‘THE PIANO LESSON’ RETURNS
August Wilson’s 1987 play still teaches, confounds divided America
SNEW YORK CITY — ome Pulitzer Prize-winning plays turn boring, trapped in a self-conscious yesteryear. But not August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” a prize winner 30 years ago and written about a half-century earlier. With its angles of meaning and mystery, it speaks to us today.
That’s the impact of the current Broadway revival, with an explosive John David Washington (Denzel’s son) and Danielle Brooks as the leads and Samuel L. Jackson as the star presence, all being directed by his wife, LaTanya Richardson Jackson.
Given a long familiarity with Wilson’s American Century Cycle (sometimes called the Pittsburgh Cycle), I went in somewhat apprehensive. The 1990 Broadway premiere, led by the ineffable Charles Dutton and S. Epatha Merkerson, and the 1995 TV movie, led by Dutton and Alfre Woodward, are powerful memories. But this revival, although questionable in details, is worthy of this great play.
Its chief dramatic conflicts are thematic and theatric: First, the battle between siblings Berniece and Boy Willie Charles over the meaning of the carved and precious piano they have inherited from their Mississippi forebears, and second, the ghost that has come to haunt the house Berniece and Uncle Doaker share in the 1936 Hill District.
I’ve taught many courses on Wilson’s remarkable works, and I always start the conversation about “The Piano Lesson” by asking, “Who’s right, Berniece or Boy Willie?” The conversation then leaps to life, as opinions dig in and battle, combat and evolve. Finally I tell them Wilson’s answer. But I won’t tell you, because every audience needs to find its own way through this painful struggle, making up its own mind and feelings.
And what about the presentation of the ghost of John Sutter, the recently killed white Mississippian whose family owned the Charles family and that magic piano more than seven decades ago? At the play’s start, Boy Willie erupts into Pittsburgh with a truck full of watermelons and the news that the 350-pound Sutter just drowned in his well. It’s grotesquely comic, but did someone push him? Was it the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog, a group including Berniece’s husband, burned in a boxcar by Sutter and his gang?
It all has to do with that piano. Boy Willie has arrived to sell the family heirloom to get the money to buy the Sutter farmland where his family was once enslaved, to make himself independent in a region full of quasi-enslaved sharecroppers. He values the piano’s history but wants to put it to use. Berniece hates the piano’s history, but protects it anyway.
Their struggle has many dimensions and can be argued many ways: They are both deeply right, but also deeply wrong. Boy Willie wants to make it on land with an ugly history, doing the farming he knows how to do. Berniece has escaped the South of white oppression, straightens her daughter’s hair and tells her not to show ethnic behavior at the Kaufmann Center.
There are four others who’ve come north: two uncles, Doaker a railroad cook, and Wining Boy, a traveling piano player and gambler; Avery, who is starting a church; and Lymon, in pursuit of a job and a woman.
And there’s Sutter, whose presence the family members all feel and whom Boy Willie fights. What’s his goal? Vengeance? How does he relate to the piano, carved with the history of the Charles family, extending back into Africa? It’s the history of Black America that’s at
issue, which means white America, as well, the issue that torments America today.
In the play, the struggle explodes in a mix of tragedy and farce. But the director doesn’t clearly follow the script, clouding the meaning. The actions of ghost, Boy Willie and Berniece are confused, which leaves it unclear at the end how she resolves the family’s battle.
Yet the passion is there. And I loved how at the climax, on the set designed by Beowulf Boritt, the framework of the house, previously forced apart, slides together as an image of that temporary family solution.
Washington is an admirable torrent throughout, although a few quieter moments would help us better understand his emotional depth. Brooks is the sweetest Berniece I have seen, but she has power in reserve when needed.
There are hardly any small roles in Wilson’s plays. Michael Potts is a diverse gem as Wining Boy. Jackson plays the solid virtues of Doaker, handles the historic background with clarity and beautifully sings his song at the start of Act 2. Both mine their comedy with skill. The fourmen work song from the prison farm is as moving as it should be, although it omits the comic coda sometimes added.
Trai Byers plays Avery’s religious dimension fully, helped by the director’s turning monologues out to the audience, as if he were preaching in the church of his mind. Ray Fisher’s Lymon, however, is too exaggeratedly comic from the start, which seriously undercuts the depth of one of the finest love scenes in Wilson’s work.
The director’s staging of the ghost has seemed excessive to some critics, but it’s all there in the playscript, especially when you add details from the TV script, which Wilson also wrote. This is a play, story and family which take their ghosts seriously, as do many families we know today. How else can we deal with the spiritually troubled history we inherit? How could we use the past — as placid heritage or risky innovation, as Berniece or Boy Willie?
“The Piano Lesson” continues at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre through Jan. 29. Tickets, $74-$318, available at pianolessonplay.com.