At the beginning of Portland Playhouse’s How I Learned What I Learned, Victor Mack, in the role of playwright August Wilson, takes off a long-sleeved shirt to reveal a black t-shirt underneath, emblazoned with the text: “I AM SUPPOSED TO BE WHITE.”
It’s a sequence that pays homage to Mr. Rogers’ coming-home routine, and a jarring convergence of humor, political commentary, and subtle camp, a dislocating call to attention that signals what’s to come over the next 90 minutes.
How I Learned What I Learned is an odd play: A biographical one-man show written by the man himself late in his career, it’s more stream-of-consciousness than plot-focused, a meandering conversation with one of the giants of American theater. Like Wilson’s other plays, it’s a provocative examination of identity and a condemnation of racism. But it has a rougher, more associative feel than the wholly realized fictional worlds in productions like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Cycling through disparate episodes in Wilson’s life, How I Learned What I Learned oscillates with deceptive ease between a self-effacing portrait of the artist as a young, bumbling poet, and a damning account of his experiences with racism (try not to be implicated by Wilson’s discussion of so-called “colorblindness”).