Jerry Morosco is a man with a mission.

	Pedro E. Guerrero/ Taliesin Preservation Inc. Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home was made of native stone and wood. Click photo for larger image.

A Taliesin apprentice from 1981 to 1986, Morosco now is president of its alumni group, Taliesin Fellows, and a champion of its much-needed restoration.

The deterioration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home, studio and outbuildings, set on 600 acres, has been the subject of much scrutiny for more than a decade. Wright's house of native stone and wood, where many of his ideas first took form, was not built for the ages; rather it was built on a modest budget to impress clients. In places, some say, it has all the permanence and stability of a theater set, which, in a way, it was.

In the early 1990s, then-Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson established Taliesin Preservation Inc. to direct the restoration effort and raise funds for it. One of its first projects was the creation of a Historic Structures Report, which holds more than 10,000 photographs and 180 detailed room descriptions documenting indoor and outdoor spaces. The report will be the basis of a master plan for the stabilization and preservation of the buildings and Wright-designed landscape. An estimated $50 million to $75 million is needed for Wright's house alone.

To that end, Morosco has invited 837 Taliesin Fellows to a private preview performance of "Work Song," Jeffrey Hatcher and Eric Simonson's play about Wright's life, which opens for previews Nov. 18 at City Theatre. The proceeds will benefit Taliesin's restoration.

"As a group we have all contributed to this work," said Morosco, who as an apprentice helped build the structure that contains Wright's archives. "It's been my observation, over the last 25 years of being associated with this, no matter how much time somebody spent at Taliesin, it remains the defining experience of their life."

Pedro E. Guerrero/ Taliesin Preservation Inc. Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home, Taliesin, needs renovating. Click photo for larger image.

Supporting Taliesin's restoration, he believes, is an appropriate way for alumni to reciprocate for the work and life skills they learned as apprentices.

Morosco sent out 5,800 invitations internationally, tapping the mailing lists of Wright-related nonprofits and other preservation and cultural groups and "anyone and everyone who I could get an address for that I thought might be interested." He has bought out the house -- all 270 seats -- for the Nov. 19 preview, and is so certain that the Friday night performance will sell out that he's also reserved seats for the Saturday and Sunday shows. But he's also extending a general invitation for Pittsburghers to attend Friday's performance, as well as the before- and after-show receptions.

Morosco sees "Work Song" as an opportunity to increase awareness of and support for Taliesin among Western Pennsylvanians, who tend to identify Wright mostly with Fallingwater.

"Taliesin figures prominently in the narrative of the play," which ends in 1936 with the design of Fallingwater, Morosco said. And with Fallingwater's restoration now complete, he hopes Western Pennsylvanians will extend their generosity to Taliesin.

A collaboration between director Simonson and playwright Hatcher, "Work Song" was a Milwaukee Repertory Theater production that debuted in 2000. Its three acts depict three stages in Wright's life and some of his primary relationships with clients, famous friends and lovers, including Mamah Cheney, who, along with her two children, was murdered at Taliesin in 1914 by a deranged servant who also set fire to the house. Devastated, Wright rebuilt the house in her memory, and rebuilt it again after a second fire in 1925.

Proceeds from the Pittsburgh events will help match a $1.14 million grant awarded in 1999 by Save America's Treasures, a program of the National Park Service and National Trust for Historic Preservation. The money is released only as funds are matched.

Supersaturated land led to a mudslide in July 1998 that washed away a portion of the hillside on which Taliesin sits, and another one, two years later, came within yards of the foundation. Some of the grant money was used to fix drainage problems in the hillside that had allowed water to penetrate the house. That work was completed in May; funds also will be used to restore damaged interior features and finishes.

A two-year restoration of Wright's studio and office was completed in 2001; that became a priority when the ancient oak that shaded the house's garden came crashing through the roof during a 1998 storm. The interior was restored to its 1950s appearance with the removal of a partition and the addition of built-ins, including a bench and long shelf unit.

Taliesin also suffers from the ruinous combination of Wright's romanticism and the harsh Wisconsin winters. Because Wright wanted, as he wrote, "a home where icicles by invitation might beautify the eaves," the roof had no gutters and the freeze-thaw cycle has eroded it.

Taliesin Preservation hopes to complete all of the work by 2011.

The pre-show reception on Nov. 19 is at the South Side studio of another former Taliesin apprentice, painter and sculptor Val M. Cox; the post-show reception with the play's cast and crew will be held at Morosco's South Side home. The Morosco house was featured in a Post-Gazette story in September 2000 and later on the HGTV series "Homes Across America." On Nov. 20, Morosco also will host private tours of Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob.

He hopes the Taliesin Fellows also will encourage their clients to contribute to the restoration effort.

"A lot of the people who will be sitting in the audience are my clients, who are twice removed from Frank Lloyd Wright's work but have an appreciation of his legacy through me," Morosco said.

After decades of demolitions and neglect, the revival of interest in Wright's life and work seems ever-expanding. Earlier this year, MusicalFare Theatre Company in Buffalo, N.Y., produced "Renewing Wright," a musical about the architect's friendship with one of his most important clients, Larkin Soap Co. executive Darwin Martin, who repeatedly rescued the architect from financial ruin through personal loans that almost always became grants. Buffalo also is building two Wright-designed projects -- a gas station and boathouse -- and last month opened another posthumous construction, Blue Sky Mausoleum, at Forest Lawn cemetery.

On stage, Wright's life has been interpreted before, in Canadian playwright and director Robert Lepage's 1998 "Geometry of Miracles" and in an opera, "Shining Brow," by Daron Aric Hagen and Paul Muldoon, which opened in Madison, Wis., in 1993.

But while Wright's long, tumultuous life continues to inspire, one of his most significant legacies, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, is struggling. Morosco thinks Taliesin's deterioration has increased dramatically in recent years as the number of apprentice students has declined. While Taliesin has a capacity for 24 apprentices, this year there are 10.

When he was at Taliesin, Morosco said, the apprentices "had an esprit de corps that made maintenance of the house and gardens almost a competition." Some of that work is now handled by paid staff. The entire Taliesin community of students and faculty, which numbered about 75 in the 1980s, now is fewer than 30.

Tickets for the pre-show reception at Cox's studio and the 8 p.m. performance are $100 per person; tickets for the post-show reception at Morosco's house are $50. The tours of Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob, which include bus transportation from Downtown's Renaissance Hotel and a gourmet box lunch, are $150. Tickets must be purchased by Friday and are available by phone at 1-608-588-7090, ext. 224, or via e-mail: worksong@mhtc.net.