One-man show tells playwright August Wilson’s story in his own words

Preeminent playwright August Wilson’s monumental “Century Cycle” plays have always spoken for themselves – powerfully and poetically encompassing the black experience in America through 10 distinctive dramas (written between 1980 and 2005), one set in each decade of the 20th century.

Wilson won Pulitzer Prizes for two of them, 1987’s “Fences” and 1990’s “The Piano Lesson,” and the others are no less widely renowned: “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Jitney,” “Seven Guitars,” “Two Trains Running,” “King Hedley II,” “Radio Golf” and “Gem of the Ocean.”

Before he died in 2005 (of liver cancer at the age of 60), Wilson wrote the autobiographical “How I Learned What I Learned,” an extended monologue about his formative years as a younger man living in Pittsburgh’s Hill District (the setting of all but one of his Cycle plays). In its premiere production at Seattle Rep in 2003, Wilson performed the piece himself, under the direction of longtime friend and collaborator Todd Kreidler.

To be more precise, though, Wilson didn't write it, at least not literally. He never actually committed to paper any of the personal stories and anecdotes that guide the show. He didn't have to – he lived it. During that original run, no two performances were exactly the same, depending on how the spirit of the moment might have moved Wilson from one night to the next.

In creating a revised version of “How I Learned What I Learned,” Kreidler based his script on audio recordings of those initial shows. He directed Ruben Santiago-Hudson in an off-Broadway production of it last fall, and in his upcoming staging here for Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre, Kreidler casts Eugene Lee in the role of Wilson.

“The play really isn’t about August’s professional success, or about how he got from point A to point B in his career. Yes, you get a sense of his eventual acclaim, but this is really more about how he defines and develops the attitudes and ideas that shaped his life in general, not just his work in particular,” Kreidler explains.

He concedes that “How I Learned What I Learned” will “definitely resonate with audiences who know his other work, who may be able to recognize in his stories some of the characters or situations that turn up in his later plays.” But, he says, “Even if you don’t, you’ll still be able to appreciate his talent as a brilliant storyteller.”

Kreidler pauses and then smiles. “His career is held in such high esteem, there’s something almost intimidating about him to a lot of people,” he says. “Another thing this show wants to portray is how genuinely funny he was.”

By a similar token, actor Lee isn’t attempting to imitate or impersonate Wilson so much as “setting out to capture and convey the deeper essence and spirit of the man,” as Kreidler puts it.

Which doesn’t make the 90-minute show any less daunting an acting challenge for Lee, who played roles in “Gem of the Ocean” (in Boston and on Broadway), “The Piano Lesson” (in San Jose) and “Fences” (at True Colors), and got to meet Wilson on several occasions.

“His language is almost like music,” says Lee. “You don’t act it, you sing it, and it requires a certain amount of discipline, an ability to play a lot of different musical instruments. It’s not like you can paraphrase August Wilson. There’s a rhythm to his writing and you have to strike every note. It’s my obligation to breathe life into the words [while] never losing sight of the tremendous sense of truth behind them.”

Indeed, that “How I Learned What I Learned” charts Wilson’s own journey of self-discovery as a black artist – set against the larger social and political unrest of the 1960s and ’70s – provides the play and its audience with what Kreidler describes as a “shared sensibility.”

He first met Wilson as an assistant director during the 1999 world-premiere of “King Hedley II” at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre. Over the course of the next six “life-changing” years, he directed, co-conceived and otherwise collaborated with Wilson on a number of other productions.

Kreidler also has a storied history of working with Kenny Leon and True Colors, where he serves as associate artistic director and co-founded of the company’s annual August Wilson Monologue Competition, a national program aimed at integrating Wilson’s work into high-school curriculum.

Most recently, Kreidler penned an adaptation of the movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” which debuted at True Colors in 2012 (directed by Leon) and later played at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. And he wrote the script for “Holler If Ya Hear Me,” inspired by the music of the slain rapper Tupac Shakur, which Leon directed for a short-lived run on Broadway earlier this summer.

In one sense – especially coming on the heels of Leon’s Tony Award-winning work staging the Denzel Washington revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” – that experience was “undeniably disappointing and a little heartbreaking,” Kreidler confesses. “In another sense, though, it was truly exhilarating. The show had a highly polarizing effect on people, but that probably shouldn’t have been surprising, because Tupac’s music had that effect on people, too.”

As reflected in “How I Learned What I Learned,” the beauty of Wilson’s work is that it unites rather than divides audiences with its thoughtful and heartfelt observations about the human condition.

Ultimately, Kreidler maintains, “This show is truly emblematic of those 10 Cycle plays, in the way all of them share a certain level of quality and passion and insight, even as they reveal so many different nuances and textures and such a rich diversity of stories about what it means to be alive.”