"Fathers and Sons" brings Michael Bradford full circle

It all started for Michael Bradford one night in the late 1980s.

A member of the U.S. Navy stationed in Bremerton at the time, Bradford was out on a date with "a young lady from Bellevue."

"She wanted to go to the theater and said there's a play by this guy named August Wilson," says Bradford. "I told her I had no interest in that. I just wanted to go to a little jazz club or something."

Bradford can be glad his companion prevailed, and that the two attended a performance of Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" at Pioneer Square Theatre.

"It was my big introduction to theater, and I was mesmerized," he recalls by phone from Connecticut. "I thought, wait, these people can say these kinds of things onstage? Amazing! It was so powerful."

The experience was such an eye-opener, in fact, that Bradford followed his own muse to become a playwright and a current teacher of drama at University of Connecticut.

And he's tickled that his new family drama, "Fathers and Sons," will have its world premiere at ACT Theatre — blocks from the site where he first became stagestruck.

"I can't even fake the funk," the verbally ebullient Bradford tells you. "I am too enthused. It's a very full circle for me. I flew in at the beginning of rehearsals for a couple days, and walked downtown to Pike Market, the Left Bank Books, the crumpet place — all the little joints I hit in the late 1980s."

Though he'd written and published poetry, it was only after his 10-year Navy hitch as a submarine electrician that Bradford got down to penning plays — works that landed on such notable stages as New York's American Place Theatre and Lark Theatre.

"Fathers and Sons" is his fourth full-length script. And though it's fictional, Bradford acknowledges it has some parallels with his own life story.

"The impetus of the play is that a guy with a 4-year-old son has lost his child — literally lost him after taking him to the park," Bradford explains. "His own father decides to come and help him get through this situation, in the hope that they can reconcile their own difficult relationship."

He adds, "It came out of me as I was watching my own two kids grow up, and considering my relationship with my own father, and his with my grandfather."

Raised by his paternal grandparents in a small rural town in Kansas, Bradford barely knew his mother, "and my father came and went. I had a lot of love in my life, but it took me a long time to realize my parents just were who they were, and I couldn't fabricate a close relationship with them."

When his first marriage broke up (he's since remarried), Bradford was determined to be closer with own kids, who are now ages 16 and 13 and very much a part of his life.

But he agrees that the subject of father-son estrangement is still a festering issue for many black families — and playwrights (e.g., August Wilson's "Fences").

"It's one of those secret problems everybody knows about it, yet most people don't want to talk about it deeply. But we need to be thinking and talking about how we got in this particular position. This situation has laid on us for hundreds of years, kind of like wet muslin."

"Fathers and Sons" was developed in workshops at Lark Theatre ("it's a kind of theatrical home for me") and New York Stage and Film.

Bradford was delighted when Valerie Curtis-Newton, University of Washington drama professor and artistic director of ACT's Hansberry Project, chose to stage the first production. The four-member cast features well-known local actors Reginald André Jackson and William Hall Jr.

Along with visiting his old Seattle haunts, the show will allow Bradford to commune with the spirit of the late Wilson, who spent his final decade in Seattle.

Though he never got to know Wilson personally, "I miss him being in the world," says Bradford. "When I was too poor to go to the readings of his plays at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, I went to the rehearsals of them for free, and really soaked them up."

He adds with affection, "August was a bad, bad brutha. And he put out a lot of beautiful, beautiful work."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com