Four black men gathered around the kitchen table enthusiastically sing work songs (“When you marry, don’t marry the farmer,” they shout, clap, and stamp their feet). increase). For her husband and her father, whom she lost to the wrath of white men, and her siblings, fight over a seemingly haunted family heirloom that tells a story of intergenerational trauma and loss. These circumstances are more than enough to bring the dead back to life.
Or at least they’ll be in Charles’ home at the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Thursday.
The Piano Lesson, which premiered at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1987, made its Broadway debut three years later with Walter Kerr. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that year. Wilson is one of his two works in his Century Cycles of Americana, a collection of ten plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, depicting African-American life. won one.
In “The Piano Lesson,” you are in 1936 at the home of old Pittsburgh railroad worker and now train cook, Dorker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson). His niece, Bernieth (Daniel Brooks), and her 11-year-old daughter, Maresa (played by Jurnee Swan in the performance I saw), are in Beowulf Borit’s too-nosed scenic designs. and I live with him. A skeletal replica of the house — just beams and planks, some not even connected. The house doesn’t have much, like a love seat, or a small kitchen with an icebox, but there’s an ornately carved piano that grabs attention even though it’s in the corner of the living room.
It’s an August instrument with a knotty history, linking the Charles family to their enslaved ancestors and the white family who owned them.Each panel is covered with a number representing Charles. The front legs of the piano are also elaborately sculpted.
Bernieth’s younger brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), plans to move up north from Mississippi with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) to acquire land, and in the process learns about his family’s past. Relics of the struggle the way to a better future. But Bernieth refuses to give up the piano and all the bloody history it represents. Haunted by dead members.
Wilson’s usual signature is here, including somber subject matter related to black disenfranchisement, prejudice, history, and trauma, combined with witty casual dialogue and surreal escapism. Wilson creates poetry out of the mundane details of African-American daily life, without forgetting how the past is as vivid and immediate as the melody of a piano-played song comes to life. .
Yet, among Wilson’s outstanding and sometimes surreal plays, The Piano Lesson, a family drama and ghost story, stands out as one of the strangest. It’s a mix of themes and tones, concrete and fantastical, brutal and comedic, but the imbalanced direction here is by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, who literally overemphasizes horror. Most effective on a metaphorical level.
Performance is, for the most part, captivating. A veteran stage and film actor who has appeared in other Wilson productions, including the 2017 Broadway revival of “Jitney” and his 2020 film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Michael Potts is the first of Doker’s Perfect as brother and itinerant musician Winning Boy. Someone who can’t seem to hold onto a dollar.
Like the surviving Charles brothers, Potts and Jackson (who played Boy Willie in the original 1987 film) have a refreshing relationship. Wining Boy continues to be a clever con artist, and Doaker is a cold-blooded wisdom dispenser. Trey Byers as Avery, a new pastor obsessed with Bernieth, takes on the highfaltine of his character preaching with comedic aloofness, and April Mathis as a minor character with a big-city demeanor. As a simple Lymon, Fisher can be a little too bonkers at times, especially when it comes to Southern drawl, but is still beloved for his silly physicality and ignorant expressions. I’m here.
Fisher stands in stark contrast to Washington’s downright frenzied performance as Boy Willie. It speaks with a fiery spark of stubborn denial, denial, and lofty aspirations, confident that we can build a future on par with white men. power over him and his family.
Making his revelatory stage debut, Washington is a flame of energy that lights every scene he appears in. Brooks is a TV star in “The Color Purple” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” and “Orange is.” I was delighted with the role. ‘The New Black’ and ‘Peacemaker’ are not as illustrious as her other outings. Too often it casts shadows and fades into the background.
Despite Wilson’s eloquent writing, “The Piano Lesson” is long, at nearly three hours. The repeated dialogue, especially in the second act, evokes a persistent sense of déjà vu. The eerie lighting changes (by Japhy Weideman) and Borit’s broken house seem like lively metaphors, nothing to capture the imagination.
In this production, the play’s supernatural elements seem anomalous, but not in Page. The characters are less shocked by the eerie and bizarre happenings and actually carry on with their lives as usual. It is a living history of racial violence and pervasive inequality. Who hasn’t heard the melody of a ghost song in the middle of the night?
piano lesson
at the Barrymore Theater in Manhattan until January 15th. piano lesson.comRunning time: 2 hours 45 minutes.