True stories

The well-traveled Ricardo Pitts-Wiley

Ricardo Pitts-Wiley has come farther from Detroit, near where he grew up, than the intervening 700 miles.

For 17 years he was part of the Trinity Repertory Company, in roles ranging from the Old African in Boesman and Lena to Banquo in Macbeth. In the course of developing three small theater companies in Providence and San Diego, he has brought more than 40 productions to the stage. He has taught acting at several colleges and universities.

But most important to him have been the musical stage productions he has written, beginning in 1979 with Celebrations: An African Odyssey. Four more followed, the most recent being A Secret Meeting of Black Men, inspired by the Million Man March two years ago. Over the years he has co-written, with Robert Schleeter, more than 150 songs for those productions.

So why is has he now dust off a one-man show, first performed some 10 years ago, that hasn't a single R&B foot-tapper in it? First we have to go back to why he wrote it in the first place, drawing from poems and short stories he'd written, preserving recollections of growing up in a little Michigan country town, and recording memorable encounters with people.

"Everything in 35 Miles from Detroit actually happened to me," Pitts-Wiley says. He is sitting at the dining room table of his North Kingstown home, wearing an earnest expression and black souvenir T-shirt from one of his shows.

"Sometimes someone will tell you a story with such a passion, such an energy, that indeed it becomes a part of your life, something that you never forget," he continues. "In some ways, I think, you become responsible for saving that story. And that's part of the reason the person tells it to you."

That helps explain the initial production. But his retelling such stories a decade later had more to do with finally arriving at a personal creative milestone.

Or, as he puts it, "In putting 35 Miles from Detroit back together again, I found myself in the middle of this maelstrom of my own re-education."

A few years ago, he says, if someone had asked him what he did, writer would be the last talent on his list. He was actor, director and producer of his shows, in various combinations -- and, oh yes, he also wrote them all. Why slight the role everything else was based on?

"Because it freed me from obligations of being a writer," he observes. "I could just write, and whatever was was. I didn't feel obligated to be a craftsman.

"As a writer, the idea of subject matter and conflict and tension and drama and language and dialogue, those were elements that I didn't focus on that much. It was more important for me to produce the event," he says.

In order to grow as a creative person, that had to change.

"A couple of years ago it first started to sink in, the idea that the work I was doing was badly structured," he admits. "I took myself to school, so to speak. I went to the library and got some books on playwriting, I read other plays. I went back and read most of the reviews of all the work I'd ever done. This was the first time I read the reviews from a playwright's perspective. I found a common thread running throughout: What was the play? Was it this idea or was it this idea?"

His musical productions, while full of individual captivating moments, sprawled all over the place. As an example he described The Spirit Warrior's Dream, which started out to be about a person's relationship to music, before long was also about myth and dreamlife and the will to survive. But redoing 35 Miles from Detroit, first performed in 1986, wasn't merely a writing exercise. It was an opportunity to revisit thematic territory that was thrumming anew with personal significance for him. When he wrote it, Pitts-Wiley had recently passed his 30-year milestone -- he is now 43 -- and he was drawn to look back on events and people that had strong impact on his life: "the color-conscious issues of the time," the civil rights movement, the consequences of the Vietnam War.

"Well, 10 years later, that impact is even more powerful than it was at the time," he declares. Since writing the play he has benefited from the intervening time and experience. He has raised two sons, one to college age, he points out. His wife, Bernadette, is also an actor and poet.

Revising 35 Miles from Detroit, which is structured as a grab-bag monologue, also was a chance to use some material that hadn't fit in elsewhere. In the last decade he'd written nine or 10 works, he says. He could use, for example, two fragments written for A Secret Meeting of Black Men, one on the question of manhood and the other about Vietnam.

"I came to a realization in those 10 years that a lot of problems that plague the black community today are artificially imposed," he says. "The impact of the Vietnam war on the black community was devastating. Absolutely devastating. A disproportionate number of our people came back and began a cycle that haunts us to this day. When I grew up, the idea of a single-parent household in the black community? I never saw that.

"So how is it that in less than a full generation, we went to a majority of black households that are single-parent, female head-of-household? Where we have more black men that are in jail than are in college? Where homicide is the number one killer of young men between the ages of 15 and 25? How did that happen in that short period of time?" he says. His hands are drawn back from his head, fingers splayed, as though the idea is exploding.

"It's amazing!" Pitts-Wiley declares.

-- B.R.

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