The winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, The Piano Lesson is August Wilson's second play to receive that award (Fences won in 1987). With this selection, Wilson became the first African American to receive the award twice and joined the select company of only seven American playwrights to be so honored. In addition, The Piano Lesson received the Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony Award for best play. Like Wilson's other plays, it was given a staged reading at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference (1987) and directed by Lloyd Richards, the dean of the Yale Drama School, where it was first performed (1988) before, subsequently, touring other cities prior to its Broadway opening at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 16 April 1990. The cast included Charles S. Dutton in the role of Boy Willie and S. Epatha Merkerson as Berniece.
Set in 1936 in Pittsburgh, the play looks at the displacement of African Americans from Mississippi who have migrated north without coming to terms with their southern past. This struggle is objectified in the brother-sister conflict between Berniece and Boy Willie. They fight over a piano that their great-grandfather carved for a white man, which the brother and sister have now inherited.
Bringing along a truckload of watermelons to sell to finance his trip to see Berniece and reclaim his family legacy, Boy Willie wants to sell the piano and use the money to buy the farmland that his ancestors worked as slaves and sharecroppers. Berniece, however, does not want to part with this symbol of her family past; their father died stealing the piano—and its artistic legacy—from the white man who had exploited his family. The piano is a concrete representation of the still-existing conflicts and connections between the past and present; it works on several levels to suggest that white exploitation of blacks' artistic and manual accomplishment is an American tradition underlying the reality of the American dream. The play's resolution, which comes with the assistance of a ghost, suggests that claiming and transforming the suffering of the past into cultural artistry is necessary before Americans can begin to participate creatively in the present. As a result of their discussions and the activity of the ghost, the brother and sister achieve a family unity and closeness. Berniece's daughter and Boy Willie's niece, Maretha, will use the ancestral piano to produce music and as a source of pride in her heritage.
Richard Hummler praised the play for its powerful and accurate rendering of black dialogue, and Frank Rich lauded Wilson for his ability to infuse the play with history lessons. While critics were also quick to point out that the success of this play helped cement Wilson's phenomenal rise to theatrical prominence, Robert Brustein, writing in the New Republic, questioned the play's commercialism and suggested that it lacked artistic merit. The drama critic for Time, however, argued that the play established Wilson as the “richest theatrical voice to emerge in the U.S. since… the flowering of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.”
Marilyn Elkins
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
