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Sidney Poitier, who (depending on your source) turned either 84 or 87 on Feb. 20, spent about eight months on Broadway, all told, in his career — seven of those at the Ethel Barrymore in A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 landmark play about a struggling, aspiring family on Chicago's Southside. But the desire to return to the scene of that triumph has never really deserted him. The opportunity to do just that was the driving force that got Thurgood to the page and then to the stage and now to the HBO screen, where it debuts Feb. 24 with Laurence Fishburne in the role of Thurgood Marshall, the legendary Civil Rights leader who, through legislation, rewrote human history in America.

Now that it can be told, playwright George Stevens Jr. is telling it: He wrote this one-man show with Poitier specifically in mind and often at his encouragement.

"Six years later," Stevens recalls, "I'm having dinner with Sidney and his wife and my wife in Los Angeles, and I say to him, 'What are you up to?' And, in that princely way of his, he looked at me and said, 'I have not been on the stage since Raisin in the Sun 40 years ago. I want to go back to Broadway.' As I remember it now, I said, 'How about I write a play about Thurgood Marshall?' — thereby sentencing myself.

"And I did. In fact, Sidney and I had apartments in the same building in Los Angeles, and he used to come down to mine, and we'd read it" — but, by the time the play was finished, Poitier felt "he wasn't really ready to do a one-man play," and he passed.

Director Leonard Foglia and James Earl Jones, fresh from On Golden Pond, directed and officiated respectively when Thurgood finally premiered in the spring of 2006 at the Westport Country Playhouse. Joanne Woodward, who ran the joint, and husband Paul Newman were first to champion the work and showed up when it bowed at the Booth on Broadway two years later, starring Fishburne. It would be one of Newman's last public outings.

	Laurence Fishburne in "Thurgood."
	photo by Carol Rosegg/HBO

The conceit of the play is that Marshall arrives on stage to address an audience at Howard University, already a senior statesman with a field of firsts behind him — the first African-American Solicitor General of the United States as well as the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States — and, from that lofty perch, he unwinds into his early times and hard knocks. He sheds years when he removes his coat and, again, when he removes his glasses. "That was very much Lennie's concept — the idea that an older man comes out to have this talk with the audience, and, as he goes back in memory, the vitality of youth returns to him."

Stevens' son, Michael, who directed the television transference of the play, caught Fishburne in Fences at the Pasadena Playhouse and thought he could successfully straddle the old and young worlds of Marshall. His dad agreed: "We decided that he was our future, and I think he turned out to be the perfect person."

Fishburne put in 126 performances of Thurgood on Broadway, from April to August 2008 — earning a Tony nomination for Best Actor along with a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance — and last summer he took it up again at L.A.'s Geffen Playhouse and DC's Kennedy Center, where it was filmed over four performances on a weekend. "I think Laurence, having had that role in him for a year and a half, was noticeably deeper when he got to Washington," opts Stevens.

"Thurgood was a great storyteller. Sandra Day O'Connor, in an eulogy, spoke of the nine justices sitting in the conference room. She said, 'Every so often, sorta late in the afternoon, Thurgood would look across at us and say, "I'm going to tell you a story," and he'd describe experiences in his life laced with sadness and filled with humor, but they applied to the case at hand.' That was his special gift."

Born in Hollywood the son of a famous film director, Stevens is home-based in Washington where he is something of an emperor-in-residence at the Kennedy Center, having pretty much set the gold standard for awards shows by producing annually "The American Film Institute Salutes" and "The Kennedy Center Honors."

	Laurence Fishburne in "Thurgood."
	photo by Carol Rosegg/HBO

Broadway always looks good on the latter. "People have really, over time, come to know that the Honors is a wonderful event and a great place to perform," Stevens says. "That and the admiration they have for the particular honoree is what makes that possible." The 2010 tribute to Jerry Herman, for handy example, utilized the talent and wattage of a host of theatrical headlines and crowned them with the inevitable triumvirate: Mame (Angela Lansbury), Dolly (Carol Channing) and one of Jerry's girls (Chita Rivera).

Even a longtime hold-out from public celebrations like Katharine Hepburn succumbed to Stevens' honors. (It didn't hurt that his dad directed her to near-Oscars for "Alice Adams" and "Woman of the Year.") More resilient was the actress who would have starred with Hepburn, had the film version of West Side Waltz happened. It's not that Doris Day hasn't been asked — repeatedly — but "I don't think she is going to ever leave Carmel or her pets," he sighs resigningly.

Burt Lancaster got away without a Kennedy Center Honor — but not without an honor from Stevens, who wrote and directed the actor's final performance— in "Separate But Equal." "It was very important for that film because this was Sidney's first television piece, and for John W. Davis — the opposing lawyer — there were a number of fine character actors you could get to play it, but you'd know how the case came out simply by the voltage of the casting. Burt Lancaster gave his side a stature that was equal to Sidney's and made it less of a foregone conclusion.

"I called and asked him to do this quite late in the process. He read the script and said, 'Absolutely.' He wasn't worried about a lot of money. He loved to do good things. By that time, he had a hard time remembering lines, but he was very sharp. He said, 'God, I used to stay out all night and go to makeup and the script girl would hand me the pages and I'd learn them before they finished with the makeup.' So he would be very frustrated when he'd forget a line, but it was a joy to work with him."

"Separate But Equal" wound up winning the 1991 Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries and setting the stage for Stevens' belated (at age 76) bow as a playwright.

For the life of him, Stevens can't figure out why The Thurgood Marshall Story hadn't been told before. "Maybe it wasn't very obvious," he suggests. "Thurgood gets less acknowledgement than some other Civil Rights leaders, notably Dr. King, who was obviously a great figure, but Marshall was his architect. Without Marshall, all that other stuff wouldn't have taken place. Thurgood Marshall changed the law. He used the law to change the law, which made it possible for so much that came after."