TV Talk: Rick Sebak revisits August Wilson interview in new WQED-TV special

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Writer/producer/director Rick Sebak’s latest installment in WQED-TV’s “Pittsburgh History Series” revisits a 32-year-old interview with the late Pittsburgh native and playwright August Wilson.

Premiering at 8 p.m. Thursday on WQED, “Brain Space & Energy: My Interview with August Wilson” culls footage from a December 1989 interview with Wilson in New York in conjunction with Pittsburgh Magazine naming the playwright “Pittsburgher of the Year,” an honor met with some befuddlement.

“I’m not quite sure what to make of that,” Wilson says in the program. “I lived in Pittsburgh 33 years, and I never got much from the city, so I left and went to Minnesota, so I think it’s sort of poetic justice and a little bit ironic.”

The half-hour special differs from Sebak’s typical style in that this is largely Wilson telling his story at age 44, halfway through his 10-play Pittsburgh cycle (or “American Century Cycle” as Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero, prefers) while in rehearsal for the 1990 Broadway premiere of “The Piano Lesson.” (Serendipitously, earlier this year Netflix confirmed “The Piano Lesson,” already filmed as a 1995 “Hallmark Hall of Fame” production, will be the next Wilson play executive producer Denzel Washington adapts for the streaming service.)

Earlier this month, Sebak said the 1990 special included footage of “Piano Lesson” Broadway stars Charles S. Dutton, S. Epatha Merkerson and Lisa Gay Hamilton in rehearsal, but that footage was used under a time-limited, two-month-only special arrangement with SAG-AFTRA, so it couldn’t be featured in “Brain Space & Energy,” which takes its title from Wilson’s own words in the interview.

Sebak said the pandemic (“It was rough to go out and shoot stuff”) and the positive response to his “Nebby” episode that resurrected a Fred Rogers interview sparked the idea to revisit the interview with Wilson, who died in 2005 at 60.

“People seemed to like (seeing the Fred Rogers interview again) and so I thought about the interview with August Wilson, many parts of which had never been seen before,” Sebak said. “He’s very good on camera and he has a nice voice and everything that he said was provocative and fun and interesting. There was probably enough to do an hour, but I think in interview shows where it’s principally one person talking, a half-hour is usually enough.”

Wilson recounts his earliest memories growing up in the Hill District, encountering institutional racism at Central Catholic in 1959, buying an old 78 record player from a thrift store in Oakland — Sebak uses a record player as a visual motif in “Brain Space & Energy” — and writing plays set in different decades.

Sebak said five sound bites from his Wilson interview were used in the PBS-WQED co-production of “August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand,” a 2015 “American Masters” presentation, but only one of those sound bites made its way into “Brain Space & Energy.”

“It doesn’t have the same cadence as my other shows, because he’s in charge,” Sebak said of the new Wilson show.

Sebak said until he embarked on this project, he hadn’t watched his Wilson interview since editing the original special that aired in 1990.

“I think we were all a little surprised at how much he smoked,” Sebak said with a chuckle. “The timelessness is the thing I like the most. Nothing about it seemed to be that dated other than the format of the video.”