A View From Both Sides of the Curtain

When Seret Scott first encountered August Wilson more than 15 years ago, “he wasn’t really August Wilson. He was just August Wilson.”

Now he is one of America’s most acclaimed playwrights, and Scott is directing South Coast Repertory’s staging of “The Piano Lesson,” one of his two Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas.

When they met, Wilson was an unproduced playwright trying to refine “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at a noted playwrights’ workshop at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut.

“Ironically, I was the only black actor there that summer who was not in the August Wilson play,” recalled Scott, an outgoing woman with an easy laugh and an informal manner. She strode through SCR’s hallways recently in a green sweatshirt and black exercise pants before sitting down for an interview backstage.

“I got to talk to him quite comfortably. He could just laugh and talk about things. He didn’t have to be guarded, because I wasn’t in the play. He was a very intense and somewhat soft-spoken man who was a good listener.”

Those conversations were the extent of Scott’s personal contact with Wilson; their artistic relationship, though, is ongoing. Before “The Piano Lesson,” she directed two productions of his other Pulitzer winner, “Fences,” and one of “Seven Guitars,” his most recent play from 1995.

Scott grew up in Washington, D.C., where she says she was a natural ham as a small girl. Her supportive parents were her first audience as she staged after-dinner productions at home. “I always played a princess, or somebody sparkling,” she said.

After drama school at New York University, she made her way as a stage actress until she was accosted on a corner near Times Square during a downpour one day in 1986.

The man and woman who stopped Scott recognized her from productions of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York and asked her to direct a play they were staging at a small theater. She answered sarcastically.

“I said, ‘Tell the playwright you saw me crossing the street in the rain and asked me to direct and I’ve never directed before.’ ” But Scott tried it, liked it, got noticed by bigger theaters and continued from there, directing in numerous regional theaters, including SCR’s 1996 staging of “Crumbs From the Table of Joy,” a play about a Southern black family that migrates to Brooklyn.

Wilson, controversially, has advocated establishing black-run theaters to foster black playwrights, with black audiences the primary target.

Scott says she learned the value of such nurturing grounds while coming up in black theater as an actress, and had it reinforced as a director trying to get a handle on material from other cultures. In 1997 she directed the American premiere of the stage version of “The Joy Luck Club,” at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn.

“For things that had to do with tradition, some of the older Chinese actors talked me through it, so I could stage it,” she said. Three months ago, Scott saw the same play, with a much smaller budget, at the Pan Asian Repertory Theater in New York.

“I just felt it had another kind of authority to it, and I can’t even put my finger on it,” she said. “It wasn’t that it was better, it was just very different.” Scott said there was something special about seeing the material done by dramatists who came to Chinese tradition and culture by birth and upbringing rather than by effort and study.

“There is absolutely a place and a need for black theater, just as there is a place and a need for Jewish theater and Asian theater and Latino theater,” she said. “I love doing things from other cultures, but I feel I tell black stories very well. Audiences can take [stories] from any culture and ethnic group and find parallels that are just stunning in how close they are to what’s going on in their own family. A good story is a good story.”

Then, laughing, she added, “A good black story is a great story.”