A Lesson for all Generations: "The Piano Lesson"

As Boy Willie pushes forward with his plans, family alliances are challenged and passionate voices are raised loud enough to wake the dead. 

 

 The Piano Lesson , winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, takes audiences back in time to 1930s Pittsburgh. Boy Willie has come up from Mississippi with a truck full of watermelons and a head full of plans. He unexpectedly charges into the home of his Uncle Doaker, sister Berniece and niece Maretha, demanding attention and a drink. Boy Willie attempts to persuade his sister to sell the family piano in order to purchase land back home, where their family were once slaves. Berniece is forced to take a stand to protect the antique piano that depicts the family’s struggle out of slavery through its ornate carvings. 

Meet the cast of The Piano Lesson! Watch this video to get an insider's look at what goes on during rehearsals, the chemistry between cast members and what the show means to them. 

Click here to learn more about the playwright, August Wilson! This blog post takes you through the famous Pittsburgh Cycle, some of his biggest influences as a playwright and some of the direct inspirations for his play
The Piano Lesson!

Written by August Wilson and directed by Lee Stille, The Piano Lesson is a haunting poetic drama that will be performed in the Sponberg Theatre on February 10, 11, 12, 13 at 7pm, and February 13 & 14 at 2pm. Recommended for ages 13+

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August Wilson's Recipe for Success

“Well, actually, I didn’t start out with a grand idea. I wrote a play called Jitney! set in ’77 and a play called Fullerton Street that I set in ’41. Then I wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which I set in ’27, and it was after I did that I said, ‘I’ve written three plays in three different decades, so why don’t I just continue to do that?’”

 Eastern Michigan University Theatre is gearing up for its next Mainstage production, "The Piano Lesson" by August Wilson. For those of you who don't know, August Wilson is an American playwright most famous for his Pittsburgh Cycle. Wilson was born on April 27, 1945 under the name Frederick August Kittel Jr. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His Pittsburgh Cycle is a series of ten plays, nine of which are set in Pittsburgh, that chronicle the African American experience throughout each decade of the 20th century. It seems only fitting that he would write a series of plays that majorly focus on life in the city that he grew up in. "The Piano Lesson" fits into the cycle by depicting the African American experience during the 1930s. 

Wilson claimed to have been heavily influenced by the 'four B's.' These 'four B's' included: the blues, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, playwright Amiri Baraka and artist Romare Bearden. In a 1999 interview with The Paris Review Wilson discussed their influence on his work by saying, "From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don’t write political plays. From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality." The image to the right is a collage by Romare Bearden entitled The Piano Lesson and it helped inspire Wilson's play of the same name. 

"The Piano Lesson" was written in 1986. It premiered at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in 1987 and appeared on Broadway in 1990 at the Walter Kerr Theatre. In 1990 the play was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play and won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. August Wilson has been noted not for writing to a particular audience, but instead writing about the Black experience in America “And contained within that experience, because it is a human experience,” he said, “are all universalities.”

See August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson" come to life at Eastern Michigan University! You can see this powerful show Feb. 10-13 at 7pm and Feb. 13 & 14 at 2pm. 

 

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