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It’s not often that an autobiographical one-man show can really live on after its creator, but August Wilson’s “How I Learned What I Learned” still feels vital and to-the-minute contemporary nearly 20 years after the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s death.
Steven Anthony Jones gives a magnificent performance as Wilson in TheatreWorks SIlicon Valley’s production of the theatrical memoir. He brings a personal spark to Wilson’s poetic way with words and powerful storytelling.
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is staging “How I Learned What I Learned” through Feb 3 at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts. The show will go on to a further week of performances touring through the community Feb. 4-11.
This production was originally presented by Oregon Shakespeare Festival and directed by Tim Bond, OSF artistic director and TheatreWorks’ former artistic director. Bond, who knew Wilson both personally and professionally, is known as one of the foremost interpreters of his works. His direction underscores a sense of warmth and personal connection throughout the show.
Constanza Romero, who was Wilson’s wife, served as creative consultant and dramaturg for the production. (A professional costume designer and artist, she also designed Jones’ simple but versatile costume.)
Wilson is best known for his cycle of 10 plays that explore the experiences of African American people in the United States throughout the 20th century — among them, “Fences,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” But “How I Learned What I Learned” offers a chance to understand Wilson better as a person through stories largely from his youth and young adulthood in the 1960s and ’70s.
As Bond shares in the program notes, he had heard some of these stories directly from Wilson in 2002, as he was exploring how to craft the solo show that would become “How I Learned What I Learned.” The show, co-conceived by playwright Todd Kreidler, premiered in 2003, and sadly Wilson only had two years to perform it before his death in 2005.
In the show, as Wilson recalls some of the escapades of his early career as a struggling poet living on his own, Jones simultaneously captures the heart and bravado of a young man tempered by the thoughtful recollections of the older man he has become.
We also see Wilson as a young man looking for jobs, some offered by employers who treat him with suspicion before he even starts the job, while a few others don’t stand up to, and in fact abet, customers’ racist thinking.
Wilson shares memories and unvarnished truths, encounters over a lifetime informed by the racism built into American society’s structure and the wounds, physical and emotional, it inflicts.
Wilson’s mother, Daisy Wilson, provides one of the earliest lessons that Wilson imparts to the audience, teaching him that “Something’s not always better than nothing.” After winning a contest for a brand-new washing machine that’s badly needed by the Wilson household, she’s denied the prize when organizers learn she is Black, instead offering her a used machine. She refuses the insulting “prize” and finds a way, painstaking as it is, to obtain a brand-new washer herself.
The play is also something of a guide to the neighborhood where Wilson grew up and that was central to many of his plays: Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The people and places of The Hill come to life in Wilson’s stories, offering a personal look at the experiences and influences that shine through in his plays.
We meet an array of family, friends, neighbors and other residents of The Hill, from stalled first romances to the neighborhood character who kicks up a musical cacophony hoping to play a saxophone like John Coltrane. We even hear a bit about Coltrane himself, too, and his performances at the local Crawford Grill.
Helping to bring the neighborhood to life is Nina Bell’s set design, made up of a series of towering brick walls that suggest the exterior of Pittsburgh row houses. The walls give the stage a monumental backdrop that’s lit up with projected historical photos and other images by sound and projection designer Rasean Davonté Johnson.
A striking feature of “How I Learned What I Learned” is both how personal and big-picture it feels all at once. By the show’s end, it’s hard not to have a strong sense that you’ve spent an evening listening to Wilson himself share his recollections, because Jones fully becomes the role.
“How I Learned What I Learned” runs through Feb. 3 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets start at $27. theatreworks.org.
