August Wilson veterans bring ‘Jitney' to Atlanta

August Wilson has been dead for nearly five years. But for actor Anthony Chisholm, who was the lead pallbearer at the playwright’s funeral in Pittsburgh, the memory is fresh. He recalls the smoky charcoal-pink marble of the crypt. He remembers the way the pallbearers shoveled earth over the grave.

“It seemed like August came out of the earth like a miasma and encompassed all of us and suddenly we were inside his being,” says Chisholm, who appears in the True Colors Theatre production of “Jitney,” opening Wednesday night at Southwest Arts Center. “It was like an energy, an intelligent energy that we were in the middle of.”

Like “Jitney” director Derrick Sanders and True Colors artistic director Kenny Leon, Chisholm is a living link to the Wilson legacy. He performed in three Wilson plays on Broadway, garnering a Tony Award nomination for 2007’s “Radio Golf.”

“Of all the Wilsonian soldiers, he is the truest,” say Leon, who currently has a warmly received production of Wilson’s “Fences” starring Denzel Washington on Broadway. “August loved him, and I just love the way he tackles August’s work, the way he understands August’s characters.”

“Jitney,” based on Wilson’s observations of a gypsy cab stand in his hometown of Pittsburgh, is a fly-on-the-wall comedy about a community, and a family, on the verge of collapse. The first of Wilson’s 10 plays about African-American life in the 20th century, it was overshadowed in the mid-'80s by the success of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and has never been on Broadway.

Leon, Chisholm and Sanders -- all pallbearers at Wilson's funeral -- would like to see that change.

“It’s his funniest play,” Leon says. “It’s probably his shortest play. But it was the inspiration for all his other plays.” (After its Southwest Arts Center run, "Jitney" transfers to the Alliance Theatre for a June engagement.)

Chisholm, who portrays a down-and-out drunk in the story, has played some of Wilson’s saltiest and most comical characters. In 1990, Samuel L. Jackson beat him out of the part of Wolf in the Yale Repertory Theatre production of “Two Trains Running.” But when the show moved to Broadway, Chisholm was called back to play Wolf. He played Solly Two Kings in the Broadway production of “Gem of the Ocean” (2004) and Elder Joseph Barlow in “Radio Golf” (2007), both directed by Leon.

The gravelly voiced actor has vivid memories of strolling Pittsburgh’s Hill District with Wilson. It was 1996, and the playwright was rewriting “Jitney” for the Pittsburgh Public Theater. They stopped in at the restaurant where the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner was once a short-order cook and saw the house where he was born. During rehearsals, Chisholm says the play grew, in typical Wilson fashion, from 90 minutes to three hours.

In 2000, “Jitney” had a successful run at New York’s Second Stage, later touring nationally and internationally. “We took it everywhere,” Chisholm says during an interview in the Southwest Arts Center green room. “We won every award in American theater. I got an Obie on my wall, a Drama Desk on my shelf. We went to London and won the Olivier for best new play. We beat out all the British plays that year.”

Set in 1977, “Jitney" describes a troubled father-son relationship through a lens of social disenfranchisement. After serving time for murder, the character Booster is released from prison on the same day the city announces plans to tear down the jitney station operated by his father, Becker.

“Ultimately, I think ‘Jitney’ is about self-reliance,” says Sanders, artistic director of Chicago’s Congo Square Theatre. “I think it’s about obligation to yourself through the community. ‘How do my decisions affect my brethren, my community in which I live, and how do they affect my family?’ … I think there are so many things about love and laughter and death and how you deal with death and how death can sometimes move you into action and how some people sometimes get trapped in their own self-pity and what you need to do to get out of that.”