There’s abundant magic still in The Piano Lesson, August Wilson’s grand, 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning tale of a Black family torn between legacy and ambition, the past and the future, an…
) are only the most obvious names to mention first – that’s some considerable Hollywood star power – and the three turn in performances so thoroughly embedded in Wilson’s idiosyncratic universe of the earthbound -=where money and death and grudges and family ties and maybe murder are the stuff of the everyday – and the otherworldly, with vengeful spirits and beloved ancestors demanding to be heard.
Their quiet life is upended with the arrival from the ancestral home in Mississippi of Boy Willie , who, at 30, is tired of his sharecropper life and wants to seize an opportunity to purchase the land his family has long worked, whether forced as enslaved people or, as with Boy Willie now, by something closer to choice.
Michael Potts , a family friend-turned-preacher in love with the emotionally closed-off Berniece, and Wining Boy , Doaker’s brother who has drunk up or gambled away any money he’s made over the years as an itinerant musician. He and Doaker know all too well the history of the family piano – they, along with their brother Boy Charles , stole back the heirloom decades earlier from the family of the slave owner who had usurped the instrument. Boy Charles paid for the action with his life.
Without spoiling some of the play’s jump-scares and surprises: there will be hauntings – Sutter’s ghost seems to be restless – and Wilson was never shy about melding the earthly with the unearthly. Even the play’s outsider – Grace , the neighborhood’s red-dressed bar flirt fancied by both Boy Willie and Lymon – knows a ghost when she sees one .
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