The Piano Lesson

August Wilson

A PLUME BOOK

THE PIANO LESSON

AUGUST WILSON is one of America’s leading playwrights, whose work has been acclaimed as among the finest of the American theater. His first play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best new play. His second play, Fences, won numerous awards, including the Tony Award, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. His third play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, also was best play of the year by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. The Piano Lesson (1990) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. August Wilson passed away in 2005.

Praise for The Piano Lesson

“Jubilant . . . There are moments in this play that simply take your breath away. . . . The issues that emerge encapsulate the whole haunted history of American slavery and its legacy. . . . A triumph of language, music, unforgettable characters, and, above all, of faith and resurrection.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“Among the most compelling, eloquent dramas August Wilson has ever written.”

—USA Today

“It is a work of incredibly rich scenes and powerful moments. . . . Wilson’s language time and again soars with lyric beauty. . . . Here is theater of irresistible power!”

—Chicago Tribune

“August Wilson has established himself as the richest theatrical voice to emerge in the U.S. since Tennesse Williams and Arthur Miller.”

—Time

“Wonderful . . . Seat-edgingly theatrical, thrillingly dramatic, extraordinarily funny . . . This is a play in which to lose yourself, a play that lights up man!”

—Clive Barnes, New York Post

“August Wilson dreams up marvelously rich and complicated people and sets them loose to tell unforgettable stories of their people. . . . The Piano Lesson is a lovely tragi-comedy. . . . Haunting . . . Wilson is a poet, a phenomenon, a treasure.”

—New York Newsday

“A feast . . . A gripping drama laced with sharp comedy, a fable with vivid characters and rich dialogue . . . Vibrant . . . Riveting.”

—Stewart Klein, WNYW (New York)

“The piano is no less vital a symbol of one family’s spiritual heritage than Chekhov’s cherry orchard was. . . . A stunner.”

—Washington Post

“Like his other works, The Piano Lesson shows a sure instinct for drama. . . . Mr. Wilson’s ear is unfailing . . . his rhythms, inflections, and vocabulary capture perfectly the rich verbal lore of his characters . . . the play . . . can take its place alongside other works in this remarkable series of plays.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Mesmerizing . . . It is August Wilson’s most accomplished work to date, resonating with a poetry that enhances a strong story and illuminates expertly drawn characters.”

—Associated Press

“An enormously funny and always riveting drama of remarkable dimensions . . . farce, pathos, and ghostly visions all seem at home with each other in Doaker Charles’s tidy house where a 137-year-old piano dominates the parlor. . . . August Wilson’s richest and most provocative work so far.”

—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

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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

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.

Further burnish to this glow is provided by the rigor and coherence of his project: to address African American life introspectively—not as a dialogue with or lesson for non-blacks—and, paradoxically, through the strength and suppleness of his artistry, enlighten both cultures. Commentary and critical response routinely reinforce the nature of this acclaim by focusing on his ambition: to document ten decades of black American life; on the authenticity of his work based on his intimacy with that life; and on the mixed-race, working-class elements in his interesting biography. Praise is regularly heaped on his “universality”—his ability to make black life (read “exotic/limited”) relate to non-black life (read “real/normal”). It is an annoying obligation that seems to beset all and only black artists. The underlying question being: “Are you an artist or a black artist?” Wilson eschews this routine question not by fusing two racial identities but by prioritizing one over the other. “Before I am anything,” he writes, “a man or a playwright, I am an African American.” His goal, as he first described it in the New York Times in 2000, was to “present the unique particulars of black American culture . . . to place this culture on stage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we thought of ourselves.”

There are, however, some respectful reservations about the quality of certain plays—reservations that call attention to their length (too much), a plethora of deus ex machina devices (ghosts; characters who live for centuries; sudden, senseless death) and sermonizing instead of storytelling. The author’s anti-assimilationist activities are highlighted with a persistence that no other ethnic or national identity merits. It is only fair to note that Wilson provokes attention to race-inflected evaluations by insisting, for example, that only a black director could serve the film Fences, and excluding white characters from his dramatis personae altogether. Whether lavish praise or cautious reservation, few of these responses consider aspects other than historical-cum-sociological ones.

The level of his achievement is high. This comes powerfully into view when the play is read, an activity that is for me equal to, and in some ways more fruitful than, seeing its stage production.

Perhaps it was being a radio child. Listening to narrative demands waves of imagination to supply the details: furnishing the room with the fewest of clues available; visualizing the sky with a sound track of rain or chirping birds; full participation in constructing what characters look like. It certainly influenced the way I read, and I believe it instigated my preferences for reading plays whether or not I have seen them. Unlike watching one, reading a good play could never disappoint.

Good theater can be the most compelling experience, enhancing perception far beyond the text. Among the seven or eight performances of Medea I have seen, only one did that for me. On the other hand, I have seen Pinter plays that rival the pleasure of reading their texts. Actors and theater people read plays and do this imaginative work as a matter of course; it is their job. But for a nontheater person, an average alert reader, it has unique rewards. Along with reacting to a staged presentation, there is another, rather different experience; the vigorous interactions between reader and text and meeting the imaginative demands of the work on one’s own.

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?

Her skepticism is palpable as the men insist upon the truck’s primary characteristic—its legitimacy—just as they insist upon their own honesty. They take pride in being able to repair it as it breaks down three times on the way to Pittsburgh and several times after its arrival. In spite of their frustrations, their industry pays off and they are able to get to a neighborhood where they can sell their watermelons. The produce the truck holds is convenient and symbolic, since watermelons are iconographically and comically related to black people. Yet here they represent the best kind of self-help. The truck’s breakdown journey is as interesting as its passengers. It has been home and hiding place for Lymon and a double necessity to Boy Willie’s project: he expects its bed to hold two sources of income—selling produce and transporting the valuable piano. Finally, its exit enables a couple, Lymon and Grace, bent on being one, to escape; and it forces Boy Willie to abandon his goal, with no option but to take the train home.

The truck bears a heavy weight as symbol and dramatic glue. Integral to the action, it sits offstage but not off page, where it stokes the imagination. What color is it? What make? What is the mechanical problem? What is its future? What will become of it and Lymon and Grace? Like a magic carpet it arrives, solves problems, and disappears with lovers aboard. The time such ruminations take and the pleasure they summon are most available in reading.

The second thing that strikes one in reading the play (which its staging may not stress) is the fear that animates it. Ostensibly, we are in a safe house on a quiet street preoccupied by the question of who will triumph—Berniece or Boy Willie—and whether a ghost is real and, if so, is it dangerous? But even a threatening ghost hovering in any room it chooses pales before the gripping fear of what is outside—the steady, casual intimacy with imprisonment and violent death. Parchman Farm, a prison, is referred to several times as a place where characters have met each other, served time on, and know as well as they know their hometown. The anecdotes about other friends and relatives are marked by bloodletting, sometimes mistaken, sometimes casual, and other times deliberate. What Lymon’s mother felt she had to do was necessary in order to free her husband from jail. A hopeless sacrifice, one gathers, for he is later murdered.

WINING BOY: . . . L. D. Jackson. That was one bad-luck nigger. Got killed at some dance. Fellow walked in and shot him thinking he was somebody else.

Berniece cautions Lymon about city life and its women.

BERNIECE: You don’t need to be out there in them saloons. Ain’t no telling what you liable to run into out there. This one liable to cut you quick as that one shoot you . . . I don’t know what them women out there be thinking about.

The Piano Lesson

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

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