Unit 6: August Wilson: The Piano Lesson

I. Orientation: Wilson, the Century Cycle, and the Play

August Wilson (1945–2005) is the central figure of late twentieth-century African American drama, author of a ten-play sequence — the Pittsburgh Cycle or Century Cycle — that assigns one play to each decade of the twentieth century. The Piano Lesson (written 1986, premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre 1987, Broadway 1990, Pulitzer Prize for Drama 1990) is the 1930s play, set in Pittsburgh's Hill District in 1936, during the Depression and in the aftermath of the Great Migration.

• Setting convention: All but one of the cycle plays occur in the Hill District, the Black working-class neighbourhood where Wilson grew up; the action stays inside domestic space (here the Charles household kitchen and parlour).
• Historical layering: Characters carry the South with them — Mississippi, the Sutter plantation, Parchman Farm penitentiary — so slavery and sharecropping remain live pressures in a Northern, urban present.
• Ancestral presence: The supernatural is treated as fact, not metaphor. Ghosts (Sutter, the Yellow Dog) and spiritual practitioners occupy the same plane as rent money and railroad timetables.
• Idiom as structure: Plot advances through storytelling, dozens-playing, blues, and repetition rather than through tight Aristotelian causation.
• Recurring question of the cycle: What should Black Americans do with the legacy of slavery — monetize it, memorialize it, or make it speak?

II. Biography of August Wilson

Life shaping the dramaturgy

Wilson's biography accounts directly for the play's location, its language, and its attitude to inherited history.

A. Life and career

• Birth and name: Born Frederick August Kittel Jr., 27 April 1945, Bedford Avenue, Pittsburgh; German-immigrant baker father, African American mother Daisy Wilson. He took his mother's surname in his twenties, an act of chosen maternal-Black lineage that anticipates Berniece's guardianship of the family piano.
• Self-education: Left school at fifteen after being accused of plagiarizing an essay on Napoleon; educated himself at the Carnegie Library, later citing the "four B's" — the blues, Borges, Baraka, Bearden.
• Poet before playwright: Began as a poet in the 1960s; the compressed image and cadence of his monologues descend from this apprenticeship.
• Black Power activism: Co-founded Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District (1968) with Rob Penny, in the ambit of the Black Arts Movement.
• Breakthrough: Moved to St Paul, Minnesota (1978); Ma Rainey's Black Bottom reached Broadway in 1984 through director Lloyd Richards and the Yale/O'Neill development route.
• Honours and death: Pulitzers for Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990); died 2 October 2005; Broadway's Virginia Theatre renamed the August Wilson Theatre.

B. Sources feeding the play

• Romare Bearden's collage: The title and germ come from Bearden's 1983 painting The Piano Lesson; Wilson said he wanted to write a play with "a woman at the centre."
• Blues aesthetic: Wilson called the blues the "book" of African American cultural memory; Boogie Woogie Red and Wining Boy figures echo real barrelhouse pianists.
• Cycle cross-references: The Ghosts of the Yellow Dog and Parchman Farm also appear in Joe Turner's Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson's companion pieces, binding the plays into one historical fabric.

III. The Piano Lesson

The 1936 play: a brother, a sister, and an inheritance

Boy Willie Charles arrives in Pittsburgh from Mississippi with Lymon and a truckload of watermelons, intending to sell the family's carved upright piano and buy Sutter's land. His sister Berniece, with whom the piano lives, refuses. Their uncle Doaker narrates its history: their enslaved great-grandmother and grandfather were traded for it by Robert Sutter; the grandfather, a carpenter, carved their faces and the family's story into its legs. Boy Willie and Berniece's father Boy Charles stole the piano from Sutter in 1911 and was burned to death in a boxcar of the Yellow Dog. Sutter's grandson has just died down a well, and his ghost now haunts the house. The dispute is settled only when Boy Willie wrestles the ghost and Berniece plays.

A. Critical analysis

• A dialectic, not a plot: The play is built as a sustained argument between two legitimate positions; Wilson gives the best lines to both, refusing to resolve the debate through moral defeat of either sibling.
• Property as the central irony: The piano was bought with human beings — "one and a half niggers" in Doaker's accounting — so any attempt to convert it back into property (land, cash) reactivates the original transaction.
• Land versus art: Boy Willie's economics are historically literate: land ownership was the concrete route to Black autonomy denied by sharecropping, and Sutter's hundred acres are, for once, purchasable.
• The supernatural as dramatic logic: Naturalistic staging (kitchen, biscuits, rent) coexists with a ghost. The climax cannot be won by argument, only by ritual combat, so realism yields to African cosmology in the final scene.
• Community over individual heroism: Resolution requires Avery's failed blessing to be superseded by ancestral invocation — Berniece calling the names of the family dead — which locates power in lineage rather than in institutional religion.
• Feminist reading: Wilson centres a widow who refuses both her brother's plan and Avery's proposal; her silence at the piano is a form of authorship, and her final playing is agency rather than surrender.
• Common critique: The four-act sprawl, the extended male monologues, and Berniece's long passivity have been faulted as structural imbalance; Wilson's defenders read the digressions as the blues form's own logic of repetition and variation.

B. Thematic analysis

• Inheritance and the uses of the past:
  1. Boy Willie: the past must be spent — "Money can't buy what that piano cost"; sell it, buy land, make the ancestors' theft productive.
  2. Berniece: the past must be kept — the piano is a reliquary of her mother Mama Ola, who "polished this piano with her tears" for seventeen years.
• Legacy of slavery and commodification: The instrument's origin as barter for two human bodies makes it evidence, and the play asks whether evidence can also be capital.
• Memory, silence, and voice: Berniece has not played since her mother died; the unplayed piano equals unspoken trauma. Healing is literally sounding.
• Racial justice and the law: Crawley's death, Boy Willie and Lymon's Parchman sentences for stealing wood, and the sheriff's extortion of Lymon's fine show law functioning as re-enslavement.
• Migration and rootedness: Doaker's forty years of railroad work — "the train don't go all the way" — versus Boy Willie's insistence on returning South, dramatize the Great Migration's unfinished promise.
• Manhood and self-worth: Boy Willie's refrain that a man must "stand up" and make his mark, opposed to Berniece's charge that he only knows how to take.
• Religion and folk belief: Avery's storefront Good Shepherd Church versus the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog; Wilson stages the two as complementary rather than rival authorities.

C. Character analysis

• Boy Willie Charles (30): Restless, funny, verbally relentless; a sharecropper's son who names his own worth. His entrance line, "Berniece still up there sleep?", sets the pattern of forcing the household awake. He wrestles Sutter's ghost — his boast that he isn't afraid becomes literal action.
• Berniece Charles (35): Widow of Crawley, mother of Maretha, works as a domestic; the moral centre. Her refusal is grounded, not merely stubborn: she blames Boy Willie for Crawley's death and refuses to let history claim another life.
• Doaker Charles (47): Railroad cook, owner of the house, the play's historian; delivers the piano's provenance in Act One, Scene Two. His neutrality is the audience's vantage point.
• Wining Boy (56): Doaker's brother, itinerant blues pianist, gambler, widower of Cleotha; sells Lymon a "silk suit." He embodies the artist's freedom and its cost — talent without accumulation.
• Lymon Jackson (29): Boy Willie's companion, evading the Mississippi law; ingenuous, seeking a woman and a Northern future. Chooses to stay in Pittsburgh, marking migration as an unfinished choice.
• Avery Brown (38): Elevator operator and aspiring preacher; wants Berniece as wife and the piano for his church. His attempted exorcism fails, delimiting institutional Christianity's reach.
• Grace and Maretha: Grace, briefly with Lymon then Boy Willie, is the outsider who flees the haunted house; Maretha (11) is the next generation whose piano lessons decide whether the legacy passes on.
• Sutter's ghost: The unseen antagonist — white ownership refusing to release its claim.

D. Significance of the title

• Literal referent: Maretha's piano lessons, paid for by Berniece, who teaches her the keys but not the family history carved into the wood.
• The lesson the piano teaches: The instrument instructs the living in what it cost; the play's action is the family learning to read its own carvings.
• Bearden's painting: The title is borrowed from Romare Bearden, signalling Wilson's collage method — fragments of story assembled into one surface.
• Pedagogy in both directions: Boy Willie teaches that a legacy must be used; Berniece teaches that it must be honoured; the final synthesis is that it must be played.
• Ironic withholding: For most of the play no one plays properly — the lesson is deferred until the last scene, making the title a promise the ending keeps.

E. Stylistic devices

• Blues structure: Call-and-response between characters, repeated refrains ("Berniece ain't gonna sell that piano"), and the group work-song "Berta, Berta" in Act Two, Scene One — a Parchman prison song that performs male solidarity and memory.
• Symbolism:
  • The piano: ancestry, art, trauma, capital — all at once.
  • The Ghosts of the Yellow Dog: the railroad crossing where the boxcar burned; agents of retributive justice pushing Sutter down the well.
  • Watermelons: a stereotype Boy Willie turns into commerce, selling white customers their own image of him.
  • Silk suit and Wining Boy's piano-playing hands: the artist's currency.
• The narrative monologue (Wilson's signature): Doaker's provenance speech and Wining Boy's Cleotha speech deliver exposition as performance; character is revealed by how the story is told.
• Vernacular language: Mississippi Delta idiom, hyperbole, and signifying (the dozens); Wilson refused to standardize the speech, treating dialect as poetic resource.
• Magic realism / African cosmology: Ghost appears without explanation; the ancestors answer when named, making the stage a space where the dead act.
• Music as dramatic agent: The piano is the resolution, not merely accompaniment — Berniece's boogie-woogie invocation of "Mama Berniece, Mama Ola" is the play's climax and its exorcism.
• Domestic realism as frame: Biscuits, coffee, rent, and a truck outside anchor the metaphysics in credible daily life, so the supernatural registers as intrusion rather than fantasy.