August, Claude and Upcoming ‘Joe Turner’ : Minneapolis director and Wilson work well together

SAN FRANCISCO —  When the going gets tough, Claude Purdy has coffee. Usually, the resident director at Minneapolis’ Penumbra Theater crosses the street from his home to a neighbor’s house where he shares a cup of that traditional stimulant for creative exchange.

But this is no ordinary suburban coffee klatch; for the last 10 years his neighborhood confidant has been August Wilson, the playwright whose sagas of black America are on their way to becoming classics of theatrical literature. The coffee is an excuse to trade ideas, plan projects, keep the imaginative juices flowing during fallow times between productions.

“It’s easy to feel depressed between jobs,” says the soft-spoken Purdy. “But you manage to keep going. It’s time to reinvigorate yourself, to read and write, to do all the things you can’t do when you’re in an intense rehearsal period. Having friends helps; since August and I have been living across the street from each other it’s been fun because our conversations over coffee become enormous searches and reactions about the entire world. That’s a way of thriving and surviving, I guess.”

Not that Purdy, who tends to retreat behind a veil of self-effacement, has had much time between jobs lately. He’s spent most of the winter on the West Coast directing Wilson’s play “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre. The production, with most of the San Francisco cast, now moves to the Los Angeles Theatre Center where previews begin March 30. It follows the same path, from ACT to the LATC, that was traveled in 1987 by Purdy’s staging of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the second of Wilson’s celebrated trilogy that (with Pulitzer-winner “Fences”) makes a potent summary of the conundrum of black life in the context of 20th-Century history.

The success of “Ma Rainey”--for which Wilson had recommended Purdy as director--brought in a flood of other offers: “Sizwe Banzi is Dead” at San Jose Repertory, “Resurrection of Lady Lester” at San Francisco’s Lorraine Hansberry Theater, and “The Colored Museum” at Eureka Theatre, also in San Francisco. Now Purdy’s in Edmonton, Canada, for a production of “Ma Rainey” at Citadel Theater.

Wilson, who credits Purdy with helping him make the leap from poet to dramatist, tries to maintain the artistic symbiosis by referring producers of the second stagings of his plays to Purdy. Yet Purdy himself denies much influence over Wilson’s work.

“I don’t think there’s anything I exclusively have that anyone else couldn’t do,” he said during an interview in a San Francisco coffee shop near the theater where “Joe Turner” is enjoying a sold-out run. “I was asked to come and direct because when they ask (Wilson), he gives them my name. Lloyd (Richards, the first director of most of Wilson’s plays) has been helpful too--the Canada job came through him. I think they just both want to see me work.”

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Modesty aside, the relationship between Purdy and Wilson has a deep foundation of mutual support and respect. They met in the mid-’70s when Purdy returned to Pennsylvania after a six-year stint at the American Theater of Paris and four seasons at the National Theater of Senegal in West Africa. “August was the poet laureate of Pittsburgh in an underground sense,” according to Purdy. “His interest was in literature rather than theater, but during the ‘60s and ‘70s people were thinking of black theater as a way of affecting the community and getting ideas out. That’s how he became involved.

“He had this play, a series of poems, really, called ‘Black Bart and the Sacred Hills.’ When I moved to Minnesota to work there, I asked him to come up and do a redraft of it. He came up and liked it here; it was refreshing, and it seemed to have a great affect on his writer’s memory. Minnesota is a great place for what musicians call ‘woodshedding’--isolating yourself and letting the memories come, and pouring them into your work.”

The experience of that first play fused the collaborative professional bonding that they now bring to a production. “We went through a lot getting ‘Black Bart’ redrafted,” Purdy said. “We talked a lot about theater, and certainly there’s been cross-fertilization the other way--the depth of August’s understanding of literature and language have been an enormous influence on me.

“I’m very grounded in these plays, they’re like second nature to me. I pored over them so much at the time they were written. I’ve heard every monologue, every sentence as they were coming out of the writer. I’m so familiar with the symbols that I think I may have made some mistakes because of knowing too much about the play; I literalized some things I should have left up in the air and left in the audience’s mind, but I’ll get a chance to re-rehearse them in Los Angeles.”

With Wilson, there’s always a second chance. “He’s one of those people who will actively watch his plays--he went to 40 performances of “Ma Rainey” at Yale; he’s a constant worker--and he’ll continue to change things even after they’re published,” Purdy said. Wilson’s notes on the San Francisco production will be incorporated in the Los Angeles run, he added.

On the other hand, “he doesn’t get involved in my directing. A couple of pieces he’s been writing while we’ve been rehearsing, and there’s a sense of involvement there because we’re looking for the same things, we’re trying to figure out how the writing is contributing to the overall meat of the play.

“But these (finished) plays are dreams. They’re so strong and the writing is so fresh that they’re like Play-Doh--no matter who interprets them, they hold their shape. ‘Joe Turner’ has not been hard work for me because it’s a matter of taking the script and digging out the gold mine that’s already there.”

“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is set in a busy Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911, at a time when blacks were moving North in massive numbers, leaving, at least physically, the legacy of Southern slavery.

New-found mobility and the process of breaking from the past also turned land-bound laborers into itinerants, plunged country folk into the confusion of the city, split families apart, reconfigured their dreams. Wilson explores these themes of separation and re-bonding in the characters of fast-talking Seth Holly (Steven Anthony Jones), the cynical patriarch of the boarding house “family”; his wife Bertha (Delores Mitchell); and their tenants (Kimberley LaMarque, Anna Deavere Smith), whose changing liaisons evoke an underlying tension within the group.

When a brooding wanderer, Herald Loomis (James Craven) appears with his young daughter, the household becomes involved in his search for his missing wife, re-examining their ties to each other and to the past. A resident spirit-man, Bynum Walker (Roscoe Lee Browne) instigates their memories, recalling tales of the “bones people” and of one Joe Turner, a notorious chain-gang master who captured freed blacks and kept them in indentured servitude for seven years. As Wilson demonstrates through the character of Loomis, the impact of slavery and the tenuous nature of freedom are never forgotten in the psyche of American blacks.

“Do you understand who the bones people are?” asks actor Roscoe Lee Browne during an interview in the same coffee shop a few days later. “They’re the ones who were on the slave ships, who sank or dove overboard rather than be shackled and sold and deprived of their humanity. They are the ones who are rising up and walking over the land.

“It’s a cruel thing to sever a people from their family ties, their religious and language ties. When our poets cry out: ‘Where are our gods?’ they’re not railing against Christianity, they’re simply knowing that these are not the gods of whom they have profound racial memories. We all have racial memories, and African Americans have to dig deep to remember them, but they still reside within us.”

The challenge of delving into these internal layers of a character prompted the Los Angeles-based Browne to turn down more lucrative film offers to work on the regional stage. It’s a commitment that has made life easier for Purdy. “Everyone likes this play so much that it’s one of those times when you sing while you work,” Browne said.

Despite his reserved exterior, “I’m not quiet when I’m directing,” Purdy said. “But I tend to like actors; I don’t consider them cattle.”

Purdy’s next project with Wilson will be a new musical, “St. Louis Blues,” that will go into a workshop production at Emory University in Atlanta this fall. In his role as resident director at Penumbra, he’ll also do poet Derek Walcott’s new play, “Viva Detroit,” which he directed in San Francisco as part of ACT’s Plays-in-Progress series.

And, between shows, Purdy will indulge in his own form of “woodshedding,” nursing the sometimes-bitter brew of liberty, sweetening it with the milk of regenerative ideas that pour forth during a visit with a good friend and neighbor.