You can blame it on Ken Sanders.

The bookseller was leaving a performance of Debora Threedy's "The End of the Horizon" in 2008 when he said to director Jerry Rapier, "You know who you should think about creating a play about is Wallace Thurman. He's so fascinating."

Like many Utahns, Rapier was unfamiliar with the young, gay black man from Salt Lake City who became the heart of the Harlem Renaissance and was dead from tuberculosis and alcoholism by 32. But once Rapier read an article Sanders had written, he was hooked. He turned to a new local playwright, Jenifer Nii, who'd written a play about ethnic tension, thinking it might be a good project for her.

"My first reaction was, 'Who?' " says Nii, speaking from her office in Key Bank Tower, where she works by day in internal communications at a health care company. "I didn't know anything about Wallace Thurman, but I was really intrigued with the idea," she says. In fact, as she started her research, "I don't think there was anything that didn't intrigue me about him. Everything was just so remarkable, from his growing up here in Utah as an African American, non Mormon, sexually fluid young man who went on to play a pretty key role in the Harlem Renaissance to his promoting of developing one's art and to being recognized because of the quality of one's work. I really respected that," she says.

There were different movements in the 1920s she explains: that African Americans were brought here against their will so they should return Africa, or that they should present only the best of themselves so as to justify their presence in society. But Thurman was an advocate for presenting an accurate portrait of their lives. Thurman, she says, was basically saying, "Don't look at my color. Look at my work. Don't look at all these things on the outside. Check me out for who I am and then decide."

Thurman's short but bright career included employment as a writer of articles, plays and novels such as The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, which focused on prejudice between light-skinned and dark-skinned black people. He was also a publisher and editor, who was the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes.

He collaborated in publishing the literary magazine Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Nii called her play "Fire" after the magazine. The word has another meaning in her mind. "It illustrated his dynamism," she says. Thurman was a strong influence on African American writers of the day, and his Harlem rooming house apartment was dubbed "Niggerati Manor" because of all the black literati who socialized there.

But Nii's work is only half the story. At the same time she and Rapier were discussing "Fire," another local playwright, Debora Threedy, approached Rapier about directing a 40-minute play she wanted to write about another 20th century Utah writer, the much better-known Wallace Stegner. Known as "The Dean of Western Writers," Stegner was an advocate for wilderness conservation and won the 1972 Nobel Prize for fiction for his novel, Angle of Repose. He founded the creative writing program at Stanford and died in 1993 at the age of 83.

Threedy wrote the play for the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment's annual symposium in celebration of what would have been Stegner's 100th birthday. A reading of the play was "warmly received," says Rapier, and he started thinking about more possibilities for it. That's when he got the idea to intertwine the stories of the two Wallaces. Threedy and Nii each completed a draft of their script, and then Rapier interwove them, incorporating some feedback from the playwrights.

Each play features a single actor, who are frequently on stage at the same time. "The hardest part is to decide when we're aware of one another," says Richard Scharine, who plays Wallace Stegner. "There are times when we're reacting to one another, and there are times when we're on a different planet." Scharine is a Professor Emeritus in Theatre and Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah, and his directing credits include eleven plays for People Productions, Utah's only African-American themed theatre, which he co-founded.

While he says his knowledge of Stegner was limited when he was cast in the role, he took a class on Stegner's novels last fall to better prepare himself. He found a lot to relate to in the life of his fellow educator. "He always had that sense of being an outsider," Scharine says, commenting that he and Stegner both came to Salt Lake City from rural areas where outhouses and one-room school houses populated their worlds -- Stegner from the Canadian province of Saskatchewan; Scharine from Wisconsin.

"When I looked at Stegner's life, I could make a lot of connections with it and I felt an affinity for it," Scharine says. "I don't know if Stegner would like my performance as him, but he sure would know where I was coming from."

Threedy's play, entitled "Where I Come From," deals a lot with Stegner's denial of how much he drew from his own life in his writing, Scharine says. Stegner rebelled against his strict father, which Scharine says led him to become a strict parent and educator himself. "I find that fascinating because I think we become our parents in the end," Scharine says. "We become the people who shaped us. He spent a lot of time trying to escape from that past, only to find that the past was the material that gave him the power to escape. His best works have this sense of autobiography that he never admitted to."

Rapier says that the interwoven plays deal a lot with the nature of home. "Stegner lived all over the country and Canada, and he chose Salt Lake City as his home," he says. "It's really difficult for people to understand sometimes why somebody with a more liberal bent who aren't LDS are compelled to live in this place, but being one of those people, there's something really warm and inviting that people can't really understand unless they're here that really makes it feel like home."

Ogden actor Carleton Bluford, who plays Wallace Thurman, can relate to the search for home. He, too, knew nothing of Thurman before being asked to play this role, but found a lot to relate to. "He was trying to find a place where he fit in," says Bluford. "I've always kind of been the same way. I've never really fit in here." The 25-year-old, who attended Weber State, has been living in Los Angeles since last May, but returned to Utah to play this role.

As a writer of short plays, poetry and screen plays, Bluford can also relate to Thurman as a writer. "One of my goals is to gather a lot of people together, especially African American people, and say something, because I think we do have something to say, in Utah," Bluford says. "There are black people and non Mormons here, and this is our home and we live here, too. We have ideas and we are trying to do good things."

Bluford, who's been seen locally at Salt Lake Acting Company and The Egyptian Theatre, says he experienced some mild racism growing up one of the relatively few black people in Utah. "There's a lot of things that people do that they don't really think is racism," he says. "Little jokes here and there, like 'Smile, I can't see you,' 'cause it's dark out. Stuff like that. But what bugs me now that I'm older is that people still are not used to black people in Utah. I got here off of the plane from L.A., and every single person in the airport looked my way, like, 'Oh my gosh, a black person,' " he says, adding that he was probably more conscious of it after living in L.A.

Much as Scharine and Threedy have similarities as educators (Threedy is a law professor at U. of U.), Bluford and Nii have similarities as ethnic minorities heading into new frontiers. For Nii, who is Japanese-American, this will be the biggest work she's had produced, and for Bluford, it will be the largest role of his career.

"I've been trying to push myself and make sure that I do her work justice and that the audience gets what they're supposed to out of it," Bluford says. "There's a statement at the end of the play. Basically, it says, 'I am a human being.' So what I think the audience should get out of it is these two people that are from Salt Lake City did great things, and they're human beings, whether they're gay or black or white or straight; it doesn't matter. They're a human, and they felt a certain way, and they did good things in the world. There are people in Utah that can and do do good things and it goes unnoticed all the time. So I feel like, you come to the show and you know some people that are from your hometown that have done great things, and hopefully that will inspire you to do something."

Nii writes on Plan-B's Web site, "I'd like to believe that people will be as fascinated as I was in this remarkable man. I'd like to believe it'd open a sliver more on the horizon of possibilities -- for that young black, or Japanese, or gay person who feels caged; for those who would inspire their community to higher heights; for those who wonder whether any of it is worth the fight."