The Piano Lesson

The Piano Lesson is a play by August Wilson. It was the 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama. The play concerns a brother and a sister arguing about whether they should sell their family piano. It represents the 1930s in The Pittsburgh Cycle.

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 daughter who were sold in exchange for the piano during the days of enslavement. The play explores the conflict between two classic desires of the typical African-American family in this era: ownership of land and remembrance of their roots.

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

External links

• The Piano Lesson at IMDb
• South Coast Repertory articles about the play