Legendary playwright August Wilson – considered one of the most important Black voices in theater – wrote the story of his life in the theatrical autobiography How I Learned What I Learned. And Chicago actor Harry Lennix (The Blacklist, Matrix Reloaded) is stepping into the role of August Wilson himself in the one-man show, brought by Broadway in Chicago and the Congo Square Theatre Company.

Reset sits down with the actor for more on what audiences can expect.

Tell us about August Wilson’s play How I Learned What I Learned?

It’s a theatrical kind of recital almost in a way. It’s in some sense, it feels almost like […] a stand-up monologue. But of course, it’s structured along a group of characters who kind of create a spine for the beginning and the middle and the end. It’s really a coming-of-age story set in his own words. And you see him mostly as a 20-year-old in Pittsburgh. But it really is how you get to meet these people who inform the figures that he created in his plays.

You’re playing a real person who you knew and spent time with. What was that like?

I’m not going to be fooling anybody into thinking that August has come back or that I’m channeling him. I don’t think people really knew him. It’s not like playing, say, Sidney Poitier or some public figure in that sense. He was a man of letters. So a lot of people didn’t really see him. But I’m mostly using my own personality and my own commonalities with his story as the template from which I go.

Prepping for this one-man show sounds like it was pretty involved. You even likened it a moment ago to doing stand-up. Is that different for you than when you’re prepping for, say, the other play that you’re in right now, [Purpose at Steppenwolf Theater]?

Yes and no. You still have to learn the lines. You have to learn the blocking. You have to learn the kind of structure of it so that you know where you’re going, how you’re going to get there when you can. You can try to read the audience and try to read your own performance and figure out when you can take your foot off the accelerator and when you can coast [versus] when you can accelerate.

So it’s really a kind of gauging, of reading the room. A live performance is always sort of about when you pick up the pace, when to let it go, when to get soft, when to get loud.

Who would you say August Wilson was to you?

To me, August Wilson was a poet. Really a dramatic poet, like Homer, like somebody who told epic tales, created mythological-sized characters and figures, almost operatic in their size and scale, their import as it were. I think he is not just the most important Black playwright of the 20th century, but the most important American playwright of the 20th century…

I also knew him as a guy. I knew him as kind of irascible, difficult to please in some ways. But in other ways, a very soft touch. He would ask questions and we would talk and I would sit outside on a break and he would smoke a cigarette and he would just tell these stories.

How does it feel now that this play is out and on the stage?

It felt great. You know, honestly, I am not that familiar with the history of this play. I didn’t know that it was really in existence [until] a couple of years ago, but August did it for himself in 2003. It’s very rarely been done since then. I sometimes wonder if he intended it to be performed by anybody but himself.

As a Chicago native, give us some words of wisdom for up-and-coming Chicago creatives and actors.

My advice is to get involved with the continuity, with the continuum that there’s a past that we can draw from. There’s a present that is now more promising than ever before, and that there’s a future. And so always be about the business of leaving something for the next generation of people to come behind. That is a story. This is a story that they must be told.

For more information on How I Learned What I Learned, visit Broadwayinchicago.com.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

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