The heart and soul and hurt of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Piano Lesson—which just opened on Broadway in an ambitious but discordant new revival—can be found in one long and winding story toward the end of Act 1. Even if you’ve seen August Wilson’s play, or know the tale of the intricately carved instrument on which essentially the entire piece rests, hearing it inevitably leaves you emotionally bruised and battered.
The piano now sits in the Pittsburgh home of de facto family patriarch Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), who lives with his niece, Berniece (The Color Purple’s Danielle Brooks, magnificent), and her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha (Jurnee Swan or Nadia Daniel). Technically it belonged to the Sutter family—because years and years ago, so did the Charleses. Robert Sutter wanted to buy his wife, Miss Ophelia, a wedding gift. “He ain’t had no money. But he had some niggers,” explains Doaker. Sutter traded “one full grown and one half grown,” Doaker’s grandmother, also named Berniece, and his father, age 9, for the piano, and his wife was thrilled. Until she started missing her servants. When Miss Ophelia took sick, Sutter summoned Doaker’s master woodworker grandfather, Willie Boy, and asked him to carve the slaves’ images onto the piano. He did all that and more, carving generations of the family’s history onto that wooden upright: Berniece; their son, Doaker’s father; his own parents, Mama Esther and Boy Charles; births, deaths, marriages, arrivals, departures…Sutter wasn’t pleased, but Miss Ophelia was. As Doaker says, “Now she had her piano and her niggers too.”
After emancipation, the piano became an obsession for Doaker’s brother Boy Charles. “Say it was the story of our whole family and as long as Sutter had it…he had us. Say we was still in slavery,” he reasons. So Doaker and his brother Wining Boy (a scene-stealing Michael Potts, recently seen in the Netflix Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) liberated it from Sutter’s house on Independence Day, 1911. As for Boy Charles, he was burned to death in a train boxcar.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
It’s a shattering story, and Jackson—who has decades of history with The Piano Lesson (he played Boy Willie in the 1987 premiere at Yale Rep)—elevates it to something of a sermon. We’re completely rapt, and by the end, we see the piano for what it really is: the embodiment of three generations of family history, and the physical representation of their slave narrative.
The history of the piano is also a slow-burning but still-intense moment of what has up until then been a slightly frenetic production. It starts, really, with the first scene, when Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), bursts in at 5 a.m. He’s just arrived from down South with his pal Lymon (Ray Fisher) and a truckload of watermelons to sell. But his real motive is selling the piano to buy some farmland—and not just any land, but the Sutter land that the Charles family worked, first as slaves and then as sharecroppers. “Berniece ain’t gonna sell that piano,” his uncle Doaker tells him repeatedly. But Boy Willie is not hearing it. The blood that was shed for that piano? “All that’s in the past,” he sniffs. Berniece won’t play it, but she certainly won’t part with it: “Money can’t buy what that piano cost,” she says.
Boy Willie is, by definition, insolent and impetuous, and Washington—so captivating as an undercover cop in Spike Lee’s Oscar-winning drama BlacKkKlansman—captures both with ease, and has presence to spare. Unfortunately, he’s also pretty much at full volume, and full speed, from the jump. To be fair, Charles S. Dutton’s performance at Yale Rep and on Broadway received some of the same criticism—too big, too loud, too fast. And if Boy Willie didn’t drive at 55 mph, the play could easily be 20 minutes longer. That’s how massive the part is. One suspects, however, that Washington will be dynamite in the Netflix Piano Lesson adaptation.
And then there’s the matter of the ghost, which seems to have arrived along with Boy Willie and has a hold on the piano. Wilson worked supernatural references or elements into many of his 10 Century Cycle plays (think of the 300-plus–year–old conjurer/visionary Aunt Ester), but only the 1910s-set Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and the 1930s-set Piano Lesson require actual onstage apparitions. Without giving too much away: Director LaTanya Richardson Jackson—who actually was featured in the very fine 2009 Broadway revival of Joe Turner—favors a more literal manifestation. Unfortunately, what should be a very powerful moment between Berniece and the piano ultimately gets overshadowed. Exorcisms are tricky business; that’s always confounded even the most ardent admirers of the play.
The Piano Lesson opened Oct. 13, 2022, at the Barrymore Theatre and runs through Jan. 15, 2023. Tickets and information: pianolessonplay.com
