By Arlene McKanic
August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, is part of his series of plays dealing with working class African-American life in the Hill district of Pittsburgh. This play, set in 1936 and now enjoying a spirited revival at the Black Spectrum Theater, concerns the dilemmas of a fractured multi-generational family, their haunted piano purchased at too dear a cost, the angry ghost of its former owner Mr. Sutton, and a cornucopia of other issues.
In the first act Boy Willie (Douglas Wade) and his sweetly vacant sidekick Lymon (the always marvelous Fulton C. Hodges) have come up to Pittsburgh from the south in a rattletrap truck full of watermelons. Boy Willie has his eyes on buying the land upon which his ancestors slaved, and is intent on not only selling the watermelons but selling the piano that stands mostly unused in the house of his uncle Doaker (David Downing), a railroad cook who lives with Boy Willie’s brittle sister Berniece (Karen Brown) and her young daughter Maretha (played that night by Leja Renee Stephenson).
The problem is Berniece refuses to part with this piano, which a slave ancestor carved with scenes from their family’s past. She won’t sell it even though she never plays it; she doesn’t want to release the angry spirits within it, she says, but lets her daughter play as the child knows nothing of the instrument’s past.
Rounding out the cast is Avery (Leon Rogers) a would-be preacher who is wooing Berniece; Wining Boy (Ralph McCain), Doaker’s drunk, jovial, piano-playing brother who has come up from Mississippi; and Grace (Simone Black), a chippie Boy Willie and Lymon pick up on a night when they’re flush with dough from their watermelon sale.
Through these characters, Wilson brilliantly details the struggles between past and present, pragmatism and idealism, progress and tradition, and men and women. Though the battle between the races is more subtle — there are no white people in the play unless you count Sutter’s ghost — it permeates and distorts everything else.
Wilson’s genius, at least with this play, is such that a cast and crew would have to work hard to wreck it, but this “Piano Lesson” cast and crew are as good as the material. The writing, of course, is delicious, at once naturalistic and soaring, with the rich speech of blacks of the diaspora spiced with snatches of blues songs, exuberant field hollers, prophetic dreams and sightings of unhappy ghosts.
The characters are so believable that the audience in the over-warm theater yelled out their encouragement, or “tsked” with disapproval, all the while fanning themselves with the programs as if they were in church.
Brown is good as the dour Berniece, who clings to the past with a death grip as she fends off men, joylessly mothers her daughter and bitterly nurses the memory of her murdered husband. Wilson writes great, crunchy roles for women, and Berniece illustrates the chasm between herself and the men in her life. Unlike them, she’s humorless, friendless, and obsessed with propriety: she’s the type of woman who wears white gloves and a hat any time she leaves the house, and admonishes her daughter to not “act her color,” when she’s at school.
Rogers is by turns timid and assertive as her suitor, no more so than during the play’s hilarious, scary, jaw-dropping climax. Downing makes an excellent Doaker, a man determined to be respectable and responsible but not above having a good time, while McCain’s Wining Boy is determined to be his opposite number. This makes him more fun to be around, and McCain has a great time with the role. Hodges’ Lymon is so stupid and innocent that he’s irresistible; indeed, in one amazing scene his naiveté comes within an eyelash of thawing Berniece out.
Wade is astonishing as Boy Willie. His character should be hateful. His own sister believes him quite capable of having killed the man whose ghost haunts her house. He’s utterly selfish and admits it and his world view is almost existential, yet his charisma, energy and sense of humor keep the audience on his side. His hijacking of the heirloom piano is disgusting, but one almost hopes he pulls it off, especially since Berniece is such a wet blanket.
Black is funny as the voluptuous young lady in red whom Boy Willie and Lymon pick up, and Stephenson is lovely as the little girl who witnesses the family madness.
Bette Howard’s direction is confident and unhurried and she’s aided by Lenny A. Buggs’ lighting, David Latimore’s sound design, which swings between subtlety and thunder, especially near the end, and Chris Cumberbatch’s set design, which has the look of a working class home run by a woman who’s grimly determined that it not be shabby. The costumes, also by Howard, are just a tad off — the dresses are more from the ‘50’s than the ‘30’s, but that’s a quibble.
“The Piano Lesson” will be at the Black Spectrum Theatre at 177th Street and Baisley Boulevard, through Sunday.
