By CARL KURLANDER

Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter (“St. Elmo’s Fire”), documentarian (“The Shot Felt ‘Round the World”), and educator on film and media, including as founding director of the Pitt in LA program. With colleagues and funding from the University of Pittsburgh’s Frederick Honors College, he traveled to Vicenza, Italy, to document a historic first: August Wilson’s “Jitney,” translated and performed in Italian. For onStage Pittsburgh (a longer version will be available at https://carlkurlander.substack.com), Carl shares his experiences documenting the Italian production — with English supertitles — that is coming to the Hill District, presented by Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company and the August Wilson House at Madison Arts and Entertainment Center, Friday-Sunday, May 8-10, 2026. Tickets and details: https://www.pghplaywrights.org/season-info/august-wilsons-jitney-in-italian/

April 27th would have been August Wilson’s 81st birthday. On May 8th, August’s first play, Jitney, will be performed by an Italian cast at a converted elementary school in the Hill District. I am eagerly anticipating this more than most, as a few years ago I got to see the production in Vicenza, Italy. Wilson’s plays have been performed on Broadway and around the world, but that was the first time one of his plays had been performed in Italy. And now that Italian production will be produced in the very place that inspired August’s unprecedented 10-play American Century Cycle.

For the past seven years I have been working on a documentary about August’s formative years in Pittsburgh and the restoration of the August Wilson House. How August went from being a kid who dropped out of 10th grade after being falsely accused of plagiarism and educated himself reading books at the Carnegie Library and walking the streets of the Hill, to one of the most celebrated playwrights in the world is incredible enough. But several years ago, I met Renzo Carbonera, an Italian director who had never heard of August Wilson until he visited Pittsburgh. I met Renzo through August’s widow, Constanza Romero Wilson, and Chris Rawson, the longtime theater critic for the Post-Gazette, who chronicled August’s rise as he went from Broadway to having his plays being produced around the world. 

We have footage in our documentary of Fences being performed in Beijing. But August Wilson had never been performed in Italy. Renzo had an idea to change that by doing the first Italian production of Jitney.

I had seen Jitney performed at the opening of the August Wilson House, when Denzel Washington had come for the ribbon cutting. The play was inspired by August hanging out at the jitney station — an localized forerunner of the ride-share Uber — in the Hill, listening to the stories the drivers would tell each other. He would then go over to Pat’s and meet his friend Sam Howze — now known as Sala Udin. August worked in Pittsburgh as a cook, in a toy store, cutting lawns, doing whatever he could, but he would never make a nickel in Pittsburgh writing his plays. Then his friend Claude Purdy suggested he move to what August called the whitest city in America — Minneapolis — where he got paid writing plays for the Science Museum. He tried to do a musical, which bombed. And then, in Minnesota, August started to hear those Pittsburgh voices.

Though Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was his first play on Broadway, Jitney was the first play he ever staged — right here in Pittsburgh. August cast his friend Sala Udin, and asked him to dye his hair and act old as Becker. August took his beloved mother, Daisy, to see Jitney — in a jitney. It was one of his proudest moments, he would tell Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes, with a tear in his eye, as she died of cancer shortly after. Though August had struggled in the formal education system, Daisy believed in him and hoped he would be something respectable like a lawyer. She threw him out of the house when he started hanging out with the Centre Avenue Poets. But August was always listening and writing, and ultimately he would take the people he knew on the Hill and the stories Daisy had told him and use them to write two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays — The Piano Lesson and Fences — a feat matched by only nine other playwrights in history, including Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.

Fascinated by the cultural experiment Renzo was attempting in Italy, I got some funding from Pitt’s Frederick Honors College to take three of my students — Owen Gambill, Aditi Sridhar and Ben Ascuitto — to Vicenza, Italy, home to the oldest theater in the world, to document this historic first.  Also on the trip was my colleague Jumoke Davis, who directed our August Wilson documentary, and Haji Muya, who had been part of Steeltown’s youth media program and had worked in the camera department on Pittsburgh-filmed Hollywood productions, such as the Netflix show Mindhunter, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, produced by Denzel Washington. 

Italy is a very different place than Pittsburgh, of course, and one wondered if the play would translate. Pitt students and a professor, Lina Insana, worked with graduate student Angela Solda from the University of Padova, who translated Jitney to Italian for her master’s thesis. The work was complicated by some of Wilson’s vernacular, as August prided himself in using the actual language people spoke in The Hill, and some of that street slang has no Italian equivalent. 

Partnering with a local theater company, Renzo found some very talented actors to play the roles, and friends of mine who are Italian Americans were surprised to hear there was a Black population in Italy at all. It has been increasing of late, due to migration from African countries, which has sparked the same kind of political debates we are experiencing here. Haji, our cinematographer, was himself a refugee from Somalia who had Italian heritage, as up until 1943, Somalia was part of Italy’s colonial empire.   

But here were these five Black Italian actors sinking into parts of the characters August had written about jitney drivers from Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the 1970s, giving rides the way Uber does today. However, as always with August, it is about the relationships. 

The lead, Becker, who runs the jitney station, has a conflict with his son — a Pitt student whose life went sideways and who ended up in jail for murder. There is a young driver trying to save enough money to get his girlfriend a house, and she’s jealous because she thinks he’s having an affair. The play has drama and humor and the rhythm of the poet August Wilson was. And it was about to be performed in a language neither my students nor I spoke a single word of.

During rehearsals, we talked to the cast, and were stunned to hear that they had rarely been on stage with another Black person — and this was the first time anyone could recall five Black actors performing together on a mainstream Italian stage. Sadly, while Italy is a far different culture than the United States, with a much more homogeneous culture — or perhaps because of that — these individuals had experienced discrimination that would not be foreign to residents of the Hill District.

We all held our breath on opening night. It was remarkable to watch a crowd of Italians pour in who, for the most part, outside of seeing Fences or Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom on film, had no idea who August Wilson was. I nervously went with one of the students to the back to watch with the rest of the audience.

PRELUDE IN PITTSBURGH, SHOWTIME IN ITALY

August himself would die tragically young at 60, just as he finished the tenth and final play of his American Century Cycle. Ten plays. All on Broadway. All inspired by Pittsburgh’s Hill District.

When Jitney opened the night before the August Wilson House ribbon-cutting, an older Sala joked that he didn’t have to dye his hair anymore to play Becker. The playwright’s protégé, Mark Clayton Southers, staged the play in the back of the August Wilson House — it was extraordinary to see the performance in the backyard of the house at 1727 Bedford Avenue, where August grew up, listening to the familiar street names in the play and talk about how much a ride to the Giant Eagle would cost. It was also so local, and yet August’s voice has now gone from Pittsburgh around the globe.    

Vicenza is home to the longest-running theater in the world. And for his production, Renzo had made the stage black and yellow — Pittsburgh’s colors — and projected photographs of the Hill District from the 1970s. Because he had a limited cast, some actors played two parts. Renzo also added music — Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye — that he felt honored the spirit of the production. August loved music. My students and I watched and listened from the balcony of the sold-out show, and though I could not understand a single word, you could feel the rhythm of the language and the depth of the emotion. It felt like watching an Italian opera. I was crying, and I didn’t quite know why. There were multiple standing ovations, and we all realized we had witnessed an extraordinary cultural experiment.

It seemed too good a theatrical experience to end there. Renzo began conspiring about bringing the Italian production of Jitney to the States on tour. Last October, he had a preview with one of the Italian cast members, who was visiting the States, and Carter Redwood — the star of FBI: International, who grew up in the Hill District, won the August Wilson Monologue Competition, and whose grandfather Carl Redwood is referenced in August’s last play — was part of that homecoming.

On May 8th, Jitney will be performed at the Carter Redwood Theater inside the former Madison Elementary School, now Madison Arts & Entertainment Center, on the Upper Hill, where Mark Southers has built Pittsburgh Playwrights’ new home. It is particularly appropriate because August, Sala Udin, Curtiss Porter and Rob Penny performed their first plays in an elementary school on the Hill, as part of a Black Horizons production company. Mark’s company has performed all 10 plays of the Century Cycle — twice — and Mark is an award-winning playwright in his own right.

The production is playing in Cleveland on its way to Pittsburgh, and will land in other American cities. But there is nothing quite like seeing an August Wilson play in the Hill District. The only equivalent I can think of might be seeing Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon — except Romeo and Juliet was not set in England. It was actually based on a story by a poet who lived in Vicenza. Going there, we realized it was a surprisingly smaller city, not unlike Pittsburgh in certain ways. And seeing Jitney in Italy reminded me of what Fred Rogers always said — that we have so much more in common than what divides us.

In his one-man show, How I Learned What I Learned, August mentions meeting Fred Rogers, who told him, “You are always welcome in this neighborhood.” He said he thought about that when someone threw a brick through a window in his family’s new house in Hazelwood, after they left the Hill. Ellen Weiss Kander, who started Steeltown with me, used to say, “You are always a schlepper in your own town.” We include an interview in our documentary, where August smiles upon being named Pittsburgher of the Year, and says it is funny how the city didn’t seem to give him too much in the 33 years he lived here.

There is a quote I keep in my office from August:

“Like most people, I have this sort of love-hate relationship with Pittsburgh. This is my home, and at times I miss it and find it tremendously exciting, and other times I want to catch the first thing out that has wheels.”

It is great that August’s work is being recognized now so widely. But let’s hope we as Pittsburghers can honor his legacy as well. May 8th will be a great time to do that — as we wonder what else August would have written, had he not died so young.

Categories: Arts and Ideas, Feature Stories, Our Posts

Tags: August Wilson, August Wilson House, Carl Kurlander, Hill District, Italian Jitney, Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre, Premiere