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.
