A legion of actors hung on his words

ACTOR Charles S. Dutton began his long association with playwright August Wilson in the early 1980s -- and like other actors who have starred in Wilson’s work, he is frank about the fact that the plays in Wilson’s 10-play cycle on the African American experience represented a ticket to Broadway for many black actors.

“Any of those actors who say they are not thinking of Broadway is being disingenuous -- in what other way is a black actor going to make it to Broadway, other than in a musical, as a singer or a dancer in the chorus?” asks Dutton, who made his Broadway debut -- and received a Tony Award nomination -- in Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” “Any actor in the original production of an August Wilson play sees Broadway in the future.”

But like other prominent actors who have performed Wilson’s work, Dutton adds that a role in an August Wilson play was not just a job but a lesson in the value of a playwright’s words. Many invoke the word “poetry.” There is no ad-libbing with Wilson, they say. If you blow a line, you might as well go offstage, come back on and start over.

And after the death of the playwright last week, Dutton and other actors who have performed his work tend to speak of “doing Wilson” the way they speak of “doing Shakespeare.”

No Wilson veteran got that message more clearly than Courtney B. Vance. In 1987, Vance was in his mid-20s and about to get his big break: He was soon to open on Broadway in Wilson’s drama “Fences.”

Vance, now 45, had won the juicy role of Cory, son of a former Negro League baseball player-turned-garbage collector who, born too young to make the transition to the major leagues, takes out his resentment on his athletic son. The father would be portrayed by James Earl Jones.

Vance had appeared in “Fences” two years earlier when it premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre as well as in regional productions -- but this was Broadway. So the actor was as shocked as the rest of the cast when the director, Lloyd Richards, quit two days before opening night because of a creative dispute between playwright Wilson and the play’s producer, Carole Shorenstein Hays.

“They could not come to an agreement about how the play should end, and as director, Lloyd was in the middle,” Vance recalled. “He would not go against his playwright, so he said he would take himself out of the equation. That was a bombshell that he dropped on the cast.

“We all just pleaded with all the parties to come to some kind of agreement. And then we went home -- we left. We couldn’t believe that after 2 1/2 years of traveling all over the country with the play, we might not open.”

By the next day, Wilson and Hays had reached a compromise and persuaded Richards to stay on as director. The play went on to win a Pulitzer Prize as well as a Tony.

The scene was much on Vance’s mind in a conversation Monday -- the day after Wilson, 60, died of liver cancer. Another play in the series, 1990’s “The Piano Lesson,” also won a Pulitzer. The final play in the cycle, “Radio Golf,” was presented at the Mark Taper Forum in August.

Vance and Dutton are among a legion of prominent African American actors whose careers were profoundly affected by appearing in Wilson’s plays; the list includes Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, Ruben Santiago-Hudson and recent Emmy Award winner S. Epatha Merkerson.

For many, Wilson’s plays, written and produced over almost 25 years, have represented a rare opportunity for a black actor to essay a challenging dramatic role.

“It absolutely defined my career,” says Vance, who was tapped for the “Fences” role while a student at the Yale Drama School. At that time Richards was artistic director of both the Yale Repertory Theatre and the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, where several of Wilson’s plays were workshopped. “That was my introduction into New York theatrical society; that was my calling card,” Vance continued. “When I went into casting offices, it was: ‘Oh, you’re in “Fences.” ’ It opened up their eyes to who I was.”

Dutton also began his association with Wilson and Richards through Yale Repertory Theatre and the O’Neill Center. “August and I sort of started out together, as writer and actor,” he says.

“Just because you’re a black actor doesn’t mean you can do August Wilson, any more than being a British actor means you can do Shakespeare,” Dutton says. “For an actor, his style separated the men from the boys, and the women from the girls.”

Angela Bassett was first introduced to Wilson at the O’Neill Center as a young actress in 1983, when “Fences” was being developed. “It played in that outdoor theater, under the stars.... I felt what audiences must have felt when they heard Lorraine Hansberry’s voice for the first time,” she says.

Bassett did not have a role in “Fences” but later appeared in “Ma Rainey” and “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” “I remember August every day, sitting there writing and smoking in the corner, having so much to say and yet kind of shy himself,” Bassett says. “You’d find him carefully writing on his long yellow pad, talking about how his characters came, about how, out of a kernel or a germ, would come these amazing epic pieces.”

Brian Stokes Mitchell had just completed an exhausting Broadway run in the musical “Kiss Me, Kate” when his agent called with good news: He’d been offered the title role in Wilson’s “King Hedley II,” also on Broadway. The bad news: He would have just nine days to rehearse.

“I asked my agent to send me the script, and of course there were 300 monologues in it,” Mitchell recalls with a wry laugh. “I just thought, ‘This is impossible.’ But I said: ‘I can do it, because it’s an August Wilson play.’ There are not many opportunities in an actor’s life to create a character for the first time for a great living playwright. There’s a rhythm and intricacy to his words -- he is the blues.”

Mitchell has enjoyed success with colorblind casting, with starring roles in “Kate” and “Man of La Mancha.” But he is quick to say that Wilson’s body of work remains a crucial opportunity for black actors because colorblind casting is the exception, not the rule. “Otherwise, you would see black people and mixed-race people in Tennessee Williams all the time, and you don’t.”

Phylicia Rashad -- who last year became the first black actress to win a Tony for a leading role in a play for her portrayal of Lena Younger in Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” -- grayed her hair to portray the 285-year-old seer, Aunt Ester, in Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean.” She calls the aged Ester “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Taking the role, she says, was not about her career, it was about Wilson. “I don’t choose to take a role to prove to someone what I can do. It’s an August Wilson play. I met with the playwright, I read for the playwright. In my career, that’s like meeting Bill Cosby -- meeting him is enough for me.”

Viola Davis, a Tony Award winner for her role in “King Hedley II,” calls Wilson “our black Arthur Miller” because so many of his characters lend dignity to the ordinary man, like Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman.”

And, she adds, when a black actor does Wilson, he or she “is becoming a part of history. You are actually giving voice to characters who represent your grandmother, your mother, your father. You are bringing them to life, and giving them validity. So it is about more than you.”