THE
PIANO LESSON
by August Wilson
Directed by Peter Wray
Studio Theatre
Dec 5th -13th
August
Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding
plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's
Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning,
Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson
has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet.
At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano
which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession,
has been gathering
dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy
Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his
dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked
as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash
he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell,
clinging to
the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy.
This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that
blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of
opportunity in the present.
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