The Academic and the Dropout

They are separated by a generation and a generous helping of social and educational differences. But these differences make the respect and admiration between the gentle academician in his 60s and the intense, chain-smoking high school dropout now in his 40s all the more striking.

The match between director Lloyd Richards and playwright August Wilson is a winning one, as evidenced by the Tony Awards that the two received last year for “Fences,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway hit. But will the magic stay with them as they put the finishing touches on “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”?

Certainly Broadway producers think so. The track record Richards and Wilson have established is such that “Joe Turner,” which premiered in 1986 at the Yale Repertory Theatre and which opened Thursday night at the Old Globe Theatre, is already promised to Broadway just two weeks after it closes here March 13.

The collaboration began in 1981, when Richards selected a 59-page script by Wilson, then a little-known poet whose work he had previously rejected, for a workshop production at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, where Richards is artistic director.

There were problems with the script, Richards recalled as he sat next to Wilson in the board room of the Old Globe Theatre: “What I discovered were two plays, distinct plays (within the play) that had a need and desire to come together as one play.”

Despite the problems, Richards, who is also artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre, dean of the Yale School of Drama and president of the Theater Communications Group, a national association of noncommercial theaters, felt he had found “a unique voice” or rather “voices” in the dialogue among four black musicians in a run-down recording studio.

“I felt the characters in both plays were readily recognizable to me,” Richards said. “They were people I had met. When I was a young man I used to go to a barbershop on Saturdays to get my hair cut. It was a wonderful place. There were discussions of baseball, of history, certainly of politics.

“Various people held the floor and created a language. . . . It was the poetry of people who may not be as educated but have real sensibility and sensitivity to the rhythm of words.”

Richards’ barbershop was called Your Barbershop and it stood on Milford Avenue in Detroit, where he grew up. Wilson also has a place in his past that he described as being “very much like the barbershop”--Pat’s Place, a cigar store and pool room in Pittsburgh, where he grew up. “As a young man, I hung around there hoping to learn something about life,” he said. “And I did. When I look back, that’s where a lot of the voices are from.”

Not being the sort of director who is dismayed by script problems, Richards took on the project, working closely with Wilson, as he has with other writers, including Athol Fugard and Lee Blessing (he premiered Blessing’s Broadway-bound “A Walk in the Woods” under Des McAnuff’s direction at the Yale Repertory Theatre). Richards encouraged Wilson, by asking probing questions, to delve deeper into discovering just what he was trying to say.

It is a dynamic that Wilson describes as being like that “between a trainer and a fighter. . . . It was like the 15th round of a boxing match. I had to reach a little deeper and do better. And I did that with ‘Ma Rainey.’ ”

Critics agreed. After several rewrites, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” emerged as the hit of the workshop season and moved, in 1985, under Richards’ direction, to Broadway, where it received a Tony Award nomination and won the New York Critics’ Circle Award for best play of 1985.

“Ma Rainey’s” success inspired Wilson, a black man, to continue with a series on the black experience in America. “Ma Rainey” covers the exploitation of black performers by white recording executives in the 1920s. “Fences” presents a father’s rage against social injustice that occurs in the 1950s.

Wilson’s latest play, “The Piano Lesson,” now at the Yale Repertory Theatre, depicts a sister and brother battling in 1936 about what to do with a piano that has legs hand-carved by their great-grandfather. “Joe Turner,” set in 1911, tells the story of Herald Loomis, the son of a slave, in his seventh year of searching for the wife from whom he was separated by a white man, Joe Turner.

“Joe Turner” is a story that came to Wilson when he saw a Romare Bearden painting titled “Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket” and was so taken by the artist’s evocation of a black family in the kitchen that he decided to write about them.

“There is a man coming down the stairs reaching for a lunch bucket,” Wilson said. “There is a painting of a woman in a white dress. There is another man. . . . They’re going to leave this man standing alone when all he needs is human contact. All these characters in the painting became characters in the play.”

The historical figure of Joe Turner, who pressed black people into peonage, as well as the song “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” by W. C. Handy pulled it all together for Wilson.

Wilson’s commitment to telling the story of the black experience has its parallels in Richards’ interest in the experience of minorities and the disenfranchised. True, Richards made his name 30 years ago by directing the world premiere of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” But he stressed that his commitment to that play emerged from his desire to tell stories that make a difference to ordinary people.

“I am not satisfied with life as it exists. I am interested in doing things that effectively speak to it,” Richards said. “One of my most meaningful theater stories is the story of when I directed ‘A Raisin in the Sun.’ On opening night in Philadelphia, the house was half full. I saw a woman with a shopping bag with her shoes in it. I knew what that meant. My mother had carried a bag like that. She was a cleaning lady.

“She got on line to buy a ticket. And when they told her how much it cost, she said, ‘$4.80? But I can see Sidney Poitier (the star of the show) around the corner for 55 cents in the movie theater.’ Still, she gave him the money.

“And I went up to her and asked her why she did it. She said, ‘Well, the word’s going around in my community that there’s something going on down here that has to do with me.’ That reaffirmed why I’m in the theater. I want to do things that concern me and concern the community I live in.”

It is a commitment that Wilson respects. Even as he starts to field offers that may take him out of what has been an almost exclusive collaboration with Richards, his greatest appreciation is reserved for the man who got him started.

“He’s certainly been a guide, and the more I get to know him, the integrity of the choices he’s made in his life impress me,” Wilson said. “I feel I could do well to follow his example as a man.”