Mr. Wilson’s neighborhood

In Plot A, it’s 1904 and Citizen Barlow needs new shoes, a job and redemption. When the audience meets him in August Wilson’s new play, “Gem of the Ocean,” he stands at the neighborhood matriarch’s door, one young man from Alabama amid a post-slavery tide of African American migrants from south to north, and he’s wondering: Is this where I can get my soul washed?

In Plot B, there are Woogie and Teenie, the Harris brothers. Woogie has a barbershop, but his big business is running numbers in the Hill District. One day he loans Teenie money, Teenie spends it on a camera, and then spends the next 40 years shooting anything that moves on the Hill. But the district is dying. Woogie’s barbershop gets leveled in urban renewal, Woogie dies, then Teenie. Teenie’s kids have to decide: Do we keep Teenie’s legacy -- a whole doomed neighborhood’s history in black-and-white negatives -- or sell them to a museum?

Alongside Wilson’s eight previously produced plays about the African American experience in the 20th century, these tales may seem a matched set. Since Wilson made his name with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on Broadway in 1984, and followed it with Pulitzer Prize winners “Fences” (in 1987) and “The Piano Lesson” (in 1990), the playwright has drawn on his old neighborhood, using the street talk and dire circumstances of Pittsburgh’s Hill District to sketch African American life in microcosm.

All of his works but “Ma Rainey” have been set on the Hill, almost all of the characters are black, and each story covers a different decade, from “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (set in 1911) to “King Hedley II” (set in 1985). Seven of the plays have reached Broadway, and critics and colleagues routinely count him among America’s most-admired living playwrights. With the arrival of “Gem of the Ocean” -- which opens Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles after an initial run in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre -- only the 1990s remain uncovered in his century cycle.

Like its companion pieces, “Gem of the Ocean” leaps between Hill District details and universal themes: The neighborhood shopkeeper is named Butera, after an old neighbor on Bedford Avenue. The mysterious matriarch, Aunt Ester, lives on Wylie Avenue, the main drag of Wilson’s youth. And she’s 285 years old, which means her character was born as the first British slave ship arrived at Virginia in 1619.

But you won’t find Woogie and Teenie in “Gem of the Ocean,” and you won’t often find Wilson in Pittsburgh.

He has lived elsewhere for the last 25 years. And Plot B, as much as it sounds like the theatrical world that Wilson has made, is really part of the world that made him. The Harris brothers were living characters in the Hill District of Wilson’s youth. Woogie’s Crystal Barber Shop came down in the attempted urban renewal of the late 1950s that largely doomed the neighborhood, leveling 80 blocks, displacing 8,000 residents and 400 businesses. As for Teenie’s old photo studio on Centre Avenue, Wilson guesses he walked past it “a thousand times .... I remember walking up that avenue when it would just shimmer with activity.”

He also remembers when, in his early 20s, he began to see the Hill in a far broader context, and “I started looking at people differently and wondering about their hsitory and why they were in the condition they were in.”

Born in 1945, Wilson came of age as the neighborhood was starting to fall apart, then moved with his family to a larger home in another neighborhood when he was 12. But seven years later he was back, a high school dropout, Army veteran, ferocious library patron and budding bohemian. As a 19-year-old slacker, he chain-smoked, eavesdropped on the old railroad men at the cigar shop, Pat’s Place, waded into the cultural politics of the 1960s, and scribbled poetry in diners.

But while theatergoers have been watching one Hill District squirm and smolder through the 20th century in Wilson’s work, another set of stories has been advancing off stage, some parallel, some not, many of which reveal plenty about the playwright. Walk the Hill in 2003 with Wilson’s work in mind and you find yourself a pedestrian in parallel worlds.

TODAY’S TROUBLE

“Who’d you fight?” asks the desk officer, presiding over the cluttered entry room of the Second District Police Station on Centre Avenue. Before her stands a sullen woman, who shrugs.

“I don’t know her from a can of paint,” says the woman.

Farther back, in the acting commander’s office, Lt. Mark Romutis calls in detective Jack Bello, who has worked the area for 32 years. Serious crimes are down, they say, way down from 20 or 30 years ago. In fact, Bello remembers pausing at a new house on Webster Avenue -- priced around $250,000, finished basement, intercom and all -- and realizing that it stood on the lot that held Irene’s whorehouse throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Still, there’s trouble enough. Apart from persistent dealing in heroin and crack, there have been four aggravated assaults around the Bedford Dwellings project in the last month and a homicide a few blocks from there.

In the early 19th century, the Hill emerged as Pittsburgh’s first residential neighborhood, attracting immigrant Europeans and, beginning at the dawn of the 20th century, African Americans. By 1945, it covered about 1.4 square miles, and blacks had become a dominant presence in the area, sustaining two Negro League baseball teams, with homegrown jazz talents like Billy Eckstine, Lena Horne, Earl “Fatha” Hines and Erroll Garner holding forth regularly at the Crawford Grill. But by then, few new immigrants were arriving to replace white families who left for the suburbs. By the early 1960s, the Hill was 95% black, as it is now.

Undone first by the urban renewal of the 1950s and then by three days of rioting, looting and arson in the wake of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, the Hill’s population shriveled from 53,648 (in the 1950 census) to a scant 11,853 in 2000.

“You get to know the community, and they get to know you,” says Bello, back at the police station. “I’m arresting the sons and daughters of people I arrested years ago.”

You’d never guess that Mister Rogers’ neighborhood lies just a few miles down Centre Avenue, but Fred Rogers did film his public television series from 1968 to 2001 in the neighboring Oakland district. For every residence and business that has endured on the Hill, there seem to be two weed-choked empty lots and a boarded-up brick ruin. The area hasn’t had a supermarket of its own for decades.

Still, there may yet be material in Plot B for a happy ending. Redevelopment has brought hundreds of handsome new housing units in the last five years. The local city councilman pledges that commercial redevelopment along Centre Avenue is the next big step.

And this month, the tale of Woogie and Teenie took another turn. The Carnegie Museum of Art, eager to capture recollections of those old days on the Hill, opened a room of 300 photos from the Teenie Harris archive -- a fraction of the roughly 80,000 images that it bought from the photographer’s family in 2001 -- and asked the public to fill in captions. Where was that bowling alley? Who owned that beauty salon, ate in the Blue Note Cafe, lived in that row house?

WHERE IT BEGAN

“Let’s see what we can see,” says Freda Wilson Ellis, English teacher, Fordham University alumna and longtime Hill District resident, approaching a bedraggled brick building at 1725-1727 Bedford Ave.

There are two storefronts, one closed, one busy with the comings and goings of brawny young men wielding multiple cell phones. Ellis, who lives just a block away in a tidy row house, steps confidently past them, picking her way toward the empty residence in back, and points toward a boarded-up second-story window.

“We used to climb out that window,” she says, “and come onto the Buteras’ roof right here.”

By “we,” Ellis means herself and her siblings, including Freddy, the brother who later took his father’s first name and his mother’s maiden name and made himself into August Wilson.

There were six kids. In the 1940s, the family lived in two rooms here. Later, when a neighbor moved away, they took over two more. Though the Hill was mostly black by the 1940s, Ellis recalls, their immediate neighbors were “very mixed. I think it was more white than black.”

The Buteras, Italians, ran the shoe-repair shop in one of the storefronts and lived in back, even after the day in March 1969 when two men, one with a knife, came in to rob the place. John Butera fought one off, but the other pulled a revolver and shot and killed John’s brother Frank.

Elsewhere around the block, there was Charley Burley, a great African American prizefighter, who lived with his family across the street. He never managed to land a big bout, so he worked as a garbage man. Then there was the Jewish market, the Syrian family, the Irish family.

And their own family was mixed. Their mother, the former Daisy Wilson, was African American. Their father, August Kittel, was a hard-drinking, frequently absent, often unemployed German American baker. The mixed marriage didn’t make the family unique, but it didn’t make them particularly popular, either.

Often, Ellis remembers, the kids moved as a self-contained tribe, catching caterpillars and lightning bugs in jars, tossing rocks down from Cliff Street toward the Heinz factory and Allegheny River far below, or walking to the library on Wylie Avenue, which these days is a mosque. Their father died in 1965, their mother in 1983.

From an early age, Ellis says, her brother “let nothing interfere with that writing. Job, whatever you’re supposed to do at various points in life -- he wrote instead.” And in 1978, when Wilson had a chance to take a job in Minneapolis writing educational scripts for a museum, he took it. National attention came a few years later.

Though her brother is seldom in the neighborhood now, Ellis says, “I think the neighborhood is still in his plays. Because all the plays are grounded in the idea of a person coming into themselves. The process of learning who you are. When you think about all of his plays, the underlying question is: Who are you?”

Laurence Glasco, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in the city’s African American community, suggests that Wilson “has not written his most important play: the one that will deal with black-white relations. In his neighborhood, and in his family. That will be the great play, if he writes it.”

Wilson’s response: “I don’t think so. I don’t feel compelled to write that.”

As for Bedford Avenue, workers across the street are pounding nails now on a 147-unit rental townhome development that aims to mix subsidized tenants with market-rate tenants paying up to $900 a month. But there’s more to the story of the Buteras and that idle storefront at 1725 Bedford.

Last year, somebody broke in, confronted the last Butera left in the neighborhood -- brother John, now an 87-year-old bachelor watch repairman who’d just finished walking his dog -- and stabbed him to death in his kitchen. Ellis saw the blood on the floor. Two brothers dead in one building, 34 years apart. And no arrests yet in the most recent killing.

Freda Ellis shakes her head.

‘A PROFUNDITY’

CHAWLIE P. WILLIAMS, who usually keeps his distance from the Hill “because it breaks my heart,” takes a seat in the Crawford Grill, folds a pair of prolifically scarred 67-year-old hands on the table, blinks, and looks back across more than three decades, two prison terms and one addiction.

“August,” he says, “was brought to me by Dingbat -- Carl Smith, an artist who worked with tacks. I was already in the process of writing poetry. August was working on poetry too, and Dingbat wanted me to hear this young mind. We met right on Centre Avenue.”

That was about 1965, when Wilson was 20 and Williams was nine years older. Before long, African awareness and art and poetry and theater seemed to be everywhere on the Hill, and much of it stemmed from a foursome known as the Centre Avenue Poets: Rob Penny and Nick Flournoy (both now dead), Wilson and Williams, who joined in the flowering while feeding his drug habit.

Free of heroin now, employed as a social worker, recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and still writing poetry, Williams stays in touch with his old running mate. He recalls “a profundity about August that a lot of people didn’t understand. When he recited poetry he didn’t sound black. But then he wrote that dialogue.” For a while, Williams recalls, Wilson lived in a basement apartment next to St. Benedict the Moor Church. Williams, then dealing drugs and fencing stolen goods, would drop by to shoot up. Wilson never did or dealt drugs, Williams says. Instead, when he needed money, “he’d get a dishwashing job periodically, and then he would quit.”

By the time Williams came back from his first stretch in prison, Wilson had moved out of town. But a dozen years ago, when Wilson’s ‘80s play “King Hedley II” first came to Pittsburgh, Williams came to see it and was taken aback. The protagonist, Hedley, carries a prison record and unsettled family business, sells hot refrigerators, robs a liquor store and seethes with anger, especially when someone calls him by the wrong nickname.

“Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?” Williams says. “My first was on drugs. My second was in that theater, seeing myself on stage. I was humbled. But one of the greatest gifts you can get is to see yourself in your friend’s eyes.”

Wilson himself is more restrained on this subject and says Williams is one of many influences on that character. But Williams will have none of that.

“I was the prototype for King Hedley II,” he says, in a more contrite tone than he uses when discussing his prison time. “I know it.”

MEMORY SPEAKING

While all these Pittsburgers have been doing their remembering, the playwright himself has been holed up in downtown Los Angeles, sweating out rehearsals and rewrites, occasionally escaping to the plaza in front of the Mark Taper Forum, where he sits under his customary cap, guarding a cigarette from the breeze.

“I don’t do research,” he says. “It’s like putting on a straitjacket.”

When not in rehearsals somewhere, Wilson lives in Seattle with his third wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, and their daughter, Azula, about to turn 6. But he returns to Pittsburgh every year to visit his mother’s grave with his siblings. And he can close his eyes and name six drugstores and three theaters that stood within five minutes of home in 1955. And he’s happy to describe one transcendent night in 1967 when he stumbled across 200 of his neighbors standing outside the Crawford Grill, listening to John Coltrane inside.

“Two hundred people, silent,” Wilson says. “They’re out there praying. This music was important to them. It remains one of the most remarkable moments of my life, to see these 200 [black people] standing on the corner, stunned into silence by the power of music, and John Coltrane. Looking back on it now, I was thinking, ‘I want to make my art like that, to stun people into silence.’ ”

Through the two decades that he’s been working on his cycle of plays, Wilson has surprised people more than once, most notably in 1996, when he denounced “color-blind casting” and suggested that instead of waiting for fuller inclusion in the largely white American theater establishment, African American writers, directors and performers should cultivate their own theatrical tradition and audiences. Wilson continues to press for a louder and more distinct African American voice in the American theater -- a position opposed by some critics, who warn that it carries segregationist overtones

These days, his ambition is more specific: In “Gem of the Ocean,” he wants to stun people with the possibility and pain of being an African American in Pittsburgh in 1904.

“You could walk around and find people who were slaves,” he says. “I find that incredible.”

This production has already seen many changes since its opening night in Chicago in April; of the seven roles, four have been recast, and the playwright has followed his usual custom of active rewriting during rehearsals, in close contact with director Marion McClinton.

The real question he aims to ask in this work, Wilson says, is: “What does freedom mean? There were no maps. You had to make it up as you went along.”

OTHER ROADS

A well-tended Buick pulls up in front of Eddie’s Restaurant, and half the guys on the Hill’s stoops and corners seem to be waving or whistling hello. On the dash of the Buick is a special parking permit -- City Councilman, it says -- and out of the car, in natty suit and tie, steps a barrel-chested man who once upon a time went to Holy Trinity elementary school with Freddy Kittel.

Inside, a jukebox trembles with soul music, and the councilman explains his name: In the same crusading decade that turned Freddy into August, he evolved from Sam Howze to Sala Udin, a revolutionary with a name taken from an African king.

“August and I used to spend a lot of time here,” Udin says. “He only needed one match in the morning, and then he’d light every cigarette from the last one, all day long.”

Toward the front of the restaurant, the waitress spars with another customer. If there’s a significant difference between Eddie’s and Lee’s, the four-stool, three-booth diner that is the opening set for Wilson’s ‘60s play “Two Trains Running,” it’s invisible from this booth.

“He liked corduroy pants, jackets, hats,” Udin continues. “While we were trying to be modern and flashy, he would dress like the old men. After a while, people didn’t try to figure out why when it was August. It was just August.”

Udin, who spent much of the ‘60s registering voters and protesting in Mississippi, remembers a lot of political meetings in those days that gradually evolved into something like theater, with poetry, drums, singing.

“The poets evolved into playwrights.... It was cheap and live and relevant and risque and dangerous and radical,” Udin says. For about a decade, Wilson explored his craft and culture through the Black Horizons theater company.

“When we started the theater, I became the leading role in most of the plays,” Udin says. “I think August had me in mind when he wrote the character Becker.”

Indeed, commanding the stage at 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds, Udin starred as Becker, the embattled father and taxi service owner who dominates “Jitney,” in the Allegheny Rep’s 1982 production. But since the revolutionary won election to the City Council in 1995, there’s no time for acting.

Instead, with two-thirds of his constituents living in the Hill District, his job is to think about the neighborhood, but in different terms than his old friend the playwright. Back in the Buick and rolling past Centre and Kilpatrick streets, the councilman nods at an empty lot.

“I had to close a jitney stand right here,” he says. “Had to close a couple of bars too. I’m making a lot of enemies among locals who feel ownership in this drug area. But we’re taking it back.... The scene is changing, but the struggles are the same. And what August has captured is the timelessness of these struggles.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

As time goes by

With the premiere production of “Gem of the Ocean” running at the Mark Taper Forum, playwright August Wilson’s 20th century cycle is one installment from completion. Director Lloyd Richards took the first six productions to Broadway. More recently, Marion McClinton directed the off-Broadway production of “Jitney,” the premiere and Broadway productions of “King Hedley II” and now “Gem of the Ocean.”

The plays, in order by the decade in which they are set:

1900s

“Gem of the Ocean”: In 1904, Citizen Barlow comes north to Pittsburgh, looks for work at a mill, figures in a notorious death and makes a bid for redemption at the urging of the matriarch Aunt Ester. Premiere production shared between Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum.

Opens Thursday.

1910s

“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”: After years of forced labor, Herald Loomis arrives with his daughter in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911, hoping to find his wife, the girl’s mother, amid the city’s new mix of rural and urban characters.

Premiere: Yale Repertory Theatre, 1986; Broadway: 1988.

1920s

“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”: Working in the shadow of racism, a blues diva and her musicians set up and skirmish in a Chicago recording studio, 1927. The only play that occurs outside Pittsburgh’s Hill District.

Premiere: Yale Repertory Theatre, 1984; Broadway: 1984.

1930s

“The Piano Lesson”: In 1936, a brother and sister battle over what to make of their past -- that is, what to do with a newly inherited, elaborately carved piano.

Premiere: Yale Repertory Theatre, 1987; Broadway: 1990; Pulitzer Prize.

1940s

“Seven Guitars”: Set in 1948. A funeral flashback tells the tale of a once-promising blues musician, a pawnshop and a man named Hedley.

Premiere: Goodman Theatre, 1995; Broadway: 1996.

1950s

“Fences”: In 1957, a father, stung by racism in his own frustrated athletic career, wrestles with options when his son shows promise as a football player.

Premiere: Yale Repertory Theatre, 1985; Broadway: 1987; Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award.

1960s

“Two Trains Running”: As urban renewal threatens the neighborhood, a diner owner and his customers sift through the scrambled social landscape of 1969.

Premiere: Yale Repertory Theatre, 1990; Broadway: 1992.

1970s

“Jitney”: In 1977, the owner of a gypsy cab company faces demolition of his building and a tense reunion with his long-jailed son.

Premiere: Allegheny Repertory Theatre, 1982; off-Broadway: 2000.

1980s

“King Hedley II”: Amid violence and crime in a scarred neighborhood in 1985, an embittered family man sells stolen refrigerators and his wife wonders about the use of bringing a child into this cityscape.

Premiere: Pittsburgh Public Theatre, 1999; Broadway: 2001.

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‘Gem of the Ocean’

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Opens Thursday. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m.; Sept. 3, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sept. 7, 2:30 p.m. only

Ends: Sept. 7

Price: $31-$45

Contact: (213) 628-2772