KenYatta Rogers remembers exactly where he was when the power of an August Wilson play set him on a path to a theatrical career that, so far, has seen him perform or direct eight of Wilson’s 10 acclaimed plays about African-American life in the 20th Century.
Rogers was seated with his father in the audience at Baltimore’s Center Stage, in December 1988, for a performance of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” Rogers was a teenager at the time, a student at Centennial High School in Howard County.
“I was blown away,” he says of Wilson’s haunting tale of a man who had been forced on a bogus charge to work on a Southern chain gang for seven years. Once freed, the man had come north, to Pittsburgh, in search of his wife. With him was their daughter, played in that 1988 production by Jada Pinkett — later Jada Pinkett Smith — a student at the Baltimore School for the Arts.
Seeing a peer on stage in a great play in a professional theater sparked some I-can-do-that in KenYatta Rogers.
So, back at Centennial, he and other students lobbied to stage a Wilson play; they wanted to produce his 1987 Pulitzer-winning drama, “Fences,” a truly ambitious undertaking for a high school. Lynn Broderick, the theater instructor, got the rights to do it, and Rogers got the male lead. “I’m pretty sure I’m one of the first 10 or 15 people to play Troy Maxson, and at the age of 18. … And from then on, I was kind of bit . . .:
Bit by the theater bug.
Over the last 35 years, Rogers has had all kinds of roles; his credits include more than 70 regional theater productions. And he directed, notably and recently, the play that gave him the bug: “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” That was the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s production of the play last fall, part of the Baltimore theater community’s praise-worthy commitment to staging all 10 works in Wilson’s 20th Century cycle over three years.
Though Wilson, who died in 2005 at age 60, did not write his plays in chronological order, the theater collaboration presents them that way, decade by decade: “Gem of the Ocean,” set in 1904, was staged at Arena Players in spring 2024; “Joe Turner,” set in 1911, had its run in October; “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” set in 1927, was staged this spring at ArtsCentric.
Next up: “The Piano Lesson,” set in 1936 Pittsburgh, at Everyman Theatre throughout September. KenYatta Rogers has been cast as Wining Boy, marking his eighth Wilson play as an actor.
Bonus: Mecca Rogers, the 15-year-old daughter of Rogers and his wife, Michelle, is one of two actors cast as Maretha for the Everyman run. “Piano Lesson” will mark the second time father and daughter worked together on a Wilson play; the first time was at Ford’s Theatre in Washington in 2019, in a revival of “Fences.”
By now, the only Wilson plays not listed on KenYatta Rodgers’ resume are “Seven Guitars” and “Radio Golf.”
The allure of the Wilson plays is strong. For Rogers, it’s the language, culture and humanity described in Wilson’s brilliant writing that inspires — dialogue that resulted from the many hours the playwright spent in cafes and in blue-collar jobs, listening to the Black working-class voices around him. The characters that populate the plays all have distinct personalities and stories to tell and, says Rogers, “they bring an entire way of thinking, an entire way of seeing the past, present and future.”
The past, in particular, looms ominously in Wilson plays. In “The Piano Lesson,” four men — Boy Willie, Doaker, Wining Boy and Lymon — sit around a kitchen table and, at Boy Willie’s urging, they sing a work song from their days in Mississippi and a brutal prison farm. Doaker is reluctant to return there, but he eventually makes it a quartet. And with that powerful scene — men bonded in some way by trauma, men who’ve survived — Wilson ingeniously draws a line from the chain gang in “Joe Turner” to Doaker’s kitchen table in Pittsburgh.
“August Wilson is about an expansiveness of personage that goes beyond borders, beyond time,” says Rogers, who, in addition to being an actor and director, is a longtime educator, currently an assistant professor of theater at the University of Maryland. “Wilson provides a connection to real and imagined paths … [His plays] are a Rosetta Stone for the things I don’t understand. And they say, ‘We are human beings, and here’s how you survive.’”
The Baltimore August Wilson Century Celebration continues into 2026. “Seven Guitars,” set in 1948, will be at Spotlighters Theatre in February, followed almost immediately by “Fences,” 1957, at Chesapeake Shakespeare; and then “Two Trains Running,” 1969, at Morgan State University; “Jitney,” 1977, at Fells Point Corner Theatre; “King Hedley II,” 1985, at Center Stage; and “Radio Golf,” set in 1990, will be produced by Noah Silas Studios and the Theatre Project sometime in 2027.
Dan Rodricks’ column appears in the Fishbowl once a week. He can be reached at djrodricks@gmail.com or via danrodricks.com
