August Wilson’s ‘The Piano Lesson’ teaches the potent legacy of Southern slavery

Kai A. Ealy, Nija Okoro and Alex Morris. / Craig Schwartz

PASADENA, Calif. – How does the indelible stain of slavery reverberate down into the 20th century? Specifically into a modest, haunted African-American home in Pittsburgh’s Hill District—where August Wilson grew up—in the 1930s, in The Piano Lesson, the fourth of August Wilson’s extraordinary 10-play “American Century Cycle,” each devoted to exploring themes of 10 sequential decades.

By the time the play is set, the worst of the Depression has passed, but not everyone is gainfully employed and comfortable. For Black Americans, especially in the South, it’s still a struggle to get by, to hold one’s place, much less to get ahead.

The Piano Lesson weaves together elements of history and spirituality to create a many-sided story about reckoning with a complicated past. Berneice (Nija Okoro) is living in Pittsburgh, in the home of her uncle Doaker (Alex Morris), an almost 30-year railroad worker, with her 12-year-old daughter Maretha (Madison Keffer), after the murder of her husband three years earlier in an unsolved case in rural Mississippi, where the family originated. She has left her hometown to escape the brutal past, transporting with her the family upright piano whose panels portraying the entire family history back to images of their African ancestors were carved two generations before by her talented enslaved grandfather. This object, which Berneice doesn’t play, but which Maretha haltingly pecks at, is the centerpiece of the household, the repository of the family lore and legacy that must be preserved at all costs, even as a dollar is hard to come by. She has rejected offers to sell it and will not budge on this question which sits at the very core of her sense of identity in the world.

Her brother Boy Willie (Kai A. Ealy) arrives unannounced, having driven up with his buddy Lymon (Evan Lewis Smith) in a truck that barely made it, with a load of Mississippi watermelons for sale. Both the truck and the melons may have been acquired questionably. Lymon intends to stay up North, as part of the Great Migration of African Americans in the interwar years to Northern cities with good industrial jobs and unions that will lift them up from hopeless sharecropper poverty. In any case, he is being sought by the local sheriff over what he calls “a misunderstanding”: “Sometimes me and the sheriff don’t think alike.”

But Boy Willie intends to return to the land his family worked for centuries, the only place he knows and feels he can succeed, buying up some of his old boss Sutter’s acreage with the watermelon sales and with the money he gets from selling the piano, to which he feels he has at least an equal title. He sees the piano not as an heirloom to be treasured but as a useless impediment to his future that can be monetized. If he owns the land where until now he and his family have been sharecroppers, “this time I get to keep all the cotton.”

Other members of the cast include two friends from back home, Wining Boy (Gerald C. Rivers), a once promising singer/songwriter/pianist who made a few popular “race” records and continues to dress as a big city dandy but is perpetually broke; and Avery (Jernard Burks) who performed hard labor back in the day, now works as an elevator operator, and is filled with the spirit of the Lord as a preacher aspiring to lead his flock in his own Good Shepherd congregation. He proposes marriage to Berneice, somewhat cynically, as he also has his eye on the piano which could be sold to pay the rent on a church and start up his ministry. A young lady whom Lymon attempts to seduce at a nightclub and brings back to the house, Grace (LeShay Tomlinson Boyce), rounds out the eight-member cast. More than one of the men has spent time at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm, the state penitentiary, on charges inseparably linked to the prevailing Jim Crow regime.

Oh, yes, there’s also a ghost in the house, the spirit of old man Sutter, owner of the land where the family lived, who recently, inexplicably, wound up falling (pushed?) into his own well. He could be real, could be a figment of Berneice’s imagination, but others have seen and felt him too. Perhaps it’s the spook who has somehow riveted the piano in place, for try with all their might as they do, Lymon and Boy Willie—in a scene that recalls Laurel and Hardy’s bout with a piano—are unable to budge it a single inch from its moorings in the living room.

Inevitably, all the outlying characters are caught up in the dispute between siblings. Almost every person has their moment in the sun to reflect from their own point of view on the family history, how critical the piano is to it (or not), and how they envision the future.

Gregg T. Daniel returns to direct this A Noise Within production, following his previous outings with other August Wilson plays in the series, Gem of the Ocean, Seven Guitars, Radio Golf, and King Hedley II. The company is now halfway through its commitment to stage them all. The Piano Lesson is the second of Wilson’s series to garner a Pulitzer Prize, in 1990; his earlier win was for Fences in 1987.

“How does one accept one’s legacy when it’s filled with hurt and pain?” asks Daniel. “How do you gain a sense of self worth, how do you know who you are, unless you fully inhabit and accept your past, including the pain? This is the battle going on between Berneice and Boy Willie. Like all Wilson’s plays, The Piano Lesson is infused with African mysticism and ancestral spirits. It’s also filled with the blues. Berniece must find her song, find her music.

“When I’ve guest-directed Wilson plays at other venues, it was always just one production of one play,” Daniel continues. “But A Noise Within has been audacious enough to want to do the entire cycle, which gives me the opportunity to see how these plays are in conversation with one another, how Wilson laid them out. And it’s thrilling to see audiences begin to recognize the overlapping themes and characters. Being able to do these plays back-to-back is one of the greatest gifts I could have as a director. There’s something very exciting about knowing that the next one is coming, and the next one after that, and knowing that our audience is tracking across the entire cycle.”

I have not seen all the plays in the cycle, so I can’t say for sure whether any of the characters in Piano Lesson recur elsewhere, but what I can say is that Wilson’s gift for dialogue and soliloquy is in peak form here. He has a talent for recounting a whole backstory—in this case many generations long—in engrossing, enchanting language. Not that we’ll retain every detail of it, but we bathe in the sheer thrill of artfully crafted prose delivered with tasty, lip-smacking gusto. Alex Morris especially shines in his monologues, perhaps the closest thing to a village griot who appears in one avatar or another in many of Wilson’s works. A well-received highlight of the play comes when four men who had at some point worked on the railroad go into an extended harmonious work song. The whole play is the Black American experience set to the music of words.

Throughout the course of the play, four characters take their turns at the piano—Maretha, Boy Willie, Wining Boy, and Berneice—all of them, in their own style, conveying their taste in music and through it their relationship to the piano and the history it embodies.

The creative team for The Piano Lesson includes composer and music director Maritri Garrett; choreographer Joyce Guy; scenic designer Tesshi Nakagawa; lighting designer Brandon Baruch; sound designer Jeff Gardner; costume designer Alethia Moore-Del Monaco; wig and makeup designer Shelia Dorn; properties designer Stephen Taylor; dialect coach Andrea Odinov; and dramaturg Dr. Miranda Johnson-Haddad. The production stage manager is Lanae Wilks, with Bryan Tiglio assisting.

Performances of The Piano Lesson take place through Nov. 10 on Thurs., Fri., and Sat. at 7:30 p.m., with 2 p.m. matinees every Sat. and Sun. (dark Thurs., Oct. 31–perhaps just a bit too spooky for Halloween?). Post-performance conversations with the artists will take place every Fri. and on Sun., Oct. 27. A Noise Within is located at 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena 91107. For more information and to purchase tickets, call (626) 356-3100 or go to the ANW website.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Eric A. Gordon

Eric A. Gordon, People’s World Cultural Editor, wrote a biography of radical American composer Marc Blitzstein and co-authored composer Earl Robinson’s autobiography. He has received numerous awards for his People's World writing from the International Labor Communications Association. He has translated all nine books of fiction by Manuel Tiago (pseudonym for Álvaro Cunhal) from Portuguese, available from International Publishers NY.