—The Star-Ledger (Newark)

ALSO BY AUGUST WILSON
PUBLISHED BY PLUME

Fences

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Seven Guitars

Two Trains Running

PLUME

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright © 1988, 1990 by August Wilson

Foreword copyright © 2007 by Toni Morrison

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

The Piano Lesson first appeared, in different form, in the Yale Theatre magazine.

Toni Morrison’s foreword first appeared in the Theatre Communications Group’s edition of The Piano Lesson.

CAUTION: All rights whatsoever in this play—including stock and amateur rights in the USA—are strictly reserved and application for performance, etc., should be made before rehearsal to the Estate of August Wilson, c/o Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, 1285 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York, 10019, Attention: John Breglio. No performance may be given unless a license has been obtained.

Plume is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Wilson, August.

The piano lesson / August Wilson

p. cm.

ISBN: 9780452265349 (paperback)

ISBN: 9780593087596 (ebook)

I. Title.

PS3573.145677P54 1990

812’.54—dc20 90-38735

CIP

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Version_1

for my sisters and brothers

Freda
Linda
Donna
Edwin
Richard

CONTENTS

About the Author

Praise for The Piano Lesson

Also by August Wilson

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword

The Setting

Act One

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act Two

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Gin my cotton

Sell my seed

Buy my baby

Everything she need

—Skip James

FOREWORD

by Toni Morrison

The glow accompanying August Wilson’s place in contemporary American theater is fixed. With numerous nominations from multiple theater organizations, two Pulitzer prizes, burgeoning scholarship, and hundreds of regional theater performances, it is hard to gainsay the luster or the permanence of that glow. Part of the stability of Wilson’s reputation rests on the singularity of being a prolific and successful playwright who confines his themes to African American culture. Other black playwrights—Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin—have both place and impact in contemporary American theater but their reputations rely on far fewer works. August Wilson widened the space for African American theater and controlled it for some twenty-five years.