The title of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Piano Lesson” – one of his cycle of plays on African American life in the 20th century – suggests it has to do with learning how to play the musical instrument that features so prominently. But it's not the kind of lesson, or even use of a piano, that you might think.
Instead, due to the stellar cast in A Noise Within’s beautifully staged production, expertly directed by Gregg T. Daniel, “The Piano Lesson” offers a deeply moving and transcendent experience allowed by a particular piano – one that a brother wants to sell to buy precious land, but a sister wants to keep to preserve the family legacy.
Set in 1930s Pittsburgh, the play takes place in the home of an older Doaker (Alex Morris), his niece Berneice (Nija Okoro) and her 12-year-old daughter Maretha (Madison Keffer). The intimate multi-level home (scenic design by Tesshi Nakagawa) allows enough breadth and depth for the characters to interact naturally, with lighting both warm and dimly moody (designed by Brandon Baruch) and subtle, eerie music (by composer and music director Maritri Garrett) evoking the ghosts – both literal and figurative – that haunt this family.
Berneice’s brother Boy Willie (Kai A. Ealy) arrives very early one morning from Mississippi – where the family is originally from – with friend Lymon (Evan Lewis Smith) and a truckload of watermelons to sell for a profit up north in Pittsburgh. But he also plans to sell the home’s piano that he and Berneice have inherited to buy farmland with his half of the money.
Doaker, who works in the railway, and his dapper brother Wining Boy (Gerald C. Rivers), who once had a recording contract, explain that the piano had belonged to the wife of a plantation owner named Sutter who had once enslaved the family. Sutter had traded Doaker’s grandmother and his father, who was a boy at the time, to buy the piano for his wife. But when the wife missed her former enslaved people, Doaker’s grandfather carved their images into the wood of the piano from memory for her, along with other images of remembered family moments.
Years later, Doaker, Wining Boy and their brother Boy – father of Berneice and Boy Willie – decided to steal the piano from the Sutter home, in a sense freeing the people carved on it, though Boy was then killed. Later, Sutter’s grandson also died after being mysteriously pushed into his own well.
Berneice now won’t let Boy Willie take the piano due this fraught connection with their family, having already turned down an offer to sell it arranged by Avery (Jernard Burks), who is also from Mississippi but becoming a preacher in Pittsburgh and who wants to marry Berneice.
As Berneice and Boy Willie spar over several days of otherwise normal activities, ghost sightings become more frequent in the house, culminating in a failed exorcism by Avery and a metaphysical confrontation with Boy Willie. Berneice attempts to evoke her ancestors from the piano to help.
It’s a powerful and resonant scene that brings home slavery’s impact on people – the enslaved treated as commodities, families broken up indiscriminately – and the deep need to preserve familial connection. The piano reflects that heritage with its carvings, but also represents the convoluted and violent history of enslaver and enslaved.
The actors’ rich portrayals of their nuanced characters are superb here. Ealy as the forceful Boy Willie and Okoro as the quietly strong Berneice fully immerse themselves in their roles, making palpable their characters’ deep wounds inherited from their ancestors, becoming especially poignant in the second act.
Morris embodies a stalwart yet warm Doaker, and Rivers gives Wining Boy a hustler’s charm and gate and is especially humorous while drunk in Act 2. Smith imbues Lymon with a boyish innocence as he buys Wining Boy’s purple suit and navigates the bars, cinemas and more ornately women of the north, such as Grace (a delightful LeShay Tomlinson Boyce), whom he laments goes home with Boy Willie instead of him.
Along the way, details emerge about Black life at the time – negotiating a place between south and north, traveling along roads and railroad lines, owning land within the constraints of white economic and political power – and of course the everyday resonances of music, religion, love, and an unwritten future captured by young Maretha passively absorbing the family stories as Berneice does her hair with grease and a hot iron.
It's a lot to cover, but under Daniel’s direction, the action is engagingly fluid and suspenseful – you really don't know what’s going to happen next – heightening the story’s innate tensions. And due to the actors’ vibrant portrayals, the characters stay with you long after exiting the theatre, their stories floating searchingly like the ghost of Sutter and perhaps the old souls on the piano.
“The Piano Lesson” continues at A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, through Nov. 10, with performances Thursdays and Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. For tickets and information, call (626) 356-3100 or visit anoisewithin.org. Run time is 2 hours and 45 minutes, including intermission.
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