American Drama in the Age of Film

10. Making Oneself Big

10 Making Oneself Big I would just look at you and wonder how you could be that big. I wanted to be like that. I would go to school and try to make myself feel big. But I never could. I told myself that’s okay . . . when I get grown I’m gonna be big like that. —August Wilson, Jitney The Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (1995) represents a much more typical television adaptation of a play than either of the taped performances of True West, which took place before live audiences in theatrical settings. Hardly films at all, the Shepard productions footnote stage performances. Unlike the televised productions of Death of a Salesman, however , The Piano Lesson disguises the fact that it originated in the theater. Wilson ’s teleplay, like David Mamet’s own screen adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross, discussed in the preceding chapter, departs radically from its theatrical antecedent , much more significantly than either Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson ’s version of Margaret Edson’s Wit, or even Tony Kushner’s sprawling Angels in America, the subjects of the final two chapters. The television production of Wilson’s play, although it includes many of the original Broadway cast members, photographs action in the natural environment as well as on the studio set, and features multiple location shots to expand the world of the play beyond the con- fines of the kitchen and parlor of Doaker Charles’s Pittsburgh home. It depicts many scenes that the play only alludes to as previous or offstage events. Despite these additions, however, the film version struggles to capture the essential theatrical “bigness” of the stage drama. The fable of The Piano Lesson is simple and straightforward. Prompted by the death of a slave-owning scion, a black family learns the value of a legacy. The conflict, the only question in the play, revolves around the question of what to do with the piano. Boy Willie’s early-morning arrival at his uncle Doaker’s house opens the action. He has traveled north from Mississippi with his friend Lymon in order to sell watermelons out of a truck to the city folk in Pittsburgh. His larger purpose is to sell the piano in Doaker’s house that has belonged to his sister, Berniece, who lives upstairs in the house since her husband’s death three years earlier. Boy Willie intends to take the money from the sale to buy land owned previously by the recently deceased Sutter. This is the same land that Boy Making Oneself Big / 133 Willie and Berniece’s father worked as a sharecropper. Their patriarch never had the resources to buy the land for himself. In the name of his father, Boy Willie wants to claim the piano for his inheritance and buy the land upon which he was raised. He sees the sale of the piano as a means to an end, the possibility for economic viability and a source of livelihood for the future. His sister, Berniece, on the other hand, treasures the piano as a reminder of the past and a way to preserve family history. Significantly, although she refuses to sit down and play the piano, she nevertheless refuses to give it up. In fact, she insists that her daughter, Maretha, take lessons and practice on it. Carvings in the wood piano chronicle the Charles family’s dissolution and bind it together forever in history at the same time. They show the bloody history of slavery and the continued ramifications of poverty, prejudice, and oppression in the Jim Crow South. As told by Doaker Charles in a drawn-out tale, Robert Sutter, Sutter’s grandfather, owned the Charles family back in slavery times. He traded “one and a half niggers,” Doaker’s grandmother and father, to a neighbor for the piano as a present for his wife. Doaker’s grandfather, a worker of wood, carved the portraits of the two slaves into the piano when the lady of the house began to miss her former attendants. This way, Doaker observes, “she had her piano and her niggers too” (44). His granddaddy didn’t stop with the portraits of his wife and son, but carved a history of the whole family all over the piano, on its sides and legs as well as its front. His grandson Boy Charles, Boy Willie’s father and Doaker’s elder brother, stole the piano out of Sutter...