Anthony Chisholm, aka Tony, aka Chiz, has the air and the volubility of an August Wilson character, one of those erudite street corner or diner philosophers.

Talking with him is an engaging and wide-ranging journey, from his youth in Cleveland and service in Vietnam to his travels through the Far East and work in the restaurant business. All were prologue to his busy career as an actor on Broadway and in movies and TV, where his credits include "Putney Swope," "Beloved," "Vietnam War Stories" and HBO's "Oz" (11 episodes as Burr Redding).

Chisholm first met Wilson at a 1990 audition. He went on to play key roles in the New York productions of four of Wilson's 10 Pittsburgh Cycle plays and to become a good friend and a pallbearer at Wilson's 2005 funeral.

Now this distinctive veteran Broadway actor is in Pittsburgh. Starting with tonight's preview, he appears as Memphis, the owner of the Hill District diner in "Two Trains Running," Wilson's '60s play, at the small but ambitious Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre.

Surrounding Chisholm is a cast about as good as any theater in Pittsburgh could assemble. Playing Holloway, the diner's resident philosopher, as he did in 1994 at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, is Sala Udin. A friend of Wilson's youth, he acted in his earliest plays and went on to be a streetwise activist, a city councilman and now an advocate of minority job training. Playing Sterling, the jittery young protagonist fresh out of jail who upsets the diner's settled routine in search of his future, is Jonathan Berry.

Leading a colorful supporting cast of diner regulars is another veteran of Wilson on Broadway, Eugene Lee, who runs his own theater in Texas. Lee plays West, the prosperous undertaker (not to be confused with the real Mr. West, founder of the real funeral home still going strong on the Hill, led by his granddaughter).

Wali Jamal, a veteran of four previous Wilson plays, will be Wolf, the numbers runner, the role Chisholm originally played on Broadway. Alonzo Green plays the mentally challenged Hambone, who's wiser than he seems, and Sharnece Thomas plays the man-shy waitress, Risa.

For director Mark Clayton Southers, founder and artistic director of Pittsburgh Playwrights, the key to this remarkable cast was signing Chisholm. Udin brings the authenticity of his youth on the Hill and his association with Wilson's early years, when he appeared in the first of Wilson's cycle plays, "Jitney" (1982). But Chisholm is at the heart of the national August Wilson actor pool, and he worked with all three of Wilson's Broadway directors, Lloyd Richards, Marion McClinton and Kenny Leon.

Chisholm's first connection was with Richards, head of the Yale Drama School, Yale Repertory Theatre and O'Neill Theatre Center, with whom he studied in an intensive 1968-69 class at the Negro Ensemble Company that included Mary Alice. That followed his service in Vietnam and was followed by a great deal of theater and living before he auditioned in 1990 for "Two Trains."

"I didn't even get an audition for the first four plays," Chisholm growls frankly.

After reading for Wolf with casting director Meg Simon, he was called back to read for Richards and Wilson ("the first time I'd laid eyes on him"). But Samuel L. Jackson got the role for the first production at Yale Rep. Chisholm was filming "Jungle Fever" when his agent called to say they wanted him to read again for the play's second version, to be in Boston.

"We were filming in Sylvia's Restaurant in Harlem. They faxed me the scene." He memorized it, reported to the stage of Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre, where "Piano Lesson" was playing -- and drew a blank.

"Just read it," Richards said.

"So I read it," Chisholm said. "Cut out all the 'uhs,' " Richards told him "in a kind of scolding manner. I gritted my teeth and did. 'Thank you,' Lloyd said. I walked up to Central Park imagining myself as Wolf. The next day I was called back. Again I took the train in from New Jersey, dressed the same, same ritual, black coffee and orange juice."

Two days later they offered him the role, and that opened up the world of August Wilson.

"But I really got to know August through cigarettes," he says. In rehearsal at Yale, there'd be a five-minute break every hour and both would make a beeline outside. Chisholm remembers they talked mainly about the fights, both being "fight fans and somewhat historians." Wilson even took the cast and crew to a sports bar to watch the Douglas-Holyfield fight.

Chisholm also got to know Wilson when Wilson gave him a ride back to New York in his town car. Just two years apart in age (Chisholm won't say who was the older), they found a lot in common. "We got to know each other on another level, and he told me things I'll always keep to myself."

Here, Chisholm takes a detour to talk about his grandfather, who was "a bit of a bully, a grand orator, who smoked those stink-ass cigars." And another to talk about his stepfather, "a

professional gambler, a partner of the numbers king of Cleveland, who had luxury cars and nice homes in the suburbs but also bars, after-hours joints and underground casinos beating working people out of their money."

The gamblers would "bet five, 10, 15 grand on races and let me hold the tickets. Soon I had a handful of dead cardboard, just like they'd been bleeding the other suckers. I don't gamble now; it saps the reservoir of good health. Even if they won big money, they were poor-spirited men with holes in their souls."

He's an August Wilson philosopher, all right.

To date, Chisholm has done six of the 10 Pittsburgh Cycle plays, "in 46 cities in all."

He got his real introduction to Pittsburgh when he was here for 12 weeks in 1996 to work on "Jitney." "August toured me through the entire Hill, up and down the alleys in the hot sun. He went and had old man Hamm cut his hair, and he turned into a child right before my eyes, melted into a 7-year-old.

"He took me to Eddie's Restaurant. Eddie was fair-skinned, curly-haired, about 5 feet 7 inches. He once hired August as a short-order cook, but he was always muttering to himself, so he fired him. August said, 'That's his claim to fame.' "

They went to the Crawford Grill and met Rob Penny and Chawley Williams. "I got a little feel for the city." He saw Wilson peel off some bills to give to a man down on his luck, then when the man returned, peel off some more.

They went to a jitney station and took a cab back to the hotel and August said, "I got my batteries charged up now," and wrote the famous speech he gave at Princeton called "The Ground on Which I Stand." "He mailed me the original typed up copy, with words scratched out -- I have it."

In rehearsal, "August engaged with us and listened to our suggestions; sometimes they'd appear in the play." That was certainly the case with "Jitney," in which Chisholm played Fielding, the alcoholic former tailor.

Written much earlier, it was just 90 minutes long, but here in 1996, Wilson nearly doubled its length, then cut it back. To start, Fielding was only an alcoholic with a monologue about his wife climbing the golden ladder to heaven. Wilson had imagined the jitney station as a former butcher shop and Fielding as an ex-butcher.

But Chisholm "got to talking about my father who graduated from Tuskegee Institute in the '30s when there were no jobs, so he became a red cap for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Gifted with tailoring skills, he made suits and jackets for riders and especially entertainers." He was also an alcoholic, divorced by his mother when Chisholm was 12. Much of this eventually showed up in the re-written Fielding.

The mayor threw August and the cast a party at the Crawford Grill ("the parking lot was full of stretch limos"), and he met Vernell Lillie, "like a queen on her throne." He remembers a jazz club in the Strip and a dance club on the Allegheny River.

After Pittsburgh, "Jitney" played 12 more cities before arriving off-Broadway. Chisholm was in them all. The cast won Obie and Drama Desk awards for ensemble acting, and after most of a year in New York, they went to London's National Theatre, opening Oct. 6, 2001, "right after 9/11." It was the first American cast to do Wilson in London and won the Olivier Award.

Chisholm started with "Gem of the Ocean" at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 2003, then in Los Angeles, where Phylicia Rashad came on board. "City to city, you didn't know if you'd be chosen to go to the next." Along the way, they wanted him to switch from Solly to the smaller role of Eli, talking about bringing in Delroy Lindo or Morgan Freeman. "I was devastated. But I came to realize any character in August is a gem, so I decided I would get into the soul of Eli."

Then they asked him to take back Solly, "which I hadn't played in a year, after I'd fallen deep down in love with Eli. August gave me a walking stick and started crying on my shoulder, apologizing for taking my role away."

For the premiere of "Radio Golf" in March 2005, Wilson was at Yale Rep from the start. "I didn't suspect he was ill; we celebrated his 60th birthday," Chisholm says. But when the cast re-assembled in Los Angeles in June, Wilson wasn't there.

Finally, they were told Wilson was sick. But he'd still persevered and re-written the whole play.

He passed away Oct. 2. Of the Pittsburgh funeral, Chisholm remembers Wynton Marsalis' haunting horn and the procession to the cemetery that "snaked up and down the streets of the Hill District through a misty rain."

He recalls "something spiritual, a miasma in the atmosphere, I'd call a phenomenon of energy, intelligence or consciousness in another form. It taught me something about the wisdom of life and death and the transition.

"I had 15 years of knowing him. He was a quiet man who carried a lot of power. I consider him a prophet, philosopher and poet. I never imagined myself as a disciple of anyone. I don't think in those terms. But I declare myself a disciple of his."