Wilson’s usual signatures are here, including the somber subject matter related to Black disenfranchisement, prejudice, history and trauma - paired with witty, casual dialogue and flights into the surreal.

To complicate matters, the piano is haunted by a recently dead member of the white family that once owned generations of the Charleses. But Berniece refuses to give up the piano and all the bloody history it represents. Though there’s not much to the house - a love seat, a tiny kitchen with an ice box - there is an ornately carved piano that commands attention, despite its place in the far corner of the living room.īerniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), has traveled up north from Mississippi with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) planning to cash it in for a plot of land and in the process hoping to transform an artifact of their family’s past struggles into a path to a better future. His niece, Berniece (Danielle Brooks), and her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha (played by Jurnee Swan at the performance I saw), live with him in what is, in Beowulf Boritt’s too on-the-nose scenic design, a skeletal facsimile of a house - just beams and planks, some of which don’t even connect. Jackson), an old railroad worker who is now a train cook. In “The Piano Lesson,” it’s Pittsburgh, 1936, in the house of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. That year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama - one of two Wilson won for his American Century Cycle, a collection of 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, depicting African American life.

Or at least they are in the Charles household, in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.įirst staged in 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theater, “The Piano Lesson” made its Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr three years later. These circumstances are more than enough to raise the dead. Four Black men gathered around a kitchen table exuberantly sing a work song (“When you marry, don’t marry no farming man, hoh-ah,” they holler, clapping and stomping their feet), a Black woman girds herself with her grief for the husband and father she lost to the anger of white men, and siblings fight over a seemingly haunted family heirloom that tells a story of generational trauma and loss.

The piano august wilson