Two Pulitzer Prizes in the Right Key : Playwright: August Wilson takes honors for ‘Piano Lesson,’ his second win in four years.

Thursday’s news that his “The Piano Lesson” had won the Pulitzer Prize for drama caught playwright August Wilson largely unprepared. It was only three years ago, after all, that he won the Pulitzer for “Fences.”

Once is terrific, but twice ?

“I was just so busy trying to get the show open that I wasn’t even thinking about it. I’m very honored and very much delighted by it,” Wilson said on the phone from the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York, where “The Piano Lesson” is set to open Monday, its future pretty much assured. “Surprised too. Absolutely.

“I also feel it is a testament and reward for the actors who’ve worked on the show for two years and have turned down other jobs to do it, giving me the opportunity to continue to work on the play. This just adds fuel to the fire. It makes me want to sit down and start another one right away.”

“The Piano Lesson” is the fourth play (fifth, if you count “Jitney,” an early piece that never made it) in a Wilson cycle about black American life in different decades of the 20th Century. The cycle started with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” in 1984, then continued with “Fences” (1987, which also won the Tony) and “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (1988). In all cases, Wilson’s director was Lloyd Richards, artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and a founder of the O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Connecticut, where he first became acquainted with Wilson’s work.

Wilson, 44, began his career as a poet and short-story writer who submitted five scripts to the O’Neill before “Ma Rainey” was accepted. He had come to playwriting late and largely self-taught. He readily acknowledges his debt to Richards, who has championed his work and been his mentor and friend for the better part of a decade.

“By the time we got to ‘Piano Lesson,’ ” Wilson said during the Los Angeles run of the play earlier this year, “Lloyd knew how I worked, I knew how he worked. One of the things that has made the relationship successful is that I don’t direct for Lloyd and he doesn’t write for me.”

In the midst of the outpouring of congratulations, Wilson claimed Thursday that the idea for “Piano Lesson” had come from a painting by black artist Romare Bearden (who also inspired “Joe Turner”) of a young girl sitting at a piano with her teacher standing over her.

“I know very little about my characters when I start with the dialogue,” he had explained earlier this year. “I flesh out a character usually by way of him revealing something about himself, generally through a story that he relates. The more I know, the more fleshed out my characters become.”

“The Piano Lesson” is set in the ‘30s (as in so many of his plays, the locale is his native Pittsburgh, where he lived until he was 33). It begins with a sister and brother, Berniece and Boy Willie, who have jointly inherited a heavily carved ancestral piano and are at odds about what to do with it. The play--which, among other things--mines the world of the supernatural, began, Wilson said, with a question: Can you acquire a sense of self-worth by denying your past? “That turned into what to do with your legacy and how best to put it to use for you,” he explained.

But Wilson also has acknowledged another powerful influence on “Piano Lesson”: the blues world--specifically a song by Skip James called “Special Rider.”

“Listening to it,” Wilson had said, “I thought, ‘Boy, if I could write a play like this. . . . ‘ It’s very elegant and powerful. It has a beautiful guitar line and then he thrashes across it.. . . . I consciously tried to mimic its beauty in ‘Piano Lesson.’ I find in the music the ideas and attitudes of the characters and I dig ‘em out. Music has this kind of baptismal grace that just spills over.”

“The Piano Lesson,” which opened at the Yale Rep in November, 1987, skipped over to Boston’s Huntington Theatre in January, 1988, before seriously hitting the road a year later. It then traveled to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, the San Diego Old Globe, Washington’s Kennedy Center and Los Angeles’ Doolittle Theatre, where it closed April 1.