A Director With a New Direction : Stage: Lloyd Richards, at the Old Globe for ‘Two Trains,’ will abandon some tasks to concentrate on what matters most to him: directing, teaching and searching out new talent.

Lloyd Richards is at a crossroads.

The esteemed director is in San Diego this week, directing “Two Trains Running,” the latest play by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner August Wilson, that opened last night at the Old Globe Theatre.

The future is a bit uncertain for Richards. Since 1979, he has occupied three positions simultaneously: Dean of the Yale School of Drama, artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and artistic director of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference, the last position since 1968.

In June, Richards plans to leave Yale, though he will retain his position as artistic director of the Eugene O’Neill. That role, which involves reading through as many as 1,400 scripts a year and selecting 12 to 15 for staged readings, has allowed him to help shape and encourage the work of such playwrights as Wendy Wasserstein, Lee Blessing, John Patrick Shanley and, of course, Wilson, of whose plays he has been the sole director during their decade-long partnership.

When asked if the two will continue their alliance, Richards said, “That’s up to August.” Wilson, who is seen as nothing less than the chronicler of black American life in this century, declined to be interviewed.

“For 12 years, I’ve been working 365 days a year, any number of hours a day,” Richards said. “It does take its toll. I look forward to being relieved of certain responsibilities--not that it hasn’t been wonderful.”

A small man of gentle demeanor, Richards has devoted his life to teaching and nurturing the work of others, and he said that won’t change.

“I know essentially what I’m going to do. I will teach, I will direct, I will continue to search for new talent--always. It’s part of my life.”

Still, what he will be losing is a remarkable system he developed to bring promising work from the manuscript stage at the Eugene O’Neill to full-blown productions at Yale. From there, if the work seemed to have legs, as Wilson’s work consistently has, he used his producing role as artistic director of the Yale Rep to arrange productions of the piece in theaters across the country.

Richards, a one-time actor born in Toronto and raised in Detroit, first discovered his calling when his friend Sidney Poitier urged him to take on the challenge of directing a new play by an unknown writer back in the late 1950s. The play, by the then 29-year-old Lorraine Hansberry, was “A Raisin in the Sun.”

After a year of working with Hansberry on the play, no major producer would touch it. No one thought there would be a market for a story about blacks.

But Richards believed in what he was doing, so much so that he spent his own money on rehearsals before he had a theater or had raised his budget of $75,000. He likens the risk to “being on a slide--you may crack up, but you’re going down.”

Eventually the theater came, as did the money--from hundreds of small investors. There wasn’t a contribution over $2,000, Richards said.

The play, which opened in 1959, was a hit that made Richards’ reputation and established “Raisin” as a classic. Still, nearly 30 years later, when he felt he had

another winner on his hands with Wilson’s “Fences,” which debuted at the Yale Rep, Richards found, to his shock, that he also had another tough sell.

“I remember being in front of the theater with a major producer who said he did not know if New York was ready for a play about a black family. That threw me because it threw me back 30 years to ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ ” Richards recalled.

“I said to myself, ‘What am I going to do? I have a play of real value that the nation should experience.’ We got an invitation from the Goodman (Theatre in Chicago) and from the Seattle Rep. Then a producer (Carole Shorenstein Hayes) who saw the Chicago production fell in love with it and wanted to take it to New York.”

And that is how Richards’ system of creating shared productions with various theaters began. “Fences,” which was first read at the O’Neill in 1983, debuted at Yale in 1985, did its touring in 1985, winning the Pulitzer for Wilson and Tony awards for both Wilson and Richards in 1987. Five years later, it’s the norm, not the exception, to see “Two Trains Running,” a play set in 1969 about blacks who frequent a Pittsburgh diner, making its way across the country in the nation’s most prestigious theaters before any consideration of a Broadway opening.

“Two Trains Running” already has been presented at the Yale Rep, the Huntington Theatre in Boston and the Seattle Repertory Theatre before its Old Globe debut. Now Richards is talking to Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, about a Los Angeles production, and rumor has it that one at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington may also be in the offing.

This network of production sharing fulfills what Richards calls his dream of a national theater. It allows each company to share costs, profits and artistic vision, as audiences all over the country develop an appreciation for the work of playwrights like Wilson.

Richards’ and Wilson’s track record with the plays that have followed “Fences” on this route is remarkable: “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” which was read at the O’Neill in 1984; “The Piano Lesson,” read at the O’Neill in 1986, which won Wilson his second Pulitzer, and now “Two Trains Running,” which opened at Yale in 1990. All of these except “Fences” have played at the Old Globe. All but “Two Trains Running,” whose fate is yet to be determined, have shown on Broadway.

But the future of the collaboration between Richards and Wilson is a question that not even Richards can answer.

The future after June of Richards’ relationship even to “Two Trains Running” remains a question.

“I don’t know what we’ll do with ‘Two Trains Running.’ In ‘The Piano Lesson’ (Wilson’s last play), I was involved as the producer,” Richards said at the Old Globe, before rehearsal. The role of producer, however, only came as a function of being artistic director of the theater, the Yale Rep, where the work premiered, he explained.

“But I won’t have that position again. I just hope it will be possible for us to develop the play in the same manner we started out. I hope there is a way to continue this process that works.”

Richards, believed to be in his late 60s although he won’t say, insists that he won’t miss the demands of his jobs at Yale, but he appears ambivalent.

“What it’s meant for me over the 12 years is that I have had a process available to me by having the National Playwrights Conference, where I can discover playwrights and begin to affect the work. Then, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, I can take the work a step further. Then I can develop relationships with theaters around the country.

“What I will be giving up, or losing, is control of that series of possibilities. Certainly, if I am going to be involved, I will be involved differently. There will be a loss of venues and possibilities. On my own, I can say, ‘Let’s take this new work here at this time.’ The ability to designate the script, the playwright and the time and the nature of the work to be done is something I won’t have as readily available to me.”

All this, of course, doesn’t mean that Richards won’t have plenty of directing offers when he leaves Yale. Stan Wojewodski Jr., artistic director of the Baltimore Center Stage who will replace Richards at Yale, has already invited Richards to direct Wilson’s next play there--or any other play he chooses--and Thomas Hall, managing director of the Old Globe, has long said that director and playwright have a standing invitation to produce their work at the Old Globe.

Wilson is reportedly working on two plays, “Moon Going Down,” set in a Georgia turpentine camp in the 1940s, and “Seven Guitars,” an impressionistic series of scenes from the lives of seven blues guitarists.

But Wilson’s career could change when Richards no longer plays the producer-director role. Benjamin Mordecai, managing director of the Yale Rep, said the process has been vital to the life of the work.

“This is the way August and Lloyd work best,” said Mordecai. “They are not the kind of artists who could have a long rehearsal period and come to all these conclusions. They require time. That might not be the case for another writer-director team.”

Some of the conclusions Richards said he worked out with Wilson over these series of productions was that “Fences” needed to be trimmed from its initial 4 1/2 hours; the mythological element in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” needed strengthening; a satisfying ending was needed for “The Piano Lesson”--which had five different endings in five different venues--and finally, the middle continues to need work in “Two Trains Running.”

And yet, despite the strong role Richards takes with writers, he remains deferential. He says he’s happy to be a part of the process and that it all comes back to how he sees himself as director--a realization made when he switched from acting to directing that landmark production of “A Raisin in the Sun.”

“As an actor, you are a being that is learning to fly, and at some point you take off and you fly, and that’s a wonderful feeling,” said Richards. “You are the act in yourself. As a director, I began to realize that I was part of the process of teaching the bird to fly. What is essential and important is that I enjoyed the flight of someone else. That enjoyment, that satisfaction, that’s at the core of it--that one can enjoy the flight without envying it.”

Richards exudes pride over all the writers he has worked with and the impressive range of experiences he has helped them hone their expression of: from Fugard’s South African sensibility to Wasserstein’s barbed feminist humor to Blessing’s thoughtful dissemination of contemporary American issues.

But Richards does acknowledge a special kinship with Wilson, who plumbs the African-American experience Richards himself has lived through. Wilson, who has never worked with any other director, has publicly referred to Richards as a surrogate father.

“A part of life is discovering what you know,” Richards said softly. “This work has permitted me that luxury to rediscover myself. This has been uniquely demanding in terms of the areas of self that it insists you explore.”