Kenny Leon's prize is getting to pay back August Wilson

August Wilson started paying it forward in 1987 during the Broadway premiere of his drama “Fences” when he met Kenny Leon, then a young actor-director from Atlanta looking to find his voice in American theater. At Sunday night’s Tony Awards, Leon, now 54, paid it back, with interest.

The Leon-directed production of “Fences” won the prestigious best revival of a play award, and its stars, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, swept the lead acting categories.

“If we didn’t win anything else, I really wanted to win that revival of a play” prize, said the Atlanta director moments after the ceremony, as an SUV ferried him to a “Fences” celebration. “Because that says so much about August and the 23 years [since the Broadway premiere].

“So I was really proud, and I think August is smiling,” continued Leon, who was nominated, but did not win for best director. “It’s a great night for the Wilson estate and all the Wilsonian soldiers around the country. I couldn’t feel better.”

Over those 23 years, Leon has emerged as a general leading those “Wilsonian soldiers,” actors and production artists who have kept Wilson’s canon alive since his 2005 death.

Leon met Wilson while participating in a New York-based National Endowment for the Arts directing fellowship, and the playwright clearly saw something in the protégé-to-be. When Leon became associate artistic director of Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre the next year, rising to artistic director in 1990, Wilson gave him permission to mount any of his plays, even if they were running on Broadway.

The collaboration reached a new plateau in 2004, when the playwright asked Leon -- who had left the Alliance to form his own Atlanta troupe, Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company -- to take over the Broadway-bound production of Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean” after the original director took ill. It was Leon’s second Broadway staging that year, following his hit revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.”

"Those breaks come from hard work," Wilson told AJC theater critic Wendell Brock after “Gem,” starring Phylicia Rashad, opened to favorable reviews. "He’s very dynamic, and he’s his own man and comes up with new ideas.”

Leon helped Wilson, who was dying of liver cancer in 2005, complete “Radio Golf,” the final in his 10-play chronicle of 20th-century African-American life. Leon was a pallbearer and gave a testimonial at Wilson’s Pittsburgh funeral, and then in 2007 brought “Golf” to Broadway. In the process, the Atlanta director formed a strong bond with Wilson’s dramaturge, Todd Kreidler, whom Leon hired as his True Colors associate artistic director.

Yet as loyal a soldier as he’s been to Wilson, Leon knew he had to mount his own take on “Fences” for the Broadway revival. That meant putting out of mind James Earl Jones, who starred in the original as Troy Maxson, a Negro League slugger whose life was limited by segregation.

With Washington in the lead role, Leon said, “there’s never been a ‘Fences’ that’s been more athletic, more youthful, more energetic, more funny.

“You use what they have and let them find the truth,” Leon continued, speaking of Washington and the “raw, visceral” Davis. “My job is to help them find that and get them to trust it. Then I can shape it and block it the way I want to.”