But Cain really had his sights set on Carnegie Mellon. He'd been bitten by the acting bug in high school, quite by accident. Though he always wanted to perform, Cain's initial creative outlet was musical: playing the piano and bass guitar and singing in the high school choir.

A choir at another high school was going to Germany and Cain wanted go along. "My choir wasn't going anywhere but the auditorium," he laughs. With the Michigan magnet school system, Cain could only switch to the other school's choir if he took a course there that required him to take choir class there as well. The two classes right before choir? French and acting. Acting won out.

His parents weren't so keen, though, on acting as a career -- which meant that when Cain wanted to switch from Pitt to CMU for its concentrated acting curriculum, his parents needed a little convincing. Cain turned to Dr. Vernell Lillie, Pitt professor and founder and artistic director of Kuntu Repertory Theatre. She elicited a promise from Cain: She'd talk to his parents if he'd come back to Pittsburgh when he could to perform with Kuntu.

Since graduating from CMU in 1994, Cain tries to come to Pittsburgh once a year. He's performed with Kuntu ("A Love Song for Mumia," 2002) and most recently performed in "August in April: Vignettes by August Wilson" at the Byham.

Mark Clayton Southers, artistic director of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre, began "August in April" in 2004. Southers met Cain through Lillie. "Lillie is the main hub," says Cain, thinking about her influence.

Cain's been very busy in his "other homes" as well. In Los Angeles, he can do television as well as stage work and has appeared on "Law & Order" and "Homicide: Life on the Street." He just finished performing in Tim Robbins' "Embedded," which had runs in both New York and London, cities which now beckon him with close friends and which he now describes with the warm familiarity of, you guessed it, home.

Of course, nothing makes home like family, and Cain's family has been able to see him perform often. In New York, his mother visited and cooked for the cast. His family will come from Michigan to see "Joe Turner" and they'll even be together to celebrate his sister's birthday, which falls on opening night.

Perhaps all the talk of home and family really grows out of Cain's experience with Wilson's play. His character, Herald Loomis, has Cain thinking about his roots. "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" is the third of Wilson's plays chronicling the African-American experience in each decade of the 20th century. It takes place in a Pittsburgh boarding house where Loomis arrives in search of his wife and ends up seeking his own identity, personal and cultural.

"Through this play, I had to reconnect with slavery in a way I never dealt with before," says Cain. "My life today is because of what they went through. I even see a cigarette differently now. I realize that the trade for that tobacco was slavery."

"Joe Turner" is the third of Wilson's plays to be produced by Pittsburgh Playwrights. Southers intends to do one a year, in the order the plays were first produced on Broadway. Next year, he hopes to do the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Piano Lesson." "We consider him the most-respected playwright from Pittsburgh," says Southers. "He's our rock."

And, truly, who has shown us our home more vividly on stage than August Wilson, with his way of exploring the corners of a life as it unfolds?

Cain muses about his own life and concludes that sometimes he just tries too hard, as with his attempts to write poetry. "I was thinking I had to do something when all I really had to do was live something." And anyplace you live is home.

Stage Preview: "Joe Turner" actor keeps
promise to Pittsburgh

Thursday, August 18, 2005

By Anna Rosenstein

For many of us, home is not a complicated concept. It's the sofa with the deep cushions, the partner, child, pet or friendly neighbor waiting to greet us, the simmering pot of soup. It's everything familiar. It's comfort.

Ask an actor about home and the answer's bound to be a lot longer than a street address.

Ben Cain, for instance, in town for Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre's production of August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," thinks of Pittsburgh as one of his homes. Sure, all his mail might reach him in L.A., but he's earned the right to wear the Steelers cap he sports.

Cain was raised in Pittsburgh. Well, actually, he was raised in Flint, Michigan, but his roots are here. Every summer, he returned to his parents' hometown to visit his grandparents. When it came time to choose a college, Pittsburgh was the obvious choice. His uncle, the first in the family to attend college, had gone to Pitt, so Cain began there as well.