The Piano Lesson is a deceptively sedate title for a play that seethes with such violent energies. But the eerie wind-blown curtain that opens the play offers a premonition of the forces that are about to blow through the plain and proper Pittsburgh home in which it is set.
Playwright August Wilson has become the griot - the storyteller - of black American experience in the twentieth century. He vividly captures the surface of black life in all its variety and vitality. Then he cuts beneath that surface to reveal the powerful currents churning within. In The Piano Lesson, this results in a play that successfully manages to be both funny and entertaining, yet deeply moving and disturbing.
The plot, at one level, is straightforward. It is the 1930s and Doaker Charles (Carl Gordon) lives together with his niece, Bernice (S. Epatha Merkerson), and her daughter, Maritha (April Foster). The family has aspirations to respectability. In the corner of the living room stands a piano which Maritha is learning to play. She plays haltingly, reading from sheet music, reflecting nothing of the rhythm and soul of black music.
Personal Ambition
Into this setting bursts Boy Willie (Charles S. Dutton), Bernice's brother, with a truckload of watermelons he has driven up from the South with his friend Lymon (Rocky Carroll). Boy Willie wants to sell the watermelons to raise money to buy the land where once his ancestors were slaves. The owner, Sutter, whose forebears were the slave owners, has recently died, falling down a well.
The problem is that the watermelons will not produce enough money. Boy Willie plans to make up the shortfall by selling the piano, half of which belongs to him, but Bernice refuses to let him sell it. Between the two of them there is little love lost, but they are peas from the same pod in their stubborn determination. Boy Willie is determined he is going to have the piano and starts moving it. Bernice, equally determined that the piano will not leave her house, pulls a handgun on Boy Willie.
Boy Willie, as a character, is charged with energy. Played with conviction by Dutton, he bounds around the stage, an elemental force firmly rooted in this world. He does not believe in ghosts - one has been mysteriously appearing to other characters - and, if they do exist, he will fight them and whip them anyway. He does not fear death; this, as he remarks, is what makes him threatening to white people.
Bernice is a quiet but nonetheless determined woman for whom life appears frozen within. The audience senses that she will calmly pull the trigger if Boy Willie takes the Piano and is equally sure that he will not back-down. This is the climax of the play and one for which there appears no resolution.
Meanwhile, Wilson has introduced us, through the characters that came to the Charles' house, to a wide range of black life in the 1930s. All of these characters are splendidly portrayed.
Lloyd Richards, dean of the Yale Drama School and director of the Yale Repertory Theater, as well as director of all Wilson's plays, says he was
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