In the hands of a lesser playwright, you can imagine this memoir by the late August Wilson to be fodder for the chatshow circuit. Here is the anecdote about his first teenage crush. Now, the one about his string of dead-end jobs. Next comes his friendship with a junkie poet, his three days behind bars and his life-or-death encounter with a jealous husband.
But How I Learned What I Learned, making its European debut 17 years after Wilson’s death, is an altogether weightier piece of work. On the surface, it is a breezy compendium of reminiscences, a ragtag collection of stories from the 1960s and 70s, long before the debut production of Jitney in 1982, followed by Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences, put him on the theatrical map. Back then, as these anecdotes attest, he was variously a high school dropout, an autodidact, a grass cutter, a dish washer and a poet.
