Berneice used to play the piano for her mother, but since her mother died she won’t touch it. Boy Willie, her brother, has come up from the south to sell the piano. He plans to take the money and buy the plantation he used to work on. Berneice refuses.
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For Berneice, the piano cannot be sold because of the past it represents. For Boy Willie, the piano must be sold because of the future it could bring. That conflict is the subject of August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson, which opened this week at the Goodman Theatre. Wilson has won accolades for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and he won the Pulitzer prize and four Tony awards for Fences. Lately he’s been in town to put the finishing touches on the Goodman’s production of his latest play, with the help of his frequent collaborator and its Goodman director Lloyd Richards.
“Behind everything there’s an idea,” says Wilson. “There’re actually two ideas behind The Piano Lesson. One is, can you acquire a sense of self-worth by denying your past? Two, what do you do with your legacy? How best do you put it to use? Those are the parameters of the play I was working on. Then it’s a matter of finding the characters. . . . I wanted to set up a tranquil domestic situation and then have that shattered by the brother of the sister who is coming north and bringing the past with him like a tornado through the house.”
Part of Wilson’s attempt to connect black Americans with their heritage is to accent their African roots. In the stage notes to The Piano Lesson, Wilson emphasizes that the piano must be decorated by carvings “in the manner of African sculpture”–the piano is supposed to have been carved by Berneice and Willie Boy’s great-grandfather. But Wilson has found that both blacks and whites have resisted his attempts to define blacks as Africans. He says the word has “frightening connotations.”
