The Piano Lesson (review)

After August Wilson's death in 2005, controversy swirled around the relative freedom taken with the 2009 production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone. While alive, Wilson insisted that black directors direct his plays. After his death, Wilson's widow Constanza Romero permitted Bartlett Sher, a white director, to stage a revival of Joe Turner on Broadway. Romero's choice to disregard Wilson's posthumous directorial provision has opened up new possibilities for post-2005 productions, such as the Yale Repertory Theatre's 2011 revival of The Piano Lesson, that stray from the aesthetic and the ideology Wilson cultivated throughout his life. Yale Repertory Theatre's latest production of The Piano Lesson, to riff on a famous quote from Toni Morrison's Beloved, confirms that the definition of Wilsonian theatre belongs to the definers. While alive, Wilson put specific mandates on his plays in order to control productions of his work (including the race of directors). After his death, a more expansive range of interpretations of Wilson has emerged.

No other place is more fitting to begin a new chapter in Wilson's theatre history than Yale Repertory Theatre, the theatre that premiered The Piano Lesson and served as the site of one of Wilson's most productive collaborations with director Lloyd Richards. Wilson's successful collaboration with Richards met a fitting expression in the director's signature use of ensembles, which mirrored and drew attention to the importance of collaboration within theatrical production. The Piano Lesson, in particular, demonstrates the importance of communities in helping protagonists to find their singular voice through the influence of secondary characters, including Doaker and Wining Boy, who help to articulate the family's history as the siblings jockey for control of their precious heirloom. In undeniable resistance to the singularity of a leading role, Wilson's The PianoLesson emphasizes the equal importance of Boy Willie and his sister Berniece.

Eisa Davis (Berniece) and cast in The Piano Lesson. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The 2011 revival, directed by Liesl Tommy, marked a significant shift from Wilson's use of traditional ensemble acting and language-driven performances, to a production with a singular dominant character and an emphasis, in certain scenes featuring Boy Willie, on physicality over language. Unlike previous productions of The Piano Lesson that called attention to the equal footing of Boy Willie and Berniece, including the 1987 Yale Rep's production, the 2011 revival focused on Boy Willie's singular ability to influence the final outcome of the play. Moreover, this production predominantly relied on gestures and physical movements to realize Wilson's finely crafted narrative. Productions during Wilson's lifetime often emphasized the spoken word to communicate its story through the strong, crisp, and spellbinding voices of the actors—as, for example, Phylicia Rashad's stirring performance in the 2004 Broadway production of Gem of the Ocean. The Piano Lesson also provides fertile ground for Berniece to tell her story, with moving descriptions of the heartache the piano has caused her and her mother, but the force of Berniece's performance depends on her appearing to have equal footing with Boy Willie throughout the play.

In the final scene of the play, Berniece's ability to put the piano to good use abates Boy Willie's desire to sell it, and he leaves with the warning that if she stops playing the piano, he will be back. In Tommy's production, the tone of Boy Willie's warning suggested that his own authority influenced the outcome of the story. Notably, Berniece's victory over the ghost at the end of the play did not take place in the original production, although Wilson incorporated the resolution for the first Broadway production. The original production emphasized Boy Willie's and Berniece's mutual equality, ending ambiguously with the fate of the piano undecided so as not to let either character overwhelm the other. Conversely, in the 2011 production, Boy Willie (LeRoy McClain) dominated the play...