Theatre in Review: How I Learned What I Learned (Signature Theatre/Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre)

	Ruben Santiago-Hudson. Photo: Joan Marcus

August Wilson gives us a tour of his early life in How I Learned What I Learned. A kind of self-portrait of the artist as a young man, it excels in drawing a vivid portrait of life in Pittsburgh's Hill District, described by Wilson as "an amalgam of the unwanted" and "a third-world country." This is where Frederick August Kittel grew up, dropping out of school, getting into trouble, and taking any job he could. As he makes clear, getting hired wasn't easy for a black man in early 1960s Pittsburgh, especially since he wasn't going to tolerate condescension or racist behavior from an employer. A favorite statement of his mother's -- "Something is not always better than nothing" -- made an early impression on him and guided many of his decisions.

His devotion to his mother's maxim is one reason he was never destined to let the pervasiveness of racism corrode his self-confidence. Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who plays Wilson, enters, takes off his jacket, and reveals a T-shirt that says, "I am an accident. I am supposed to be white," using it to make catty jokes about Clarence Thomas and Justin Timberlake. He then tells a scalding story about how an attempt at desegregating the neighborhood Catholic church led to a boycott among white parishioners. "I knew then that the Catholic Church was immoral," he says. He then delves into the definitions of "black" and "white" found in Webster's Third International Dictionary to make the point that racism is so deeply ingrained into our way of thinking that we don't even recognize it.

Wilson may have left school at an early age, but he devoured every book he could find and soon bonded with members of the neighborhood arts community -- poets and visual artists -- along with a full complement of eccentrics, boozers, and street people. Seeing How I Learned What I Learned, one realizes where all those distinctive Wilson characters come from. We also get glimpses of his early love life, especially a tempestuous episode with a young lady named Snookie, who turns out to be nothing but trouble. "I have the temper of a rascal," he says, and clearly he had the best of teachers.

How I Learned What I Learned was co-conceived by Santiago-Hudson and Todd Kreidler, who directed, and it's unclear where they drew their material from, be it Wilson's writings, interviews, or other materials. A passage in which he describes how three distinct ethnic groups -- whites, Asians, and blacks -- will behave differently in a restaurant is remarkably similar to an impromptu talk I once heard him give, in which he asserted that black Americans, by virtue of their African heritage, possess a distinct point of view and manner of acting. This has always seemed like a pretty broad supposition, one that may not hold up in a society that is becoming increasingly racially mixed, but it is essential to his vision. Wilson's characters are haunted by an African heritage they may not even consciously recognize, and their salvation often lies in reconnecting with it.

Because of this vision, Wilson was in many ways a true cultural conservative, calling for a distinct African-American theatre, which he saw as a necessity given the lack of opportunities for black artists. He was also a determined opponent of nontraditional casting. In the New York Times account of his notorious debate with the director Robert Brustein, he went so far as to say "It is wrong for black actors to appear on stage as anything other than black characters." For good measure, he added that women should not play men, and vice versa. Similarly, when in How I Learned What I Learned Wilson says, "We both, black and white, are victims of our history," it is hard to forget that Wilson was himself the child of a black mother and a white father. For very good reasons, he identified himself as African-American -- in midcentury America, he probably had no other choice -- but it would be interesting to know how, or if, it influenced his point of view as an artist.

None of this is meant as criticism of the man who created what is arguably the most monumental body of work of the 20th-century American theatre, but it is to suggest that he was a far more complicated man than the one portrayed in How I Learned What I Learned. It's a loose-limbed work, heavy on the anecdotes and maxims, and rather light on psychological insight. Santiago-Hudson is a skilled entertainer, and, armed with Wilson's words, he certainly knows how to keep an audience's attention for 80 minutes. Kreidler's production also benefits from a lovely and original design. David Gallo's set surrounds the stage in a collage of letter-size pieces of paper, a striking image that suggests how profoundly writing ruled Wilson's life. From time to time, Gallo projects courier-style letters onto the pages, providing segues from one sequence to the next; at the end, he provides a montage of Wilson's titles, reminding us how profound his achievement was. Thom Weaver's skillful lighting employs a number of pastel colors to add visual variety and underscore changes of mood. Dan Moses Schreier's sound design draws on a variety of musical influences, including blues and gospel, and the numbers "What Keeps a Man Alive," from The Threepenny Opera, and "The House I Live In," a brotherhood-of-man statement recorded in the mid-'40s by Frank Sinatra.

It's hard to see How I Learned What I Learned as anything other than a pleasant, occasionally insightful, tribute to an eminent American playwright, given a big lift by the considerable skills of the actor playing him. On the other hand, Wilson has so many admirers that this may be more than enough for them.--David Barbour