Why Has He Played the Same Role for 20 Years?

Building Character

Performers

Anthony Chisholm never tires of August Wilson’s Jitney

Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series on actors and how they create their roles

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After 50 years in the theatre, Anthony Chisholm has naturally played a wide variety of roles, but there’s one that he just keeps returning to: Fielding, a mischievous, alcoholic car service driver with an eye-opening past in August Wilson’s Jitney. The story of hard-working men trying to survive in 1970s Pittsburgh, the play is currently enjoying its at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre and, once again, Chisholm is in the cast.

His two-decade dance with Fielding eerily mirrors the late playwright’s own journey with the drama. Begun in 1979, it was the first play written in Wilson’s ten-part Century Cycle, which explores the African-American experience in the 20th century by setting one show in each decade. However, after it was submitted and rejected twice for development at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Wilson put it aside to work on his breakthrough, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. And though that first iteration of Jitney was eventually staged at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Repertory Theatre in 1982, Wilson extensively reworked it for its second premiere at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1996, which is when Chisholm came on board.

“When we started this play, it was only an hour and a half long,” says Chisholm in his unmistakable craggy timbre. “It was very skeletal, and one of the actors — he’s gone now, he passed — Willis Burks, said, ‘August, nobody’s going to know that you wrote this play!’ August said, ‘Why not?’ Willis said, ‘There’s no monologues in it at all!’ So August proceeded to write monologues. He wrote me two, and the second one, when you discover that I am a tailor, is all based on stories I told him about my father. My father graduated from Tuskegee University in the middle of the Depression in this country, and there were no jobs for anybody in that period. But he got a job as a redcap [porter] on the railroad. He started meeting these musicians, many of them famous. So his tailoring skills emerged and, like Fielding, he did make suits for celebrities, like Count Basie, and eventually opened a tailor shop in Cleveland where I was born.”

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Like much of Wilson’s work, Jitney is driven by characters and poetry more than plot. In the rundown Hill District of 1977 Pittsburgh, a group of unlicensed African-American livery drivers talk about their lives, loves, aspirations, failures, sins, and secrets. Fielding is one of those guys, and while he starts off as a pathetic drunk, constantly bumming a few bucks for a bottle of hooch, he ends as a tragic figure, a talented man hobbled by racism, classism, and addiction.

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While Chisholm wears Fielding like a second skin, he has an intriguing trick for making sure his performance never becomes rote. “I try to imagine that I’m skydiving out of a plane at night with a blindfold on — you don’t know what’s going to happen!” he says. “That’s a technique I use mentally to keep it fresh.” And though there are ghosts informing his interpretation — his father, his good friend Wilson (he was one of the playwright’s pallbearers), even his younger self (as a struggling actor in the ’70s, he made ends meet as a cab driver) — he says that when he gets onstage, none of that is in his conscious mind. “I don’t think; I just do,” he explains. “If you think, if you become aware of the audience, you’ve left the play, so I try not to. I go into the trance. I know the story; I’ve done my homework; I just do it. I’m sure there’s an intangible where maybe the spirit of my pops comes through because I’m bringing him along with me, but I’m not thinking of him. I don’t have to do anything about the thinking of what Fielding’s talking about as much as the feeling he has when he says it.”

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Top image: Anthony Chisholm in Jitney; top and bottom photos by Joan Marcus.

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