Craig Wallace and Jewell Payne in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson," at The Hangar Theatre through August 14. Photo by Thomas Hoebbel Photography
THE HANGAR THEATRE’S PRODUCTION OF AUGUST WILSON’S MASTERPIECE “The Piano Lesson” is a rapturous piece of musical theater, a play that is by turns intimate and epic, somber and comic, and above all enthralling. A grand opera by way of the blues, “The Piano Lesson” stands alongside the work of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Tony Kushner in defining and exploring the great symphony of American experience in all of its joys and tragedies. It is also a fine testament to the late Wilson, who passed away in 2005, as arguably our nation’s finest 20th century playwright; in Wilson’s words, “The Piano Lesson” is “the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy.”
This is Wilson’s second work to win the Pulitzer Prize; The first, “Fences,” was mounted at The Hangar in 1996. “The Piano Lesson” takes place in 1936 Pittsburgh, in the Hill District of the predominantly black neighborhood in which the playwright was born. It is also the fourth play in his “Century Cycle,” a ten work arc that chronicled the everyday life of African Americans decade by decade.
The story transpires in the parlor and kitchen of the young widow Bernice (Dawn Ursula), who lives with her uncle Doaker (Glenn Turner) and daughter Maretha (Jewell Payne) in a middle-class family home. Their relative tranquility is disturbed when Bernice’s brother Boy Willie (Craig Wallace) barges in unannounced, having traveled from Mississippi ostensibly to sell watermelons but in actuality to take possession of a family heirloom — a gorgeously hand-carved piano.
Boy Willie, who is all brash and bluster, but nonetheless compelling in his passion to look forward to his own future and shape his family legacy, tells his relatives that he has an opportunity to purchase the farm on which his family worked as slaves. In doing so, he says, he can convert the prized piano into something that will “give back” to future generations and also help him leave a mark on the world for himself. He tells his uncle, a railroad worker who is a generation older and many more wiser, and then his suspicious sister: “Sutter’s brother selling the land. I got one part of it. Sell these watermelons and I get me another part. Get Bernice to sell the piano and I’ll have the third part.”
He repeats this refrain throughout the play as both plea and a proclamation, demonstrating a remarkable dogged determination despite the enormous emotional legacy of the family heirloom. The musical instrument at the center of the stage is majestic: hand-carved figures appear on the front of the piano, and the characters describe ornate images on both sides that represent the family’s rich culture and the scars of slavery.
In Bernice’s words, “Money can’t buy what that piano cost.” The siblings’ great-grandfather carved those images after losing his wife and young son when they were traded “one and a half” slaves for the instrument. Years later, Bernice’s and Boy Willie’s father was killed after he took the heirloom from another generation of white owners. Like Chekov’s cherry orchard, Wilson’s piano represents a symbol of both a traumatizing past and an uncertain future. The sheer weight of the instrument is central to the symbolic language of the play as well; when the characters try to move the piano, it simply won’t budge, raising questions about to what extent we are even capable of transforming our pasts into a brighter future – or at least, whether or not that kind of upward mobility is actually accessible to these characters.
In 1999, Wilson told the Paris Review that the genesis of “The Piano Lesson” came from a painting by Romare Bearden of the same title (in the same interview Wilson cited his major influences as the four ‘Bs’: blues, Borges, Baraka and Bearden). He began work on the play with a question: “can you acquire a sense of self worth by denying your past, or is implicit in that denial a repudiation of the worth of the self?” For Bernice, the piano must remain a shrine to a tragic past even if it is never played or used; for Boy Willie, the instrument represents its use value, with its sentimental value transferred into his romanticized vision of what it would be like to live on a self-run farm. To Willie, the work of each new generation is to take the fate they were given and to build on it or transform it entirely. The lesson of Wilson’s play is that both characters are right and they are also both wrong: the flaws in their perspectives reveal the undeniable reality of the specific cultural complexities, horrors, and traumas that have shaped their characters.
Wilson’s greatest achievement may be imbuing his characters with such lyrical richness, and in director Jennifer L. Nelson’s hands, the entire cast of eight actors are allowed to sing out loud. Whether frying bread, ironing shirts or performing the instrument that takes center stage, the Hangar production emphasizes the musicality of the daily life of the family. This is especially true of the unpredictable itinerant Whining Boy (David Emerson Toney), a former circuit musician who brings humor, music and mysticism into the home whenever he appears on stage.
Though the primary conflict centers on the battle between brother and sister, eloquently voiced by the rich timbre of Wallace and the almost snarky Ursula, “The Piano Lesson” unfolds slowly through seemingly casual conversations. The upwardly mobile Avery (Jefferson A. Russell) is happy with his job as an elevator operator and his calling as a preacher; he is grateful that he receives a turkey every Thanksgiving, a token his foil Boy Willie claims he’d never accept. The young Lymon (Nickolas Vaughan) also plays opposite Wallace; polite and hesitant, he hopes Pittsburgh will itself provide a suitable setting for a future free of slavery’s legacy. The wonderful young actor Jewell Payne (a middle school student and member of the local singing group Vitamin L!) stands comfortably alongside these veteran actors as she serves primarily as the repository for past stories and the hope for the future.
But the true magic of “The Piano Lesson” is how the play slowly and subtly works itself out to a conflict not among the living but between the living and the dead. The specter of the past haunts Bernice and Doaker’s household, and not only in the form of an upstairs ghost that may represent a murdered plantation owner. From the spirits of Bernice’s late husband, to ancestors who succumbed to slavery, and the mythological “yellow dog,” creatures of the railroad all make their presence felt throughout the play.
As Wilson’s work gives itself over to the spirits of the past, it integrates those stories into part of a grander realist classic. “What I saw was black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence,” Wilson said, referring to the painting “The Piano Lesson.” The same may be said for Hangar’s particular production of this profound and moving play.
“The Piano Lesson” continues at The Hangar Theatre through August 14. Tickets are from $20 to $40. To purchase tickets in advance, call (607)273-4497, or visit hangartheatre.org or visit the box office from 10:00am to 5:30pm Monday through Saturday. Tickets also may be purchased one hour prior to show time. The Hangar is located two miles from downtown Ithaca, at 801 Taughannock Blvd./Route 89 at the Treman Marina Entrance to Cass Park.