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Photo by Jim Craven Director Kenny Leon, left, talks with "Seven Guitars" cast members, from left, Susan Champion, Derrick Lee Weeden and Andrea Frye. Leon directed the August Wilson play, which opened Saturday. From Atlanta to Ashland 'Seven Guitars' director has added some spice to theater in both places BY BILL VARBLE See it "Seven Guitars," by August Wilson, opened Saturday at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Bowmer Theatre. The next performances are set for 8 p.m. Thursday and 2 p.m. May 2. Tickets are $21, 27 and 29.25. Call 482-4331. Kenny Leon faces the cast of "Seven Guitars" in the empty room they call New Place at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Leon, who is the play's director, and these seven actors have brought August Wilson's slice of African-American life in 1948 Pittsburgh to the stage here, previewing it Wednesday night to a standing ovation. Leon flies back to Atlanta, Ga., in just hours, so this is both a goodbye and some final coaching. "I want to make it easy for Katherine," Leon tells the actors. "Know what I'm saying?" That would be Katherine Gosnell, the play's stage manager. The director normally turns a play over to the stage manager and leaves after opening night, but Leon is due back at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, where he is artistic director. The talk is of technical stuff: cues, timing, internal pauses. "The first scene is not slow and metered and sad," Leon says. "If people start moving around, or you hear paper, you need to pick up the pace." In 1994 Leon directed George C. Wolfe's "The Colored Museum" at the Black Swan, and OSF artistic director Libby Appel wanted him back. "He works wonderfully with actors," Appel says, "and I thought he would be a great assett to this company, which he certainly has been." "Seven Guitars" is about the death of a young black man, a blues musician tasting his first success, and what that death means to others. The blues as a repository for the experience of Africans in America is an important theme of Wilson's. In the play, the war is over and times are good. There's a boarding house, chickens, card games. "That card game is a key," Leon says. "It's like, boom, boom, boom, oh Lord!" The actors nod, acknowledging. Listening with them are choreographer Patdro Harris and scenic designer Michael Ganio. Leon wants the actors to "attack the laughter," or start a line after a laugh has peaked but before it subsides. "The scene is about rhythm," Leon says. "The way we talk." Leon, 43, combines a shaved head and baggy jeans with an air of casual intensity. He grew up in rural Florida, where he had to heat bath water on a woodstove. He went to Atlanta to attend Clark, a black college, when Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson were students there. After paying some acting dues ("Lonely Planet," "A Raisin in the Sun," "Master Harold and the Boys"), he directed at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, the San Jose Repertory Theatre, the Huntington Theatre Company and other theaters. When he took over as artistic director of the Alliance in 1990, he inherited a company with the reputation of a good, if not daring, theater. The audience, like the board, was overwhelmingly white. Leon started presenting plays by African-American writers dealing with racial and social themes. As August Wilson joined Oscar Wilde, some of the more conservative patrons expressed outrage, and season ticket sales plummeted by one-third. A Rastafarian Ghost of Christmas Present in "A Christmas Carol" wasn't exactly what they'd had in mind. The Alliance's board stuck with Leon, however, and single-ticket sales have since jumped almost 50 percent. The minority audience has gone from about 4 percent to more than 20 percent. "The audience is younger and more diverse," Leon says. "My community looks at us as being leaders, not followers." Leon has commissioned and directed three works by the Atlanta playwright Pearl Cleage, including "Blues for an Alabama Sky," produced last year at the OSF. He commissioned "The Last Night of Ballyhoo," by Alfred Uhry, which opened during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, went to Broadway and won the 1997 Tony for best play. Disney staged a new "Aida" called "Elaborate Lives: the Legend of Aida," with lyrics by Elton John and Tim Rice, at the Alliance last year with Leon as co-producer. Disney officials cited his commitment to diversity _ something Disney itself has worked on in 1996's "Pocahontas" and beyond. The play opens next month in Chicago, and ultimately, Leon hopes, on Broadway. Leon loved working with John, whom he sees as a star who could help to bridge the gap between the world of pop and the world of theater. "In the old days there used to be (pop music) guys who would write for the stage," he says. "We should get them back together.'' Leon thinks "Seven Guitars" is one of the most important plays in the last 20 years. "It's a universal play," he says. Bluesman Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton (Ken LaRon) has died after cutting his first hit, "That's All Right." In flashbacks, the music business sharks are ripping him off. As Vera (Deidrie Henry), whom he loves, says, "Everything keep slipping out his hands." Louise (Andrea Frye) owns the boarding house where Vera and Hedley (Derrick Lee Weedon) live. A game of cards is excitement enough for Louise these days. The play ranges from post-war Pittsburgh to black leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey to the blues and Hedley's folk remedies and apocalyptic visions. It's vintage Wilson, whose work aims at integrating the whole history of blacks in America into the everyday lives of African-American characters. He's writing a cycle of plays about black life in each decade of the century. "Kenny Leon is one of the finest directors of August Wilson's work in the country," Appel says. "He understands the poetry and exquisite beauty of an August Wilson play." Leon says he jumped at the chance to come to Oregon in order to do another Wilson play, and because of an attitude that may sound old-fashioned: the belief that theater can change people. He had one stipulation. It was about the scene with the chickens that Hedley keeps to butcher to make the sandwiches he sells in the Hill District community. "It must be real," Leon says. "No fake chickens, like they've used in some productions. Live chickens. Libby saw that." August Wilson has said that black life on the stage can contain any idea at all, and when people see that their ideas will change. Leon buys into that. "He's saying his culture and his religion and the smell of his mother's kitchen and all these things can sustain themselves on the stage," he says. "I think he feels our stories are underrepresented. He said, `I'm just gonna write about black life."' Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA