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 Browne reconnects with acting ties to Pittsburgh Sunday, February 04, 2001 By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor
Artistically, at least, actor Roscoe Lee Browne has been to Wylie Avenue, has experienced the way of life in Pittsburgh's Hill District captured in 40 years of photographs by the late Charles "Teenie" Harris.
Harris was not the only Pittsburgh-born artist to chronicle the African-American experience here. Playwright August Wilson has written an entire cycle of dramas that take place in the Hill, each set in a different decade of the 20th century.
Browne has starred in two of them, playing Holloway in the Broadway production of "Two Trains Running" and Bynum Walker in several productions of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," including one at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.
Now, the sonorous actor has put that resonant voice to work narrating Pittsburgh filmmaker Kenneth Love's new documentary about Harris, "One Shot," which takes its title from the nickname that former Mayor David Lawrence bestowed upon the photographer.
"I wonder if August knew him," Browne says over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. In the Wilson plays, he remembers, "I would speak about Wylie Avenue and all the other streets more than most of the other characters did. It was the same life that Mr. Harris was always photographing, and August knew everyone in the area."
Browne had heard of Harris prior to his involvement in the film, and thinks he may have met him once, when Browne was a track star at Lincoln University, in Chester County. "I think that's when I might have encountered him," he says.
He certainly was familiar with Harris' employer, the Pittsburgh Courier, which had a national circulation and was the country's most influential African-American newspaper at the time.
"I read it all the time," Browne says. "It was resonant with the fact that African-Americans were not as yet full citizens. The articles were brilliantly and clearly written. And it covered African-Americans as people. In the New York Times or the Herald Tribune, if you were an athlete or entertainer, you might get some notice. The Pittsburgh Courier covered all of black society, anything that was newsworthy."
Among Browne's other Pittsburgh connections was his role as Merlin in a PBS production of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" that was produced by WQED-TV. Kenneth Love was a member of the crew and met Browne at that time.
During that shoot, Browne says, "He came up to me, and I chatted with him." Love used that memory as an entree when approaching Browne to narrate the Harris film.
"He knows I narrated some other things, including 'Babe' and a few other rather prominent pieces."
Browne has not yet seen Love's film but, he says, "I did see the photographs they were using. It was quite extraordinary. [Harris] set the camera up and took pictures of people on the street and captured all of their joys, all of their sorrows, the mores, all of it. And he'd do it quickly. A good photographer knows his eyes."
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