Word: pianos
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...piano in Doaker Charles' living room is a family heirloom, and like most heirlooms it is prized more than used, its value measured less in money than in memories. For this piano, the Charles family was torn asunder in slavery times: to acquire it, the white man who owned them traded away Doaker's grandmother and father, then a nine-year-old. On this piano, Doaker's grieving grandfather, the plantation carpenter, carved portrait sculptures in African style of the wife and son he had lost. To Doaker's hothead older brother, born under the second slavery of Jim Crow...
...sits admired but mostly untouched in Doaker's house in Pittsburgh, and it threatens to tear the family apart again. Boy Willie Charles, son of the man who stole the piano, wants to sell it and use the proceeds to buy and farm the very land where his ancestors were slaves. Boy Willie's sister Berniece denounces as sacrilege the idea of selling away a legacy her father died to obtain...
That is the premise of The Piano Lesson, which opened last week at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. The lesson of the title -- an instruction in morality rather than scales or fingering -- makes the work the richest yet of dramatist August Wilson, whose first three Broadway efforts, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, each won the New York Drama Critics Circle prize as best play of the year. The fact that producers are not shoving each other in haste to bring Piano Lesson to Broadway, especially in a season when the Tony Awards...
...Piano Lesson debuted more than a year ago at the Yale Repertory Theater, where Wilson has launched all his plays. In that production, the work seemed an intriguing but unpolished amalgam of kitchen-sink realism (there is literally one onstage) and window-rattling, curtain-swirling supernaturalism. Not much of the actual text has changed. But at the Goodman the play confidently shuttles spectators between the everyday present and the ghostly remnants of the past, until ultimately the two worlds collide. The first glimpse of the spookily poetic comes before a word is spoken, when a shaft of white light illumines...
...PIANO LESSON. This stunning work by dramatist August Wilson, at Chicago's Goodman Theater, combines the emotional clout of his Pulitzer-prizewinning Fences with the lyricism of his Joe Turner's Come and Gone...