The Piano Lesson

By August Wilson, directed by Lou Bellamy
Penumbra Theatre, St. Paul, Minnesota
March 19, 2008

August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play begins with a 5:00 A.M. pounding on the door, but Penumbra appropriately begins its production a generation before Wilson’s 1936 setting with a brief, wordless sketch. A woman polishes the family piano which is decorated with folk art carvings and then encourages her young girl to play. This prelude ends with a freight train thundering through the set. This opening emphasizes that while the play takes place over the course of 5 summer days in 1936 Pittsburgh, its real story starts much earlier.

The present day tension of the play is between Berniece, who has moved north to Pittsburgh with her young daughter, and her brother Boy Willie. The overbearing Boy Willie plans to sell the family’s heirloom piano in order to buy land from the family that once owned their ancestors. He sees this as an appropriate way to use the family heirloom. He firmly believes that if he owns land, he will then have something tangible to pass down to his children—something his father and grandfather could not do.

Berniece has brought the piano north with her because it carries the symbolic heritage of her family. It had, at one time, been traded for her great-grandmother and grandfather (the price of the piano was 1 and 1/2 slaves—a mother and child). Carved on its surface are the images of this great grandmother and son, along with scenes depicting the sale and other events marking the family’s history. Berniece will not allow her brother to sell it. Through the course of the play, the audience learns the history of the piano and the family, a history that includes murder, loss, and a tradition of imprisonment that suggests the existence of a system of indentured servitude long after slavery’s abolition.

In one of the most powerful scenes of the play, Boy Willie and his friend Lymon share the stage with Boy Willie’s two Uncles: Doaker and Winning Boy. The younger men have recently served time in a prison farm—Parchment Farm. Many years earlier, the older men had served hard time in this same prison. Boy Willie and Lymon begin singing a work song they learned at the prison, and the older men join in the spirited song, mimicking the fall of the pick by stamping their feet and banging on the table. While this scene highlights the shared experience of these two generations of men—almost a shared rite of passage—the men one by one withdraw from the singing in a painful recognition of grief and loss until Boy Willie is left alone singing and slamming his hands on the table, unaware he is the only man remaining in the song, desperately beating back the demons that have marked his personal and family history.

This powerful rendition of this scene is evidence that Penumbra is the perfect place for Wilson’s drama: not only was Wilson a friend and company member, he shares Penumbra’s commitment to presenting the lives of black people and culture with all of its complexity on the American stage.

The Penumbra Theatre’s production of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize drama The Piano Lesson has been extended through March 30.

Visit the Penumbra for schedules and tickets: Penumbra Theatre