The piano lesson

The piano lesson

August Wilson

Book - 1990

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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Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 812.54/Wilson Due Oct 22, 2024
Subjects
African Americans > Drama.
Collective memory > Drama.
Published
New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Plume ©1990.
Language
English
Main Author
August Wilson (-)
Item Description
Cast: 5 men, 3 women.
Physical Description
108 pages ; 21 cm
Awards
Pulitzer Prize in Drama, 1990
ISBN
9780452265349
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

The fourth play (and second Pulitzer Prize winner) in Wilson's cycle on twentieth-century black American experience is set in Pittsburgh in the 1930s. Boy Willie Charles is up from Mississippi to sell a truckload of watermelons to earn part of the price of a just-dead white man's farm. He thinks he'll get the rest by selling the family piano, into the wood of which is carved a good deal of the Charleses' history. His sister Berniece refuses to part with it. The struggle over the piano crystalizes the conflict between the siblings' (and many other twentieth-century blacks') choices in life--his to repudiate the past and fight for the future on home ground, hers to cling to her heritage but find a new life in a new place. The other dramatis personae in Wilson's characteristically large cast each provides another slant on the central dialog, not through ideological rhetoric but by means of his or her particular experiences reported in the symphonically rich language that is Wilson's hallmark. ~--Ray Olson

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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