Elizabeth Van Dyke loves what's she's doing.

She's a guest worker in Pittsburgh, where August Wilson's plays began. She's an experienced director, directing a Wilson play for the first time -- and not just any play but the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Piano Lesson," in which she once acted at the country's leading black theater. And she's doing this at Carnegie Mellon, which lavishes more resources and support on her students than she can quite believe.

Nor can she quite believe her all-black student cast, a mixture of seniors and juniors with one sophomore. "It's so exciting to be at CMU's school of drama, with something going on in every corner 24 hours a day and the students so devoted, committed and also open and trusting. It's a great gift."

She may also be making a kind of history. Van Dyke believes this is the first-ever black play on the CMU main stage. When it opens its 10-day run tonight, it will certainly be the first August Wilson play seen there. That would be a particular anomaly in his home city, except that CMU Drama considers itself a national institution before it is a Pittsburgh one. So the anomaly is larger, because Wilson is already a national classic.

Considered in either way, it's high time CMU tackled the plays of Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, and in Van Dyke it has found a guest director with the experience and zeal to lead the way.

She is, in effect, leading her cast -- who mainly come from middle-class lives, mixed-race families and/or predominantly white schools -- in the discovery of their black historical heritage.

You do that when directing most plays, of course. A big part of an actor's training is discovering the emotions relevant to life experiences he or she hasn't had. Then that has to be made specific to the play. Directing Chekhov, say, the great nursery and training ground for actors, you steep them in the specific attitudes and atmosphere of turn-of-the-20th-century, pre-revolution Russia.

So with Wilson, much of Van Dyke's job is to help her actors discover the world about which he wrote, citing the experience of the black church, the moaning bench and blues and work songs, right back to slavery and the auction block. She has had them sing, "close your eyes and get in touch with your heritage. It's a marvelous discovery that it's in your blood."

It's a discovery that came to Van Dyke, too. She was born in Oakland, Calif., and raised in Los Angeles, going to mainly white schools, and she was grounded in European drama. "You'll have time to learn how to be black," her mother said. "I want you to learn about the world."

She knew young that she wanted to be in theater, inspired by the plays, ballet and opera her parents took her to. "I was blessed with parents who loved me enough to let me follow my destiny."

That led to college in New York, where she still lives, having accumulated a significant body of work as an actress and director. Her directorial credits include "Great Men of Gospel" at New York's New Federal Theatre and, at regional theaters around the country, "Paul Robeson," "Raisin in the Sun" starring Esther Rolle, "Zora" starring Phylicia Rashad and the world premiere of Imiri Baraka's "Remembering We Selves."

Her previous trip to Pittsburgh was to direct "Sophisticated Ladies" in 2004 for Kuntu Rep. And she is producing artistic director of Going to the River, a program for African-American women playwrights at New York's Ensemble Studio Theatre.

As an actress, she's played a full range of black plays and white classics, from Wilson to Shakespeare. And her TV credits include "Law & Order," "New York Undercover" and such.

Perhaps her best-known work is "Love to All, Lorraine," her own one-woman stage show about playwright Lorraine Hansberry ("Raisin in the Sun"), who memorably said, "universality comes from being very specific."

Van Dyke first learned the specifics of Wilson from him and his great mentor and collaborator, director Lloyd Richards, playing the earnest Mattie Campbell in two of the pre-Broadway stagings of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." She later played Berniece in "The Piano Lesson" at New Jersey's Crossroads Theatre.

"Piano Lesson" is Wilson's 1936 play, in which a brother and sister fight over the fate of a piano carved with the slave history of their family. It blends robust humor with some of Wilson's best storytelling, rising to an audacious ending that mixes incipient tragedy with farce -- not to mention a ghost.

"If Boy Willie is the engine of the play, Berniece is the emotional force," Van Dyke says. She should know.

She's been at CMU since mid-January, but she visited earlier for casting and to meet the student designers. She recalls a room full of primarily white design students, talking to them about Skip James and the blues and Romare Bearden. She told them "creativity is not in the head" and watched them "ignited with the experience of Bearden."

In addition to taking to directing her first Wilson play like a famished wanderer let loose at an endless buffet, Van Dyke is also using Wilson's work to teach a CMU "directing actors" lab for 18 actors and six directors -- which means white actors and directors are getting a shot at these new classics of the American theater. The inevitable result has been to get students talking about race in a way Americans usually don't.

"It's been provocative, challenging, insightful and volatile," she says, savoring the tumult.

"I learned my craft on Western European literature -- Ibsen, Chekhov, Williams, O'Neill, Shakespeare -- and never once did I think I was playing a white woman. Plays so classical in scope have all the elements of humanity, and so does August Wilson."

She shines with pleasure: "Isn't art wonderful, powerful and delicious!"