Gem carver August Wilson sets sail at the Huntington BY SALLY CRAGIN

One suspects August Wilson is never alone. Especially when he’s writing. When he’s sitting down to create a play, myriad characters present themselves, demand attention, and interact with other characters. For Wilson, the past 20 years have been devoted to dramatizing the African-American experience of the 20th century in a cycle of plays, one for each decade, set mostly in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Starting with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which hit Broadway in 1984, Wilson’s epic oeuvre has garnered several awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes and multiple Tonys and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards. His stature is such that a new August Wilson play is heralded as a significant cultural event.

This month, the Huntington Theatre presents the ninth play in the projected 10-play cycle, Gem of the Ocean, in a Broadway-bound staging directed by long-time Wilson collaborator Marion McClinton. It’s the seventh Wilson play for the Huntington, in a tradition that began with a 1986 production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Wilson has skipped around in his dramatic journey through the 20th century: his most recent work, 2000’s King Hedley II, was set in the 1980s, but Gem of the Ocean takes place exactly a century ago.

Gem received two 2003 productions, at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and LA’s Mark Taper Forum. But Wilson doesn’t regard the play as finished, and he’s still fine-tuning it. Weeks before the September 10 opening in Boston, two single-spaced pages of amended lines are posted on the Huntington rehearsal-studio wall, alongside a mesmerizing collage of copies of 1903 photographs of African-Americans (the suggestion of actor Delroy Lindo, who was last seen at the Huntington as Herald Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a role for which he earned a Tony nomination). There are barbers and farmers and an elderly lady identified as Tamar Blythwood. She wears leg-o’-mutton sleeves over a worn apron. Her face is intricately wrinkled and, though her body is bent with arthritis, she turns an unflinching gaze toward the camera. The caption identifies her as 116 years old, which still makes her much younger than Gem of the Ocean’s senior denizen, 285-year-old Aunt Ester, who finally makes a long-awaited appearance after being referenced in other Wilson works.

Former slave and present seer Aunt Ester (who’ll be played by Tony winner Phylicia Rashad) lives quietly in Pittsburgh with her protégée, Black Mary. (In King Hedley II, the Aunt Ester character actually dies after living more than 350 years.) Ester specializes in "washing souls," and a new arrival in Pittsburgh, anxious Citizen Barlow, craves this service. Born in freedom (thus his name), he is nonetheless a man in torment. His arrival throws Ester’s household into disarray. Other characters include Black Mary’s brother, Caesar, the local constable; and ex-slave Solly Two Kings, Ester’s friend and suitor. Gem of the Ocean essentially fields two groups of African-Americans — those born into slavery and those born after emancipation. What happens to the first generation of African-Americans born free, the play asks, and what does freedom mean?

Wilson talks about all this while sitting at a table outside the Pizzeria Uno on the same block as the theater. An enthusiastic smoker, he is dapperly dressed in a black beret, a brown jacket with a subtle chevron pattern, and a black jersey. In person, he’s both warm and disarming, apologizing for "stumbling" over his words when talking about Aunt Ester, but — as one would expect — proving a spellbinding conversationalist who speaks of his characters with both wonder and delight. You get the impression he’s avid to find out what they’ll do next.

He admits that removing the "h" from the standard spelling of "Esther" was one way of distinguishing her from her Old Testament counterpart. "I definitely didn’t want people to think of her as the biblical character," he says. "I didn’t want her to be this mystical character floating above the play with magic powers."

Yet Ester has her rules, and one of them is that she’s available only on Tuesdays. "If you go to see Aunt Ester, you never get to see her the first time you go. You have to come back — it’s like a test," Wilson says. "Some people never come back." Of course, when they do, as one character does in the 1960s-set Two Trains Running, persistence counts. "In other words," says Wilson, "you have to want it. She doesn’t have any magical powers; she empowers you. She’s a good psychologist to empower you to solve whatever your problems are."

In Gem, Citizen Barlow proves his willingness to heed Aunt Ester’s words by looking for a pair of coins, a step he must take to get to the next level of her treatment. "In the rewrites, Black Mary asks her, ‘What about the two pennies?’ Well, there’s nothing magical about them," Wilson explains, "but if he goes and finds two pennies, that has put him on the first step of where he needs to go. He thinks they’re important and he believes that they’re important, so when he finds the two pennies he thinks he did something and thinks, ‘I’m going to get my soul washed,’ and all that stuff. But you have to do the work yourself to empower you."

Actor John Earl Jelks reprises the role of Citizen, which he played at the Goodman and the Mark Taper. His long-standing dream is someday to appear in every Wilson play. For him, Citizen is the ultimate outsider in the Hill District. "Here’s the thing with Citizen," he explains by phone. "He’s still outside the community. The community are the people who come through Ester’s house who take the torch and help people move forward. He’s not selfish, but he’s always looked out for himself."

Protecting Aunt Ester at every turn are Solly Two Kings (Lindo) and Black Mary (Lisa Gay Hamilton, of TV’s The Practice), whose tense relationship with her older brother, Caesar, the area constable and enforcer, provides sharp social commentary. "In August’s writing, there are lessons," says Hamilton, who appeared in The Piano Lesson on Broadway. "For me, Caesar represents in our community an individual who has lost sight of himself and who he is as an African being. He has acquired power and lost his way, and Black Mary sees that and is saddened and doesn’t have the capability of bringing him in. For lack of a better analogy, he’s a Colin Powell or a Condoleezza Rice, who’ve lost sight of who they are and are willing to sacrifice their soul for what they think is right."

One pivotal plot point is that Citizen, with Ester’s help, actually visits a place first mentioned in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which is set in 1911. The "City of Bones" is a fantastic, metaphoric construction — supposedly a place deep in the Atlantic where all the bones of drowned slaves have come to rest. "Pearly white bones. All the buildings and everything is made of bones," explains Aunt Ester. "The people made a kingdom out of nothing."

When the suggestion is made to Wilson that this image is actually horrific — a graveyard city made of the bones of slaves forcibly taken from Africa who either jumped overboard or were shipwrecked — he chuckles and demurs. "It’s a beautiful city," he says, eyes flashing. "They say it’s the most beautiful city you’ve ever seen. That’s the point — you take something bad and make something good out of it. That’s what black America always does — creates something from nothing."

Wilson has been turning over this image in his mind for years and finds it a poetic addition to the other themes in Gem, which include the varieties of freedom versus bondage. "Okay," he begins, "you got this ocean and a boat, 20 or 30 go down, or a plane, a couple of hundred, but you suddenly stumble on this site and see two million bones and say, ‘What happened here?’ " Although Wilson’s voice is casual and the sun is shining brightly on the other side of Huntington Avenue, a chill descends.

Jelks, as Citizen, gets to visit the City of Bones. A few weeks before the opening, it’s clear he’s still working on the resonance of this potent image, not to mention on the acting challenge of making the place come alive on stage. "It’s the most beautiful city," he says, echoing Wilson. "There are trees and streets, and everything is made of bones — but not just bones of any old bodies. These are the bones of people who didn’t make it across."

For Wilson, the idea of an African-American community deep under the waves is perfectly plausible, and that word, "community," comes up again and again. Certainly the powerhouse Huntington cast (which includes Tony winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Olivier Award winner Anthony Chisholm, and Raynor Scheine, who reprises the role he played in Joe Turner) represents one ideal Wilson community. Everyone has appeared in at least one other Wilson play, and many of them have performed Wilson’s works at the Huntington. And they take familiar pleasure in the rhythms and cadences and themes of the playwright, who is known for his blues-driven lyricism. "What’s exciting and reassuring for me is that nobody is resting on their laurels," says Lindo. "I think we all are clear about what we would like this play to be, and it’s good, frankly, that the creative process is to continue to discover what it should be."

Part of Wilson’s creative process is the rewriting. Despite previous productions, he very much views this version as an opportunity for refining. "He needs more than one production to finish a play because he works off the experience of the actors and the audience," says Huntington managing director Michael Maso. "He’s found this process works for him, and he’s more and more committed to the notion of the process that allows him to feed off the energies of the actors, director, and rehearsal hall."

The Huntington Theatre Company presents Gem of the Ocean at the Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue in Boston, September 10 through October 17. Tickets are $14 to $69; call (617) 266-0800 or visit www.huntingtontheatre.org/.