KenYatta Rogers remembers exactly where he was when the power of an August Wilson play set him on a path to a theatrical career that, so far, has seen him perform or direct eight of Wilson’s 10 acclaimed plays about African-American life in the 20th Century.

Jada Pinkett Smith, in a 1988 production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” with Bruce A. Young at Baltimore’s Center Stage

Rogers was seated with his father in the audience at Baltimore’s Center Stage, in December 1988, for a performance of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” Rogers was a teenager at the time, a student at Centennial High School in Howard County.

“I was blown away,” he says of Wilson’s haunting tale of a man who had been forced on a bogus charge to work on a Southern chain gang for seven years. Once freed, the man had come

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