The Piano Lesson is a case, a “lesson” if you will, in point. The drama centers on a conflict and confrontation between siblings: Berniece, who lives in a Northern city, is clinging reverently to a piece of furniture—a piano—that is literally and figuratively her and her ancestors’ history. Boy Willie, who has remained in the South, wants to sell the piano to buy the same land these ancestors worked on, changing generations of servitude into ownership and escape from a brutal past. The refusal of brother and sister to surrender, or even to compromise, affects the action of all the characters in the play.

It was in reading the text that I was struck by the beauty and accuracy of August Wilson’s language, as well as a richness waiting to be mined from the interstices between performance and text, between the stage and the readerly imagination.

With no stage to inform a reader, the time and the place of the action must be deduced from the description of the setting, the first line of which uses the word “parlor,” an unmistakable signal of a certain decade and a certain class. Without benefit of a stage, a reader must create the furniture in this “house that is sparsely furnished” with “evidence of a woman’s touch” but with “a lack of warmth and vigor.” A reader imagines predawn and evening light, and gives face and form to the characters as they enter. Additionally, there is the listening that a reader can do unimpeded by an actor’s interpretation. August Wilson’s dialogue, dramatic and informative, is also “hyper-naturalistic” and reads in some places like lyrics. He teases from African American vernacular its most salient elements: loaded metaphor, nuance, clever use of the unsayable and the resonant spaces in conversational exchange. And the music—here the percussive staccato of these lines (some picked up literally from song) as Boy Willie describes his plan to buy Sutter’s land:

BOY WILLIE: . . . Walk in there. Tip my hat. Lay my money down on the table. Get my deed and walk on out . . . Gin my cotton. Get my seed. And I’ll see you again next year.

Furthermore, there are narrative threads in the play that “play” more deeply in the reading of it. For me there were two seams that were as intriguing as the main plot. Two undramatized but significant “silent” stories. The first was the life of the truck Boy Willie and Lymon arrive in. This truck full of watermelons is not just the play’s mobility—it is also a kind of offstage character with its own colorful personality and multiple roles. Its first appearance elicits a question about its origin.

DOAKER: (Looking out the window.) Where you all get that truck from?

Shortly afterward Berniece asks the same question three times:

BERNIECE: Where you all get that truck from?

BOY WILLIE: I told you it’s Lymon’s.

BERNIECE: Where you get the truck from, Lymon?

LYMON: I bought it.

BERNIECE: Where he get that truck from, Boy Willie?