Not an Assignment, an Honor

Marion McClinton still recalls seeing his first August Wilson play, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” in the mid-1980s. A blend of reality and magic realism, he says, it pushed the envelope of what theater could be.

“The play ‘rearranged the molecules.’ You came in one way and left feeling different,” McClinton recalls. “Though I’ve directed August’s ‘Seven Guitars,’ ‘Two Trains Running,’ ‘Fences,’ ‘The Piano Lesson’ and ‘Jitney’ since then, I consider ‘King Hedley II’ to be his next big push. It’s operatic, Greek in size and structure. He’s wrestling with something huge this time.”

The eighth in Wilson’s cycle of plays chronicling the African American experience through each decade of the 20th century, “King Hedley II” is set in 1985 in Pittsburgh’s crime-infested Hill District. The story deals with a struggling ex-con (Harry Lennix) at war with his past and his present--zeroing in on relationships with his second wife (Mone Walton), his mother (Juanita Jennings), her ex-lover (Charles Brown) and friends (Monte Russell, Lou Myers).

Laced with dark humor and messianic prophecies, “Hedley” tackles major philosophical issues: the “greed is good” ethic, the demise of the extended family, what it means to kill someone, and the possibility of new beginnings.

“The play is about redemption, rebirth, reclaiming the traditions of our ancestors,” the 46-year-old director says, catching some rare quiet time in a Taper rehearsal room.

A finalist in the 1999 Pulitzer Prize competition, “Hedley” opens at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday and is scheduled to open on Broadway in the spring at a theater to be announced. This is the first time McClinton is going the distance with a Wilson play. Previous Broadway productions were directed by former Yale Repertory Theater artistic director Lloyd Richards.

“I consider August one of the three most important American playwrights, along with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill,” says McClinton, who has seven original plays to his credit. “When it’s your watch, you have to safeguard that legacy. I don’t feel intimidated by that prospect, but I do take it very seriously.”

McClinton’s latest assignment comes on the heels of a year in which he was on a roll. The Twin Cities native directed the critically acclaimed revival of “Jitney”--a reworking of Wilson’s 1982 play that McClinton refers to as “the little engine that could.” “Jitney” was presented at the Taper and New York’s Second Stage, where McClinton also directed the surprise hit “Jar the Floor”--a tale of four generations of black women.

“Marion had the same talent two years ago,” Wilson says, “but turned in two fine directorial jobs in New York and came into his own.”

Having worked at such prestige venues as the Joseph Papp Public Theater, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, the La Jolla Playhouse and Baltimore’s Center Stage, McClinton is frequently referred to as one of the country’s leading black directors.

“That label doesn’t bother me,” he says with a smile. “I’m up there in very good company. My mom is black. I don’t view myself as a second-class citizen. And I want people to know who I am.”

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McClinton grew up in Selby-Dole, a “tough but beautiful” section of St. Paul, Minn., that acquainted him with life’s underbelly. His parents divorced when he was 13, but a strong mother kept him in tow.

“You didn’t take on Lenora McClinton,” he says. “She was tenacious, indefatigable--the only person who ever scared me.”

He was a sickly youth, suffering from debilitating asthma. Movies--particularly those starring Marlon Brando--became an escape. He’d watch “On the Waterfront” or “A Streetcar Named Desire” and would stop wheezing by the end. When he was in eighth grade, McClinton saw a live production of “Julius Caesar” at the Guthrie Theater--his first play other than a road show of “Funny Girl.” After that, theater became a passion (“like church, a powerful communal experience”). Still, making movies was his ultimate goal--acting, directing and writing, a la Orson Welles.

For a decade beginning in the early 1970s, McClinton worked with antisocial public school students by day and acted at night. In 1976, he auditioned for Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger” at Minneapolis’ Theatre in the Round. Landing that part, he says in hindsight, probably saved his life.

“I was drinking heavily, experimenting with assorted things. I was lucky I didn’t get myself into trouble or killed,” he says. “ ‘Niger’ turned things around for me. I became part of a world in which I was accepted.”

In many ways, acting is more satisfying for McClinton than writing or directing.

“The lights go out, and it’s just you and the audience,” he says. “Writing is so private. And while directing pays the bills, it’s hard being the captain of the ship--particularly when the waters are rough.”

McClinton’s career got a boost in 1977 when St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre--which he considers the leading African American theater company in the country--was created. Two of its leaders, Lou Bellamy and the recently deceased Horace Bond, became mentors. From 1979 to 1993, he acted and directed on that stage, a place he still thinks of as his artistic home.

It was also in ’77 that Claude Purdy, a Penumbra actor and director who was McClinton’s “directorial guru”--introduced him to Wilson, who had moved to St. Paul from his native Pittsburgh. McClinton played the narrator in Wilson’s first stage piece, “Black Bart and the Sacred Hills,” in 1981, and the alcoholic Fielding in a Penumbra performance of “Jitney” four years later. Inspired by Wilson’s literary acumen, he took up writing, which seemed “necessary and important.”

McClinton’s 1989 “Walkers” and 1991 “Who Causes the Darkness?” addressed the “difficulty of surviving when society denies one’s humanity.” “Police Boys,” a 1992 story he wrote and directed about an all-black police unit dealing with gang violence, became his literary breakthrough. It won the prestigious Kesselring Prize for drama and led some to call him “Wilson’s heir apparent.”

The common thread in his work? “The heroism involved in living,” he says.

“Life is the heavyweight champ of the world--each day greets you with another round,” McClinton says. “How you deal with that dictates the kind of human being you become. Do you succumb to the darker impulses or find your way back to the light? That’s what ‘King Hedley’ is about.”

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Cutting his professional teeth in the late 1970s and ‘80s worked in McClinton’s favor. Though the country has yet to fulfill the promise of the civil rights movement and the ‘60s, he says, barriers have been broken. It was Wilson who revolutionized theater more than anyone this century, he says, proving that black stories are viable, artistically and financially.

McClinton’s 1981 directorial debut, “Waiting for Godot” at St. Paul’s Park Square Theatre, took place three years before Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” hit the scene. Before that, black talent was “just nickeling and diming it,” he says. Though there are still a limited number of slots, jobs exist that didn’t before.

“The system is still pretty racist, but August turned it upside-down,” McClinton says. “Most regional theaters now put on at least one black production a year. The dilemma is that the black theaters that spawned these artists are on the verge of extinction. Regionals can’t offer the same kind of understanding: Nurturing your brother is different from nurturing your cousin.”

Wilson says that McClinton is the first director to help him shape or “excavate” a play--digging into the text and finding out what’s there.

“After the ‘Jitney’ rehearsals, he’d stay up all night working on the script,” Wilson recalls. “He’s good with human relationships, and you can talk deep with him about ideas. In ‘Jitney’s’ father-son story, he pointed out that I’d left out the relationship with the mother--which ended up being the core of the dispute. Still, as a writer himself, Marion has respect for the playwright and knows to get out of the way.”

“Hedley” has changed significantly since a Seattle workshop a year ago, when Laurence Fishburne played the lead. Since its world premiere at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in December, the relationships have been clarified and the youth element strengthened.

“August’s refusal to settle is the mark of an artist at the top of his game,” he says. “Putting out a work-in-progress is less about what critics say than about getting it right.”

For the most part, reviews of “Hedley” have been positive--with minor reservations. “Some of the wisest, most passionate writing of [Wilson’s] career,” wrote David Patrick Stearns of USA Today. “Mr. Wilson’s characters make their own music, in symphonies that never fail to exalt, even as they break your heart,” observed the New York Times’ Ben Brantley.

“King Hedley II” has been compared to “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” because of its focus on family, and with “Death of a Salesman” because of its elevation of the common man. Another obvious parallel: its 3 1/2-hour running time.

“If you think about length for length’s sake, the art of the piece ceases to exist,” the director says. “You wouldn’t edit out parts of the Mona Lisa because the frame isn’t big enough. When reviews lead with the length of the play, that’s sloppy work. Thank God, Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ or Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ weren’t written today.”

McClinton lives in St. Paul with his wife, Jan Mandell, a public school performing arts teacher who heads up an improvisational touring company, and their 10-year-old son, Jesse. Though he’s talking with the Walt Disney Co. about directing on Broadway, a flirtation with Hollywood was short-lived. “The Cosby Show” rejected one of his scripts, he says. And although he still longs to direct a film, he’s drawn more to character-driven stories, such as those turned out by Scorsese, Bergman and Charles Burnett rather than “mindless” action-adventure flicks.

McClinton is working on two commissions for Manhattan’s Playwrights Horizons. As for assuming Wilson’s mantle? That’s way down the road.

“After reading ‘Hedley,’ I called up Keith Glover, another playwright labeled ‘Wilson’s successor,’ ” McClinton recalls. “‘There’s no need for an ‘heir apparent,’ I told him. ‘August’s still here--and he’s still got his crown.’ ”

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“KING HEDLEY II,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Dates: Opens Thursday, 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays at 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. No evening performance Oct. 22. Ends Oct. 22. Prices: $30 to $44. Phone: (213) 628-2772.