August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is not a comedy. It has comedic moments, pockets of respite that Wilson’s characters lull in and out of. But the latest revival, under the direction of LaTanya Richardson Jackson, is a-textual. Wilson’s seminal work is tonally misread, flattened into a sitcom about a haunted piano versus a family struggling to forge anew amid their past.
The Charles family is wading in grief, deluges of trauma rotting its roots.
A desperate Boy Willie (John David Washington) has come north to sell the family’s piano. It is a relic that his enslaved ancestors were traded for by their owner, Sutter. It is an heirloom Boy Willie’s own father died to “steal” back.
Boy Willie is adamant on using the piano’s profits to buy land his ancestors slaved on. It’s a chance for a man who has spent his life indebted (as a sharecropper and a prisoner) to steer his own destiny. “I’m supposed to build on what they left me,” says an impassioned Willie to his uncle Doaker (Samuel L Jackson), the anchor and archivist of the Charles family.
But, Berniece (Danielle Brooks) insists that the piano stay firmly planted, tired of her brother’s impulsivity and disregard for the piano’s legacy (there’s blood on the piano, she warns ). Unlike Boy Willie, Berniece and Doaker have seen Sutter’s ghost haunting the family’s residence. The spirit, they argue, is a presence of the past that Boy Willie too easily forgets.
Under Jackson’s helm, the production’s problems begin with its curious lack of vulnerability. Every inner glimpse into the Charles family and their tribe is turned into a performance, squeezed of its honesty.
The characters’ recollections (of past wounds, of their hopes and dreams) are all blocked outward to completely face the audience. They’re delivered sermon-style, as if they aren’t revelations or confessions, but exposition. Even the piano itself feels bizarrely overemphasized. To show that the antique is ancestral, eerie FX and a spotlight drills down on to the instrument intermittently. It’s a spoon feeding that does little to illuminate the piano’s actual importance.
At times, the literalness is with purpose. Sermonizing from Avery (Trai Byers), a pastor who longs for a distant Berniece, make sense as he is actually a priest. Byers balances well Avery’s conviction for his faith and the wounds he licks given Berniece’s rebuffing of him.
Wining Boy (Michael Potts), a piano player and Doaker’s older brother, also fits well in Jackson’s interpretation; as does Lymon (Ray Fisher), Boy Willie’s friend who has joined him up north. Potts, especially, brings a necessary humor to Wining Boy’s vagrant ways, while reminding us of his demons given a life bound to the piano. But often, the play’s emotional logic is abandoned.
Washington captures Boy Willie’s gung-ho attitude about the piano’s potential sale, but does not bring any shading beyond child-like impulsivity. With Jackson’s direction, anger remains Washington’s default emotion for Boy Willie, a choice that feels misplaced when dealing with a grieving Berniece. The play’s final moments of Boy Willie confronting Sutter’s ghost are more slapstick than purgative.
Moments of ratcheted tension are also misfires that don’t register altogether, with the emotional stakes of the play all but evaporated by the second act. A key scene in which Berniece accepts the romantic gestures of Lymon receives chuckles and hollers from an audience who have not been led to understand the weight of the moment. A moment when Berniece finally gives in to sensuality, to lust, to love gets the same response as a first-time kiss between two characters on a network comedy.
It is particularly devastating to watch Wining Boy’s drunken re-entry receive belly laughs from a mostly white audience, when there lies a Black man drowning his sorrows and “ghosts” in alcohol, succumbing to the commodification of his life.
Amid the haze, some light peeks through. Brooks brings sensitivity and passion to Berniece. She shines during a confrontation with Boy Willie, in which she blames him for her husband’s murder. Jackson is also steady, bringing a placidity to Doaker. He is a solid force between the two siblings. But, some of his own remembrances of the family’s history feel ungrounded, much like the production.
It’s not that comedic elements have no place in Wilson’s world. It’s not that an audience isn’t allowed to have its own, unique reaction.
But in Jackson’s revival, a strong reasoning behind the latest remounting is unclear when comedy overshadows Wilson’s tale about the exploitation of Black labor and the impact of Black trauma. It’s a glibness that leaves behind little besides projected specters and the occasional crack-up. People were entertained, the audience laughed. But, for what?
