Presented by the August Wilson Society in conjunction with the AWS 2020 Colloquium: August Wilson on the Margins: Understudied & Underrepresented.

The August Wilson Society presents How I Learned What I Learned featuring beloved Pittsburgh actor affectionately known as a Wilsonian Warrior, WALI JAMAL. Originally written and performed by August Wilson himself in 2003, How I Learned What I Learned is the autobiographical story of Wilson's journey through the hardships of growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh and his rise to fame as a playwright. This show offers a dramatic portrait of Pittsburgh and its characters, defining an era through August Wilson's lyrical prose.

Friday, March 13, 2020 | 8 P.M.

August Wilson African American Cultural Center

980 Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15222

Tickets: $25 | Open seating

STRONG LANGUAGE & ADULT THEMES

WALI JAMAL is a Pittsburgh native, performer, and playwright and the only actor to have performed in all 10 of Wilson’s American Century Cycle plays and How I Learned What I Learned. He was recently named the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “2018 Performer of the Year.”

AUGUST WILSON (1945-2005) is one of the most important playwrights of his generation, having won two Pulitzer Prizes, a Tony Award, and seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards. The 10 plays in The American Century Cycle explore the heritage and experience of the descendants of Africans in North America, decade by decade, over the course of the 20th century.

ABOUT THE AUGUST WILSON SOCIETY (AWS)

The August Wilson Society (AWS) defines itself as an interdisciplinary learning community of instructors, students, and theatre lovers who remain dedicated to commemorating August Wilson’s legacy by promoting the studying, teaching, researching, performing, and ultimately the safeguarding of the rich narrative of the African American past that Wilson has bequeathed to us in the form of 10 plays that chronicle the stories of African Americans from 1904 to 1997.

This fundamental mission is reflected in the interdisciplinary scope of the Society’s charter membership as well as in projects already slated to delve more deeply into the largely untapped interdisciplinary spectrum of his work. AWS also considers its major objective to be keeping in the forefront for current generations of students a major writer and artist who dedicated his life and genius to chronicling and rendering into poetry and drama, the history, decade by decade, of African Americans in the twentieth century.

From the 1980s through the beginning of the twenty-first century, Wilson made America and the world more aware of the saga of a people struggling to gain status in a country that they had helped to build. Through the immensity and ambition of his vision, Wilson crafted a series of linked narratives that not only captured many of the untold stories of the black experience but that also increased the presence of African American performers and theatrical talent in theatres throughout the United States as well as beyond its borders.

Because of August Wilson, the doors of mainstream theaters opened wider than before to the voice and perspectives of African descended people, many of whom are involuntary immigrants in this country.