NEW YORK — For anyone who knows how hard August Wilson once struggled to get his plays financed and produced on Broadway with mostly unknown actors from his informal repertory company from the hinterlands, the writer’s newly vaulted Gotham status is nothing short of amazing.
Now comes a starry, enjoyable Broadway revival of “The Piano Lesson” at the Barrymore Theatre, one of the 10 plays in the late, great Bard of Pittsburgh’s famous cycle of Black American life in the 20th century, starring the Hollywood actor Samuel L. Jackson and directed by the actor’s wife, LaTanya Richardson Jackson. The cast is further replete with Danielle Brooks from “Orange Is the New Black” and John David Washington, the son of Denzel Washington.
And the titular prop piano, which Wilson employed as a modest symbol for the ancestral sacrifices of those who perished on the Middle Passage and plantation fields beyond, has such elaborate and detailed carvings that you can imagine it being stored and later used on a soundstage for an upcoming movie, even if a modest one already was made. I’ve seen “The Piano Lesson” several times, but never with such a grand upright piano, replete with the faces of long-dead enslaved people staring out at a Broadway audience.
Wilson, of course, wrote a play for each decade of the Black experience and “The Piano Lesson,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, covers the 1930s. A young man named Boy Willie (Washington) arrives in Pittsburgh’s Hill District (the site of all but one of Wilson’s plays) with his countrified friend, Lymon (Ray Fisher) escaping the racist legal system of Mississippi. Boy Willie, who has learned under duress to be a schemer, intends to effect the sale of the family heirloom, as carved by an enslaved ancestor under the orders of a slave owner whose wife missed the enslaved people he had sold and wanted a reminder. A further family member even was killed for stealing, or rather returning, the piano to a family blown apart by the cruelty of slavery.
Boy Willie sees only money. Unfortunately for him, though, he owns the piano in tandem with his sister, Berniece (Brooks) and the siblings sure can’t carve it down the middle. And Berniece sees the value of the piano differently. And thus Boy Willie has to learn one of Wilson’s key lessons for young people, that it is folly to disrespect those upon whose shoulders you stand. And he also has to learn you sometimes have to break the law to do the right thing by your people.
As Wilson’s diversely structured plays go, “The Piano Lesson” is perhaps the most moralistic and melodramatic yet also the most fun to watch. (Preacher Avery, played by Trai Byers, and the sardonic Wining Boy, played by Michael Potts, add to the clash of Hill District characters toward the end of the first Great Migration.) As Boy Willie tries to sell the instrument, the entire house (designed here with a fractured flourish by Beowulf Boritt) creaks its disapproval as the ghosts of the past are awakened. And as the two siblings fight this out, the older and wiser uncle, Doaker (Jackson), watches in studied remove, alternately dispensing helpful wisdom and cynical acceptance.
He knows the ghostly history of the ancestral piano and what it means to this family and, by extension, to Black America.
Jackson is terrific, especially in Act 1, as he crackles with life and humor, sparring with Washington with a delicious kind of ease, even as the authentic Brooks, playing one of Wilson’s strongest female characters, tries to build a home for her daughter and the next generation. Jackson has the kind of rhetorical vibe that works well with Wilson’s naturalistic poetry and, especially for anyone over 50, he makes it very clear that his guy knows all about the follies and narcissistic tendencies of youth; Wilson wrote Doaker to know the end of the play even from the beginning and that is exactly as he plays him.
Act 1 is far stronger here than Act 2; the first half of the show is filled with compelling staging ideas and rich, specific acting, whereas things fall off the boil considerably in Act 2, when the choices become more general and feel less distinct, as if the show ran out of time in rehearsal. There’s a desired climax here involving Boy Willie’s eventual understanding of his own lack of understanding and, with Washington, you never fully see the realization dawn, a key part of “The Piano Lesson.” Maybe in time Washington will find his way there.
But when it comes to Wilson’s poetry, visual metaphors and roiling ideas? All flowing here with eloquence and verve.
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At the Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St., New York; pianolessonplay.com
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