The Resident Ensemble Players present August Wilson’s How I Learned What I Learned

Co-conceived in 2003 with Wilson’s long-time collaborator Todd Kreidler, the show was originally performed by the playwright. The deeply personal work invites audiences into the playwright’s mid-20th-century artistic journey, as he shares the stories, struggles, and unexpected lessons that made him one of America’s most important and groundbreaking dramatic voices.

From the Hill District to Broadway

August Wilson was born and grew up in Pittsburgh’s tough Hill District, a challenged and challenging African American neighborhood. A lifelong autodidact, Wilson left school at age 15 and educated himself by reading at the city’s Carnegie Library. He began writing poetry in the 1970s but is best-known and much lauded for his American Century Cycle, 10 plays each spanning a different decade from 1900-1990.

Wilson received seven New York’s Drama Critic’s Circle Awards and two Tony Awards, along with Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. In 2015 PBS’s American Masters series profiled him in The Ground on Which I Stand. After his death Broadway’s Virginia Theater was re-named in his honor, and since its opening in 2009, the August Wilson Center for African American Culture has become a mainstay of Pittsburgh’s cultural life.

Though this is a one-person show, How I Learned What I Learned is a surprisingly rich script that journeys back and forth through Wilson’s life, exploring with quick dramatic portraits and segues the memorable characters he encountered and the lessons they taught him. Though anecdotal, it bears evocative similarities to the tone and sweep of his narrative dramatic works and often slips into his frequent and much-admired poetic passages.

Beautifully realized

This REP production is beautifully realized by director Gotch and El-Amin, a skilled and versatile actor energetically guiding the audience through Wilson’s expansive mind, including the lifelong racism over which he ultimately triumphed. His pride caused the playwright to leave jobs or situations that belittled him, and he quoted his mother, who believed that “something is not always better than nothing.” Though the play is studded with strong language and racial slurs, it is also fiercely humanistic and deeply humorous, a rounded portrait of a creative spirit that would not be stifled, and one which El-Amin paints with force, grace, and joy.

Stefanie Hansen’s engaging scenic design literally fills the stage with Wilson’s plays. Actual script pages serve as a backdrop and spill across the floor and out of the proscenium toward the audience. Their sheer magnitude is a testament to the playwright’s voluminous oeuvre and nonstop work ethic. Jo Fulmer dresses the actor in clothes that Wilson would have worn, including his ever-present cap. And Eileen Smitheimer here does triple duty, designing the seamlessly integrated lights, sound and music, and projections that add immeasurably to this production’s depth.

The possibilities for all of us

How I Learned What I Learned explores the playwright’s search for the “limitation of the instrument” to which he dedicated his life. In their telling, El-Amin and Gotch illustrate that though the playwright wrote this work for himself, the script, as it toggles between stories and lessons and concludes with Wilson’s poetry, illuminates possibilities available to us all.

The eloquent production’s final image, with the actor silhouetted in front of a screen that scrolls Wilson’s play titles, is an admirable summation. Unbroken, August Wilson conquered seemingly unconquerable obstacles, and from them he created the platform on which he built both his career and an inspiring life.

Know before you go: This play includes strong language, including racial slurs.

At top: Hassan El-Amin as the titular playwright in How I Learned What I Learned. (Photo by Evan Krape.)

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