The Piano Lesson @ Theatre Arlington
—Jan Farrington
It took me a while to warm up to Theatre Arlington’s production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, but once it got rolling (and it rolls for a good long while), this sprawling family story caught me up again, as it usually does. Wilson’s ability to let “ordinary” people speak their truths in every way—from blunt honesty to vivid poetry and song—always astonishes.
Director Natalie King clearly knows that the “action” of this play is sometimes physical—but more often hidden in the talks these characters have around the kitchen table. Some are family; most have known one another for years. And lots of emotional baggage is being carried, just waiting to come crashing down.
At rock bottom, this is a story about different ways to preserve heritage. That may sound dry, but let’s put it another way: Your family were slaves for generations. Some of them were split up and sold to pay for a white mistress’ new piano—which later (long story) came to be carved (by another ancestor) with the faces and stories of your enslaved ancestors. Now, in the early 20th century, there’s a choice: Does the family keep this symbol of their history, or sell it to buy some of the land they once worked as a white man’s “property”?
Of course, there is no single right answer. But through the quarreling, joking, drinking and music-making of the story, this family will come to a better place.
And there’s a ghost, which always helps.
King directs a solid cast with more than a few outstanding performances. Jerrold Trice plays Doaker, owner of the Pittsburgh house that anchors the northern side of the family. He’s a railroad porter, a prestigious and steady job for a Black man in the 1930s—and because he travels, he keeps in touch with the family in Mississippi. Trice makes a terrific anchor for the story, with a rumbling voice and a lively way with a story. Doaker’s widowed niece Berniece (Shaundra Norwood) lives with him, along with young daughter Maretha (Alyssa Melton). Berniece is being wooed by preacher Avery (Seykou Calhoun), also a migrant from back home. Another uncle, the seen-it-all Wining Boy (David Wendell Boykins), was a musician but now seems to travel aimlessly—dropping in from time to time.
At dawn one morning, Berniece’s force-of-nature brother Boy Willie (Sean Massey) bangs on the door. He’s up from the South to sell a truckload of watermelons to the white folk of Pittsburgh—with his country-boy friend Lymon (Kevin Davis Jr.), who owns the falling-apart truck and (“ducking and dodging” the sheriff back home) thinks he might just stay up North and look for love.
Boy Willie is full of news: the family’s old nemesis, the landowner Sutter, has died falling down his own well—just the latest in a series of “accidents” that may be related to the burning death of Berniece and Boy Willie’s father some years back. A lot of white men have been falling down wells, and a “ghost” is taking the blame.
Boy Willie wants to buy the farmland Sutter left behind. With his savings and the watermelon money, he just needs his share of the piano (splitting the profit with his sister) to have enough. But before he goes toe-to-toe with Berniece, everyone in the story has already told him she won’t sell…ever. The piano is like a family totem, a reminder of all that’s gone down for centuries. Still, we also can see the justice—and the practicality—in Boy Willie’s vision of owning and working the land that’s soaked in his family’s blood, sweat, and tears.
Boy Willie’s down-home friend Lymon—running away from that kind of farm life— is played for gentle comedy, but Davis’ portrayal is sweet and touching. Melton is winning as tween-ager Maretha, delighted by all the family coming by to entertain her. And Jayden Russell is nicely Betty-Boop-ish as Grace, a local girl both Boy Willie and Lymon would like to know better.
As brother/sister, Massey and Norwood make a great pair. Under her amusingly buttoned-up church lady manner (Diana Story’s costumes for her are nicely detailed), Berniece is just as stubborn as Boy Willie, though he’s definitely noisier. She keeps turning down the patient and surprisingly wise Avery (a fine portrayal by Calhoun), but you expect she’ll marry him once she’s ready. Massey’s fiercely driven Willie starts loud and gets louder, but that’s how Wilson wrote the character: he’s the annoying brother who comes to visit and won’t leave.
Wilson slips in the darker notes in a way that lets you see them, or not. We tap our toes at the stomping, rhythmic, strangely joyful work song “Alberta”—sung by a group of the men around the table. Then we remember how most of them know it: from their time at the brutal “Parchman Farm”—the state prison in Mississippi that was another form of enslavement for black men. These men work and do their best, but still have moments with the law that frighten and shape them. And the family is a bit broken, like a long-distance marriage—with half down South and the others struggling to make a new life up North. Slave times aren’t that far away from them, historically or emotionally.
So who’s right? Will Boy Willie ever change his mind, or Berniece hers? Just when you think not, something gets him by the throat, and moves her to make music on a piano she hasn’t touched for years. The standoff is over. They’ve each experienced a breakthrough—learned a “lesson”—and it changes them just enough.
This shaggy story takes its sweet time getting to the shouting, ghost-wrasslin’ end. But patience pays off. It’s enlightening and heart-tugging to be a “watcher” of their stories, quarrels and life-changing moments. In the play’s whirlwind last seconds (with good-byes and hugs going around), you may find a catch in your throat, as a glow of happiness and harmony descends.
It may not last, but it does us good to see it.
WHEN: Through May 15
WHERE: Theatre Arlington, 316 W. Main Street, Arlington
WEB: theatrearlington.org
