The August Wilson Celebration continues in Baltimore theaters

A reminder that the Baltimore August Wilson Celebration continues in September with Everyman Theatre’s staging of “The Piano Lesson.” That production will mark the fourth of the 10 Wilson plays that 10 Baltimore theater companies agreed to stage over three years, giving a whole new generation of theatergoers multiple opportunities to see live performances of all of Wilson’s great works.

Chesapeake Shakespeare’s producing executive director, Lesley Malin, conceived the idea of this three-year festival. I expressed a wish for it in my Sun column a few years ago, and so I send heaps of praise to Malin and her theater colleagues for making it happen.

Though Wilson, who died in 2005 at age 60, did not write his plays in chronological order, Baltimore’s celebration presents them that way: “Gem of the Ocean,” set in 1904, already staged at Arena Players; “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” set in 1911, already produced by Chesapeake Shakespeare; “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” set in 1927, staged this spring at ArtsCentric; “The Piano Lesson,” 1936, will be at Everyman through Sept. 28; “Seven Guitars,” 1948, will be at Spotlighters in February, followed almost immediately by “Fences,” 1957, at Chesapeake Shakespeare; and then “Two Trains Running,” 1969, at Morgan State; “Jitney,” 1977, at Fells Point Corner Theatre; “King Hedley II,” 1985, at Center Stage; and “Radio Golf,” set in 1990, will be produced by Noah Silas Studios and the Theatre Project sometime in 2027.

Some, if not all, of these plays have been staged in Baltimore over the last three decades. Morgan State University’s theater department gave us “Jitney” in 2012, marking a return to Baltimore of a play Wilson refined and finished here, during a run at Center Stage in 1999. Everyman Theatre’s 2019 production of “Radio Golf” was superb. While set in Pittsburgh, its themes of social mobility and class, and its references to urban renewal, were profoundly relevant to Baltimore. 

Center Stage has had a long history of Wilson plays. Among the most memorable was a haunting production, in 2008, of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” set in a Pittsburgh boarding house during the Great Migration.

“Ma Rainey” is one of two Wilson plays that have been adapted for film, and it was a stellar rendering, released in 2020, with Oscar-nominated performances by Viola Davis and, in his final role, the late Chadwick Boseman. The other Wilson play made into a movie is “Fences,” starring Davis and Denzel Washington, who also directed the film. “Fences” premiered on Broadway in 1987 with James Earl Jones in the lead. The play earned Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and, that same year, he published another play, “The Piano Lesson,” that earned him a second Pulitzer just three years later. The man was extravagantly talented and prolific.

“The Piano Lesson” brings me to Charles “Roc” Dutton. The Baltimore-born actor and director, whose theatrical career started while he was an inmate in a Maryland prison, was in the original Broadway cast of that play, in the role of the headstrong and hard-headed Boy Willie. He received a 1990 Tony nomination for his performance, his second for a role in a Wilson play. (Dutton received a Tony nomination six years earlier, when he made his Broadway debut as Levee, the trumpet player in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”)

You can see why Dutton won acclaim for his stage acting by going to YouTube and searching for a 1995 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV adaptation of “The Piano Lesson.” I have watched it several times. It made me wish I had seen Dutton’s Boy Willie on stage.

Charles “Roc” Dutton, who is in his 70s now, has been away from acting for several years and, last I heard, was residing in Georgia. He had a place in Howard County and owned horses there before moving to Baltimore for a time, then down south.

Dutton’s story is legend: Grew up in East Baltimore, incarcerated as a young man in the 1960s and 1970s, took an interest in Black playwrights and acting while inside the walls, came out of prison, earned a degree from Towson State University and, in the 1980s, a masters degree in acting from Yale School of Drama. He went “from jail to Yale,” then to Broadway, movies and television.

At some point in the August Wilson Century Celebration, it would be a bonus to have Roc Dutton back in Baltimore for one of the plays — if not in a role on stage, then in the best seat in the house. He is deserving of a hometown tribute.