Saturday, December 06, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At the dinner following Thursday's Heinz Awards, August Wilson had a seat of honor beside Teresa Heinz, but he also roamed the room, greeting many family members and old friends, and meeting some for the first time, like Franco Harris.

	August Wilson's daughter, Sakina Ansari, attended the Heinz Awards, which honored her father, among others, on Thursday night at Carnegie Music Hall. (John Heller, Post-Gazette) Click photo for larger image.

Wilson had to re-schedule a reading at Bryn Mawr College to fit in the $250,000 Heinz Award. He came here from New York City, where the night before he did a reading for the famed 92nd Street Y poetry series. "That was my life's ambition when I was 24," he recalls, "standing at the corner of Crawford and Centre, looking Downtown. The Y had every poet worth his salt. It meant you'd made it. Whenever they call, I just say 'yeah.' I always read some poetry, to keep my license."

These days he is as busy as always, interesting himself in some of the many productions of his eight completed plays, polishing his ninth, beginning his 10th, balancing other projects and weaving in trips to speak, read or accept awards.

But just now, the playwright's life is relatively quiet. Reached by phone in Seattle, a couple of days before coming to Pittsburgh, he is settling down with his wife, Constanza, and daughter, Azula, 6, for an extended period of writing. Last week he started tentative work -- "just tip-toeing around the edges," he calls it -- on the final installment in his cycle of 10 plays set in different decades of the 20th century. This will be the concluding '90s play, and he says, "I think it'll be easier than 'King Hedley' [his '80s play]. I think I have a firmer grasp on the contemporariness of it."

	Heinz Award: August Wilson's acceptance speech

Rather than feeling any reluctance to bring his ambitious cycle to a conclusion, Wilson says, "When you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you start running toward it." The new play's working title is "Radio Golf," which Wilson notes that people tell him "doesn't sound like any of your plays so far," but that's just his point -- he wants to capture contemporary rhythms. He hopes to have the first draft done by May and expects then to feel free to tackle all the other projects he has in mind.

Chief among them is the novel he's spoken about before. "I want to try my hand at that -- everybody else does." He also has ideas for original movie scripts.

His main unfinished business is "Gem of the Ocean," his ninth play, set in 1904, which had its debut last winter in Chicago and was then revised for later production in Los Angeles. The next move is toward Broadway. Revised and re-cast, "Gem" will play at Boston's Huntington Theater, Sept. 15-Oct. 15, and "then we want to go to New York, starting previews Oct. 25."

Wilson is pleased with the re-writing he did of "Gem" in Los Angeles. "It changed a lot -- honed in, clarified. It's pretty much there, with a few more things to tackle." He thinks the chief problem in Chicago was the casting. "It didn't get a good reading. [The characters] Citizen and Caesar were weak. I liked Aunt Ester when she didn't go gospel." That central role was taken over in Los Angeles by Felicia Rashad, who "did a wonderful job" and will continue in the role. Marion McClinton will continue to direct.

Then there's the perennial topic of many years -- the long-awaited movie of "Fences." Wilson just doesn't have much to say about that, because nothing's happened lately. "I sent them a re-write, an additional polish of the screenplay -- that's all I know." Now the project rests with producer Scott Rudin. "If you do it, you do it; if you don't, you don't," he says with resignation.

Over the years there have been inquiries about movie rights for "Ma Rainey" and "Joe Turner." But aside from the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV version of "The Piano Lesson," filmed in Pittsburgh, there's been nothing. Presumably it will take a big screen success for "Fences" before other Wilson titles come into play.

"When you look at the movies being made," he says, "mine is not the kind of material they think appeals to the mass audience. [To the studios,] dumb and dumber sounds better." The kind of passionate director who might make a Wilson movie usually has his own projects. So Wilson waits.

Between the two productions of "Gem," Wilson wrote and performed a one-man autobiographical show, "How I Learned What I Learned." It played at Seattle Repertory Theatre and Wilson has had 13 offers to do it elsewhere, one of the first coming from the Pittsburgh Public Theater. But he doesn't see when he'll have time to get back to that until, perhaps, 2005-06, when New York's Signature Theatre will devote a whole season to his plays.

He and artistic director James Houghton have discussed putting the one-man show in one of those slots, "which would mean 64 performances, which means I'd have to go into training now!"

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