Portland Stage’S How I Learned What I Learned

RR: August Wilson’s work has deeply impacted contemporary playwrights. Who are some playwrights that you love, and within their work, see the influence of Wilson?

JCK: I worked a lot with Dominique Morisseau when she was early in her career and I think her writing is infused [with Wilson’s influence] through the way she has celebrated the city of Detroit in her Detroit Cycle. I helped her develop her play, Paradise Blue , for a couple of years, and actually did the first reading of Williamstown Theater Festival. I also worked on her play, Skeleton Crew. I would also say in a very different way, that I see it in the plays of James McManus, who more people should be producing. James McManus celebrates the working people in Pittsburgh but for White America, celebrating the borough of Donora and looking at the kind of ghost-town millwork where the air was so dirty, that it’s actually where the Clean Air Act started in America.

RR: You first started directing here at Portland Stage 10 years ago with August Wilson’s play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2013. How’s it feel to be back at PS with another August Wilson work?

JKC: It's just great to feel back at home within the play and at home at this theater. How I Learned What I Learned also feel very full circle for me, having now worked on this as well, as I have either directed or dramaturged all of the plays of The American Century Cycle . It's so amazing to come to this production with the knowledge and experience of all of his other plays. There's such important lessons and such beautiful storytelling within August language nobody else in the country in the world writes like him.

RR: What is it like to direct a one man show about a very notable real person? How's that different from your typical process?

JKC: I think for each play that I enter, there's some place that's going to cause you some kind of anxiety. For this production, I think there is such a reverence around who August is in our memory, for who he was, that the size of his legacy is majestic. Who wouldn't be intimidated by that? But at the same time, that's not how I enter the room every day. Every day I enter the room, I trust what I know. Through trusting the language, we have found the emotion, the storytelling, and the rhythm. There's such a rhythm in August’s language I mean he called his influences the 4 Bs: Blues, Bearden, Baraka and Borges. In this play, you can hear the blues, you can hear the poetry. While I'm not a musician, I have a deep understanding, respect, and appreciation for jazz and I hear it when I read this play. Lance is doing such a beautiful job of creating the space, infusing the rhythm. August has written these beautiful passages, but Lance is really lifting them. And that's what the play wants.

RR: When it comes to our audiences at Portland Stage, what lessons within How I Learned What I Learned that you're especially excited for people to hear?

JKC: I think the overall lesson of the play is that finding your own voice. All of our experiences are worth something. I'm most looking forward to how it resonates with our younger audiences. And I'm hoping that they'll walk away wanting to find their own song and knowing the value of their own voice. That they’ll see our biggest challenges can be the biggest gifts that life gives us in getting to the next step. This play is both hopeful and inspiring, filled with wit and humor. As August would say, “all you need is joy in one hand and laughter in the other.”

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