Event preview
“Two Trains Running,” by August Wilson and directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson
Featuring Pauletta Washington
Through March 10. 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays; 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. Wednesday and Feb. 27; 8 p.m. March 6; 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays. No shows Mondays and Tuesdays. $20-$35. True Colors Theatre in the Southwest Arts Center, 915 New Hope Road S.W., Atlanta. 404-532-1901, www.truecolorstheatre.org.
Years ago, actress LaTanya Richardson Jackson asked playwright August Wilson a bold, to-your-face question, one that was being asked of the playwright in print by several female social critics of the time.
Richardson Jackson wanted to know why Wilson didn’t write plays with more female characters in them, particularly women with a contemporary sensibility. In his series of Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning plays documenting the 20th-century African-American experience, surely he could come up with one play that spoke to the female experience of the period.
“He said, ‘I will write for them when I know what they say, and that may never happen,’” Richardson Jackson said.
So now she finds herself trying to coax that female voice forward and amplify it as she directs Wilson’s “Two Trains Running,” for Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre at the Southwest Arts Center in Atlanta. For the lone and key female role of the character, Risa, Richardson Jackson cast her longtime friend Pauletta Washington.
Set in Pittsburgh at the dusk of the nonviolent era of the civil rights movement and the dawn of the by-any-means-necessary black power movement, “Two Trains” explores anxiety but also the dynamism of the era. It plays out in a creaky diner in a black neighborhood about to be swept away in a tide of gentrification. Whether the diner’s regulars and staff will ride the crest of the wave or be drowned by it is the question.
Risa is a waitress at the diner. In some ways, it is fitting that both Richardson Jackson and Washington are trying to bring her forward and give her more agency in a show with dominant male characters that seem never to have mastered the words “please” and “thank you.”
Richardson Jackson, a veteran stage, television and film actress, is the wife of actor Samuel L. Jackson. Washington, an accomplished pianist and actress, is the wife of Oscar winner Denzel Washington.
The Jacksons met while LaTanya, an Atlanta native, was a student at Spelman College studying theater and Samuel was a student at Morehouse College. Pauletta Washington met her husband while both were working on the 1977 television movie “Wilma,” about the Olympian track star Wilma Rudolph.
Neither woman would argue that their husband’s careers eventually eclipsed their own (though Washington is adamant that LaTanya Jackson is “the talent in the family”).
But the reasons their husbands are better known, both say, are due in part to willing choices each woman made and stinging choices made for them. They discussed those decisions before a rehearsal last week at the arts center.
Though both are classically trained and saw early momentum in their stage careers, in the early years of their careers the big, breakout film and television roles never seemed to go to darker-skinned, shapely women such as them.
“I always have felt a bit bitter that the industry didn’t recognize the pure talent because they are looking for superficial things,” Washington said, as she gestured to Richardson Jackson, though in some ways she was speaking for herself as well.
But both women put voluntary brakes on their careers after they began having children. Two traveling actors can’t make a stable home, they said.
“Sam and I had made a pact, since we were both from broken homes, I said I am not going to have a kid that wasn’t raised by two parents,” Richardson Jackson said. “I didn’t care what it took.”
Without missing a beat, Washington agreed.
“There’s a lot of talk about the Hollywood families, but that commitment that the two of them made, Denzel and I made the same commitment,” Washington said. “I came from a solid home. I came home, my mom was there.”
Richardson Jackson cut her work back to occasional summer projects, while Washington allowed her career to cool until her four children were in college (the Washingtons’ son John David attended Morehouse College). The women have been content to see their children move forward, though there have been moments on the red carpet with their husbands when they’ve had private pause.
“I’m with him on his arm as his wife, and everybody comes up to you and says, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky,’” Washington said. “And there have been times when I have said, ‘What?! Y’all don’t know.’”
Richardson Jackson said she’s asked herself some fairly pointed questions along the way: “Resentment? Really, God? Him? Not me? Really?” she said.
But then she looks at all she has and says, “You know what? We got blessed.”
And now that their children are mostly grown and gone, the women are plowing ahead with interrupted careers. Invited to direct by her longtime family friend and True Colors founder Leon, Richardson Jackson cast Washington because, she said, she felt it was time to take all they knew about life in a supporting role and pour it into Risa.
“I don’t think (Risa) is a young girl,” Richardson Jackson said. “A girl wouldn’t have this kind of wisdom. This is a woman, full grown.”
