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Bard of His People
| Article
# : |
16898 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
1,637 Words |
| Author
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Michael Marshall
Michael Marshall is executive editor of THE WORLD & I. |
The Piano Lesson is a deceptively sedate title for a play that seethes with such violent energies. But the eerie wind-blown curtain that opens the play offers a premonition of the forces that are about to blow through the plain and proper Pittsburgh home in which it is set.
Playwright August Wilson has become the griot - the storyteller - of black American experience in the twentieth century. He vividly captures the surface of black life in all its variety and vitality. Then he cuts beneath that surface to reveal the powerful currents churning within. In The Piano Lesson, this results in a play that successfully manages to be both funny and entertaining, yet deeply moving and disturbing.
The plot, at one level, is straightforward. It is the 1930s and Doaker Charles (Carl Gordon) lives together with his niece, Bernice (S. Epatha Merkerson), and her daughter, Maritha (April Foster). The family has aspirations to respectability. In the corner of the living room stands a piano which Maritha is learning to play. She plays haltingly, reading from sheet music, reflecting nothing of the rhythm and soul of black music.
Personal Ambition
Into this setting bursts Boy Willie (Charles S. Dutton), Bernice's brother, with a truckload of watermelons he has driven up from the South with his friend Lymon (Rocky Carroll). Boy Willie wants to sell the watermelons to raise money to buy the land where once his ancestors were slaves. The owner, Sutter, whose forebears were the slave owners, has recently died, falling down a
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