How I Learned What I
Learned
August Wilson (Co-Conceived with Todd Kreidler)
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| Steven Anthony Jones |
As the elderly man walks across the stage carrying his aged
limp with dignity and purpose, we are immediately struck by eyes that twinkle
with humor and a face beautifully burrowed with a lifetime of experience. The African American gentleman makes his way
over to a hat tree to take off his jacket, revealing a tee-shirt that on the
back in bold letters says, “I am an accident; I did not turn out right;” and on
the front, “I am supposed to be white.”
After the audience’s laughter dies down, we soon learn that
August Wilson -- the famed playwright and author of the ten-play “The
Pittsburgh Cycle” chronicling the African-American experience of the twentieth
century – in no way believes the writing on the shirt he now sheds. While he reads from the mammoth Third Edition
of Webster’s International Dictionary that
blacks are “outrageously wicked people ... connected to the devil” while whites
are “innocent, fortunate, and decent” people, Steven Anthony Jones as August
Wilson is quick to tell us in no uncertain terms, “We black people are not an
accident ... Our births are moments of profound creativity.”
And thus begins a near-two-hour gentle rambling and
remembering of experiences, philosophies, and learnings in which Steven Anthony
Jones is most believably, most astonishingly August Wilson. Starring in the one-person autobiographical
play that the playwright wrote and first premiered three years before his death
in 2002, the much-revered, veteran actor Mr. Jones presents a captivating,
enlightening, and often wonderfully humorous How I Learned What I Learned. Directed
by Margo Hall with evident love, respect, and admiration for both the
playwright and this actor, How I Learned
What I Learned opens at Marin Theatre in a joint production with Lorraine
Hansberry Theatre and Ubuntu Theatre Project – both of whose stages Mr. Jones
will continue to play the role in the weeks to come.
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| Steven Anthony Jones |
As Steven Anthony Jones recounts August Wilson’s family
history, life, and learnings, headline topics are typed across a wall of
illuminated hanging papers – a three-dimensional collage designed by Edward E.
Haynes, Jr. and luminously accented by Stephanie Johnson’s lighting
design. The effect is a lifetime of
poetry and play scripts from which Mr. Jones’ August Wilson draws his stories
and mini-sermons, while sitting on a wooden-slab porch reminiscent of scenes
from one of his family-based plays like Fences.
Time and again, August uses humor to land a stark point
about the reality of black history in America.
Noting his family arrived on these shores in the early 17th
century, he wryly states that for the first 244 years, his ancestors had no
problem finding work; but that since 1865, “It has been hell.” His mother became part of the “Great
Migration” to the North in the early twentieth century, landing in the Hill
District of Pittsburgh, where he tells us with a smirk that in 1955 lived 54,997
blacks and three old, white ladies.
Those three were the only three whites who came back to a Catholic
congregation the week after the monsignor announced that blacks would be
welcomed.
The harsh reality of what it was like in the mid-1960s to be
a twenty-year-old black man in the Hill District comes home in several
anecdotes that Mr. Jones relates of August Wilson’s attempts to get a job. The young August does not last long at a
series of positions, told upon hiring in a toy store’s stock room, “If I catch
you stealing, I will shoot you;” asked to stop mowing grass after the home’s
white owner screams, “Get him off my lawn;” and admonished severely for being
twenty seconds late as a restaurant’s dishwasher. In every case, the young man desperately in
need of a job immediately quits, having learned from his mother, “Something is
not always better than nothing.”
The influence of August Wilson’s mother on his own
development as a person and a writer is a key thread throughout his story. In a particularly poignant moment, Mr. Jones
solemnly relates one of the author’s insights after his mother died. “You find
out after all those years you have been living in your mother’s prayers, and
now you have to live on your own.
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| Steven Anthony Jones |
We meet many of the Hill District’s residents who often
became prototypes for characters in Mr. Wilson’s plays. There’s the sax-playing Cy Morocco, “an
African lost in America,” who taught a young man who was surprised his love of
saxophone did not mean he could just pick it up and play it with no practice
that the same principle applied to his desired career. “August, you want to be
a writer ... then learn how to do it,” inspiring the happy-go-lucky high-school
dropout to take his love of reading and poetry and seek someone who could teach
him how to write well. The flow of
stories is full of such short portraits of the people who later populated the
scenes and scenarios the playwright would recreate of his beloved Hill
District.
Steven Anthony Jones gives no less than a tour-de-force
performance as he embodies the almost larger-than-life persona of the aged
August Wilson. His deep, gravely voice
hypnotizes the enrapt audience while we also at times want to reach out and
help him as he gingerly with some obvious old-age pains makes his way down the
porch’s steps.
While on the one hand probably few of us wants the evening
to come to an end because of the sheer fascination of both the subject and the
actor portraying him, in fact the length of the play feels about fifteen
minutes too long, especially given no intermission. Frankly, I found myself wondering toward the
end how many more titles would be typed on the papered wall to announce yet one
more short story. At the same time, I
could not help but thoroughly enjoy all, up to the very last one.
This three-company production of August Wilson’s How I Learned What I Learned now showing
on the Marin Theatre stage must not be missed by anyone who has ever seen even
one of the playwright’s works. But at
the same time, there is so much to be gained about the experience of being
African American in a white America even for someone who has never heard of the
playwright or his incredible Pittsburgh Cycle.
Just to be in the presence of Steven Anthony Jones as he becomes August
Wilson is a blessing and a memory that should live in each audience member’s
bank for years to come.
Rating: 5 E
How
I Learned What I Learned continues through February 3, 2019 at Marin
Theatre, 397 Miller
Avenue, Mill Valley. Tickets are
available online at https://tickets.marintheatre.org/Online/ or by calling the box office at
415-388-5208, Tuesday – Sunday, noon – 5 p.m.
How
I Learned What I Learned continues next at Lorraine Hansberry Theatre,
February 14 – 24, 2019 at Buriel Clay Theater, 762 Fulton Street, San Francisco
(https://www.lhtsf.org) and at Ubuntu
Theater Project (http://www.ubuntutheaterproject.com)
at a date to be announced, Waterfront Conservatory & Playhouse, 2010 4th
Street, Berkeley.
Photo Credits: Kevin
Berne
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