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The Piano LessonPart of The August Wilson Century CycleDateline: 27th April, 2008The Piano Lesson is a great work of modern literature. This edition is introduced by Nobel prize-winner Toni Morrison, one of the greatest African American novelists of her day and, as such, one of the few people who could rival August Wilson's place in the canon of Black literature. Miss Morrison is somebody who states a preference for reading plays rather than watching them, believing that too often the intercession of a director and actors can lead to disappointment when a staging fails to match or surpass "the vigorous interaction between reader and text and meeting the imaginative demands of the work on one's own". The Nobel laureate nicely sums up her appreciation of this fourth play in the sequence when she writes, "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 ... between the stage and the readerly imagination". The Piano Lesson takes place in 1936, the year in which Jesse Owen caused such a stir at the Berlin Olympics. It is special for a number of reasons. First, it has the most potent of literary symbols in a piano that carries the whole weight of the generations of slavery that its owners and their predecessors suffered. Secondly, it has a wide collection of memorable characters with unforgettable names such as Boy Willie, Berniece, Lymon, Doaker, Wining Boy and Maretha. Thirdly there is a family struggle about far more than merely a piece of wood. Fourthly and finally, we also get to meet ghosts with attitude from both sides of the colour divide. On one level, The Piano Lesson is a simple, comic road trip story about Boy Willie, one of Wilson's many born losers with the gift of the gab, who are always out to make a buck. With his pal Lymon, he has travelled up from the family home in the south to visit his sister Berniece and, at the same time, sell a truckload of watermelons. He wants to make money to buy the land on which the family were enslaved and which has been cultivated with the blood of generations of his people. The watermelons are not enough and eventually, a battle develops over the piano of the title, which is adorned with carved images of the family's history. On one side is the belief that the only way the family can move on is to buy the land on which they were kept in chains; on the other, belief in the musical instrument as a memorial to those same people. This would make for a superb play (or novel for that matter) without the injection of The Ghosts of the Yellow Dog, who are slowly picking off the murderers of Berniece's husband and the chilling ghost of Sutter, the last in a long line of slave-owners, whose land Boy Willie has his eye on. To top it all off, prior to an unlikely battle between man and ghost, Boy Willie delivers a speech worthy of comparison with Shylock's "if you prick us do we not bleed" plea. "I got a heart that beats here and it beats just as loud as the next fellow's. Don't care if he Black or White. ……. so what I got to do? I got to mark my passing on the road. Just like you write on a tree, 'Boy Willie was here'". The Piano Lesson is a pleasure to read from start to finish. It might be getting tedious, but once again it seems fair to call for a London production of a play that has not been seen in the city since a production at the Tricycle fifteen years ago. Philip Fisher
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