The Piano Lesson

The Piano Lesson is a play by August Wilson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright. It won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

The play concerns a brother and a sister who argue about whether they should sell their family piano. Boy Willie, a sharecropper from the South, wants to sell his family's ancestral piano to buy land. His Pittsburgh sister Berniece insists on keeping it. The piano has the carved faces of their great-grandfather's wife and son, who were sold in exchange for the piano during the days of enslavement. In essence, the piano serves as an embodiment of their struggles as a family and how they overcame. However, the piano is mystical in many ways owing to it's history. Being seen as a symbolic embodiment of their past ancestry, a subtle, reserved fear is also a part of their feelings toward their piano.

The play premiered on November 26th, 1987 at the Yale Reperatory Theater and debuted on Broadway in 1990. It won Wilson the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and his second Pulitzer (his first came in 1987 for Fences). The original Broadway cast featured Charles S. Dutton, Carl Gordon, Rocky Carroll, and S. Epatha Merkerson.

Under August Wilson's supervision, The Piano Lesson was made into a made-for-TV movie in 1995. Charles S. Dutton plays Boy Willie and Alfre Woodard plays Berniece.

Set in 1936, this play represents the 1930s and the fourth in The Pittsburgh Cycle.

External links

• The Piano Lesson at IMDb
• "Berta, Berta" (song from The Piano Lesson), performed by Brandon Marsalis