Chautauqua Theater Company Guest Actor Lance E. Nichols, playing the part of August Wilson, performs during a rehearsal of How I Learned What I Learned Aug. 7 in Bratton Theater.
SOPHIA ROOKSBERRY
Staff Writer
At 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in Bratton Theater, Chautauquans will have another chance to step into the life of August Wilson as Lance E. Nichols portrays the playwright in Wilson’s autobiographical one-man play, How I Learned What I Learned.
Long before embodying Wilson on the Bratton Stage, Nichols was a young pre-med student at the University of New Orleans, in the city where he was born and raised, still waiting to uncover his lifelong passion for theater.
“At the end of my freshman year, I looked at my ledger card and I went, ‘I don’t think this doctor thing is going to work out,’” Nichols said. “… I switched from pre-med to drama, and in one semester, my GPA went from a 2.3 to a 3.9, and then I realized I’d found what I wanted to do, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t have to be a doctor. I can just play a bunch of doctors.’”
Despite his desire to pursue theater in New York, Nichols moved to Los Angeles after graduation and lived with his sister while acting in graduate student films. After booking an agent, Nichols played everything from a reporter to a bailiff on shows including “L.A. Law,” “Cheers,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
Nichols holds a stool in self defense in a scene in which Wilson nearly gets into a bar fight.
“They used to tape half-hour sitcoms in front of a live audience, so it was like doing theater,” Nichols said. “They bring the audience into this studio and they would sit in bleacher-type seating … There was no laugh track, so the laughter that they would get would be the natural laughter that you hear.”
As Nichols’ career took off toward the turn of the century, August Wilson’s plays were also growing in popularity across the country. Nichols auditioned for a number of Wilson’s plays at the Mark Taper Forum in LA, but didn’t perform in a Wilson work until 2010 when Swine Palace Theatre in Nichols’ home state put on King Hedley II.
Nichols first performed in How I Learned What I Learned during the joint production between Portland Stage Company and Le Petit Theatre in 2023, under the direction of CTC Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll.
“In Portland, Jade asked me, ‘How do you want to approach this?’” Nichols said. “I said, ‘I want to approach it like it’s a blank canvas. You got a paintbrush and I got a paintbrush, and we’re both painting together. Now, I have an idea and I want to see what you think about this.’ In this play, August speaks of at least 10 different people who were very influential on him … but there’s four that he talks about all the time … I said, ‘I want to play with giving those four people their own physicality and vocal quality.’”
Bringing multiple characters to life is one of many challenges associated with a one-man show. However, Nichols said he always seeks challenging roles and, in this play particularly, enjoys balancing difficulties across language and the added stressors of performing alone.
“When you’re onstage with other actors, you have the anchor if something goes wrong,” Nichols said. “If you’re on stage by yourself, you better start tap dancing, telling jokes, saying something … [Also, August’s] writing is so poetic and lyrical, and he switches syntaxes back and forth. Sometimes he’s talking almost in Shakespeare, and other times he’s talking street, and so that was challenging to be able to code switch like that.”
After finishing his performances in Maine and Louisiana, Nichols said he still felt like his journey with the show was incomplete. In 2025, he revived the role for a one-night performance at the Rubicon Theatre Company in California, but under different direction and without the “special” and “magnetic” qualities of the iteration directed by Carroll.
“About six months ago, I got a text from Jade saying, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about doing our show next summer at Chautauqua — let’s talk,’” Nichols said. “The next day we Zoomed and she told me the idea that she had, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m on board,’ and then she told me … we had the original [set designer] and lighting person and sound person, so when I realized I had my original team, I was like, ‘Hell yeah.’”
Before coming to Chautauqua and reprising the role, Nichols took a day trip to Pittsburgh, the setting of How I Learned What I Learned and most Wilson plays, while filming a television series in Ohio.
“I visited the August Wilson [African American] Cultural Center in downtown Pittsburgh, but more importantly, they have turned August Wilson’s house … into a museum and some of the rooms have been preserved in their original form,” Nichols said. “… I had a chance to walk into the same space that August walked into … Walking into that man’s house, for lack of a better word, was a spiritual experience for me and I think it has helped me enrich this production.”
The additional layers added to Nichols’ performance have paid off so far, and will continue to enhance the play in the remaining performances at Chautauqua.
“After the matinee we had on this past Sunday, I had gone out the stage door in the back and there were two people that came up to me, and we started talking and they were telling me how much they really enjoyed the show, and while I was talking to them, various people were walking past and … quite a few of them had tears in their eyes, and they were saying, ‘Thank you so much for bringing this show to Chautauqua,’” Nichols said. “‘Thank you for letting us look into August Wilson’s world.’”
