The Story Weaver -- August Wilson, Chronicler Of Black Experience, Lives Here But Shines On Broadway

Like many of his characters, playwright August Wilson knows how to tell a good story.

Sitting over his fourth cup of coffee in a Capitol Hill deli near his home, the Seattle-based dramatist is discussing the strong current of mysticism in his plays, particularly in the prize-winning drama, "The Piano Lesson." As usual, he elucidates with a yarn.

"This friend of mine went mountain climbing in Peru," recounts the bearded, gently bearish Wilson in his soft, jumpy voice. "He got lost, and no one could find him. Planes were out there looking, but he was really lost.

"Then suddenly the ground tells him to get up. He puts his hand on a tree, and the tree says, `This way.' He touches another tree, and it says, `Not me.' He keeps listening to the trees - `This way,' `Not me.' And he walks straight out of there in two days."

"I've never had an experience like that," Wilson adds, after another sip of coffee. "But I believe it happened. And to me those kind of things can enrich a play."

Wilson enriches his own plays with magic, and with the poetry and jive, the history and dreams, the disappointments and hopes he finds coursing through the African-American experience.

Another major ingredient: the blues. "The blues is the best literature black Americans have," Wilson insists. "It's our cultural response to the world, an emotional reference point. Five million years from now if people have those records they'll be able to piece

together a lot about us."

Wilson will leave behind his own record. At age 47, the largely self-educated author has racked up a rare achievement: five plays successfully produced on Broadway and nationwide, two Pulitzer Prizes (for "Fences," and "Piano Lesson"), and the forging of a distinctive voice, a sensibility, a style not to be mistaken for that of any other tale-teller.

Now more than halfway through an ambitious 10-play cycle that chronicles black America through each decade of the 20th century, Wilson is deep at work on "Four Guitars," a new drama about Chicago blues musicians set in the 1940s.

He's also dropping in on rehearsals of his 1990 drama, "The Piano Lesson" at Seattle Repertory Theatre, directed by close colleague Lloyd Richards. (The fourth Rep production of Wilson's work - the last was the pre-Broadway "Two Trains Running," in 1991 - "Piano Lesson" opens April 21.)

Submitting to local interviews is rare for Wilson. Since moving here from St. Paul, Minn., two years ago, he's kept a low profile. You're unlikely to run into him in playhouses.

"I don't go much to theater," he admits. Nor at cinemas: "I spent 12 years without going to a movie. Before that I went about twice a year."

A non-driver, he prefers "a simple life. Give me my books and records and I'm happy." And clearly, the glamour of the New York literati scene doesn't beckon: "I like New York, even miss it when I'm not there. But I find if I stay longer than 30 days it gets tiring. I prefer smaller cities, probably because I grew up in Pittsburgh."

Black, working-class Pittsburgh - where Wilson was raised, along with five siblings - looms large in his personal mythology.

It also provides the setting for many of his plays, including "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" (set in a 1911 boarding house), "Fences" (about a garbage man and his family in the 1950s), and "Piano Lesson," the Depression-era tale of a struggle over a family heirloom.

"Coming from Pittsburgh meant a lot to my work," Wilson muses. "It's a very racist city, I think because various ethnic groups converged there and the competition for blue-collar jobs created animosity. Whatever you try to do in Pittsburgh, it's difficult - even washing your car."

The light-skinned son of an estranged white father he barely knew, Wilson's anchor was his proud, caring black mother, Daisy.

"She was a very principled woman," he recalls. "She taught us how to read. When I was 5 I had my library card. She said if you can read you can do anything, because it opens all the doors there are."

Wilson often speaks of the incidents of bigotry that pockmarked his youth: finding a virulently racist note on his desk daily at a Catholic school he attended. Being passed over for football, for dubious reasons.

And there's the time he carefully researched and footnoted a paper on Napoleon, and got a failing grade for it. Why? The teacher thought it was so good someone older must have written it. Rehashing the incident, Wilson chuckles: "Constance, my fiancee, says I've told that story too much."

The anger over early insults clearly has not dissolved. But instead of corroding his life, the pain seems to have fueled Wilson's desire to write, and relate "the parts of black culture that have so often been ignored by white people who'll tell you there is no such thing as a black culture.

"I said I'd look at my culture so we can have something to stand on, something that's ours and don't belong to anyone else. It's like, this is what we have to go into the world and do battle with."

How a high school dropout became a major dramatist is the stuff of the Wilson legend, a sort of true-life black-literary-Horatio Alger fable full of signposts.

There was that first typewriter he bought, with $20 his sister paid him to write a college paper for her. And the years reading Dylan Thomas and Ralph Ellison, writing poetry and stories ("not to send out, just to see what I had to say"), working odd jobs.

Other landmarks: Moving to St. Paul. Helping form the Black Horizons Theatre. Marrying, fathering a daughter. Seeing his first "legit" play in 1976, at age 31. (It was Athol Fugard's "Sizwe Bansi Is Dead.")

And those five famous rejections from Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference. In 1981, the O'Neill finally gave a Wilson script the nod. It was "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," a searing study of a '20s jazz combo backing up a famous blues singer, and it catapulted Wilson to Broadway in 1984.

At the O'Neill workshop to hone "Ma Rainey," Wilson met O'Neill director and Yale Drama School head Lloyd Richards. Richards (who staged Lorraine Hansberry's seminal "A Raisin in the Sun" on Broadway in 1958) saw in Wilson a diamond in the rough.

Recalls Richards, "He was new to play writing, but what commitment he had! And when I read that play I felt I knew his characters, they were so real to me."

Richards has staged all the premieres of Wilson's subsequent plays, helping him become the most acclaimed and produced black playwright in America. Yet Wilson's style still has its detractors. On first sight, even second, a Wilson play can seem slow, amorphous, a lot of verbal riffing and little dramatic action.

"My plays are unlike any other plays," the author admits. "Some people who see my work for the first time say, `That's not a play!' They're not expecting so much talk. But the art comes out of the talk, the characters. In a small space in time you learn an enormous amount about these people."

He soundly rejects the idea that his scripts are simply literary outpourings, devoid of craft: "My plays have their own rules, they don't follow Aristotle's. They're highly crafted, and when a character says or does something it's never arbitrary. Everything has a purpose. Things are layered in one after another, and gradually they all connect."

As for noted critic Robert Brustein's charge that Wilson misuses the regional theater system as a Broadway try-out circuit, the author begs to differ: "I look at New York as just another region of the country. Why shouldn't a show play in San Diego, in Boston, in Chicago, in Seattle, while it's developing?

"It's not a try-out you see at Seattle Rep, it's the play. Yeah, your response may help us make changes, but you haven't lost anything. You've contributed."

In his view, critics also have something to contribute: "I read all my reviews, of course I do. I think writers who say they don't aren't being entirely honest. And I learn something from every review."

As for his life in Seattle, Wilson reveals little: "This is a nice city. It's way out here. Can't go any further."

Does he enjoy working with Seattle Rep? "Oh, yeah. Good people there - (artistic director) Dan Sullivan, (associate artistic director) Doug Hughes."

Might he premiere a new play at the Rep soon? Say, "Seven Guitars"? "Oh, maybe, but nothing's certain. I can't really say."

Sullivan is less equivocal: "I'd be delighted to premiere anything August writes," he assures.

One thing Wilson will admit he lacks in Seattle is a daytime hangout, a coffee shop or cafe with the right ambience where he can spend hours drinking coffee, writing by hand, watching the scene around him. He's been working in such haunts since his days as an aspiring poet.

"The more noise the better," he says, when asked what ambience he's looking for.

"Noise, people talking. That never bothers me."