The setting is the crucible in which many a work of art has been fired. There is a stool, a coat rack, and atop a desk, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.
This is the set direction for August Wilson’s autobiographical play, How I Learned What I Learned. It’s a one-man show consisting of a series of reflections, anecdotes and conversations spoken by the actor playing Wilson. The first sections are titled My Ancestors, Hill District, 1965, The Set (the main drag where life happens), Barbara Peterson and on from there concluding with one called How Do You Know, What You Know. These sections are framed by pauses during which the actor is typing.
Already an admirer of Wilson’s 20th century ten-play cycle set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, I was quite taken with this one when I saw it performed in 2017 at the Round House Theater in Bethesda, Maryland. The set design was riveting—the bucket of nails, the ball of rags, the lunchbox (all of them “detritus of the Wilson canon”) strewn on an abandoned lot with a performance platform in the shape of a boxing ring (Wilson was a boxing fan). Behind it hung a wall of paper scraps cut from 5,555 sheets of paper—a tribute to Wilson’s habit of writing his plays on legal pads, envelopes, napkins and checks, whatever came to hand.
At long last I have my hands on a copy of the script and just reread it. I’m thinking about people, places and events that I’d include in my own one-woman play—Conneaut, Hilda Burr, Ninth Street, Shirley Cochrane, 1993, Rebecca, the nurse poets…. And my stage set? Maybe a basement room with a plank desk, electric typewriter, the 1969 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, my old leather home care bag and, on the wall, Rachel Dickerson’s woodcut, “Wanting Memories.” This is a work in progress. The script will evolve.
At the end of Wilson’s play, the actor pulls a poem from his pocket and reads it aloud:
We are what we are—
Are made by old things,
Come back. Clearly,
Brilliant as the sun.