The Piano Lesson
August Wilson (1987)
“A piano carved with the faces of slaves sits in a Pittsburgh living room — and whether to sell it or keep it may be the most important argument two siblings ever have.”
At a Glance
In 1936 Pittsburgh, Boy Willie Charles arrives from Mississippi with a plan: sell the Charles family piano — carved with the faces of their enslaved ancestors — to buy the land where their family was once owned. His sister Berniece refuses. She will not sell the piano, which holds the spirits of the dead, but she also will not play it, unwilling to awaken a grief she cannot contain. A ghost haunts the house, old wounds reopen, and the piano becomes the battlefield where the family must decide whether the past is something to sell, something to preserve, or something to finally face.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Piano Lesson won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Wilson's second Pulitzer after Fences. It is part of the Pittsburgh Cycle — ten plays covering each decade of Black American life in the twentieth century, one of the most ambitious theatrical projects in American history. The play is singular in American drama for making an inanimate object the literal repository of ancestral souls — the piano is not a metaphor for family legacy, it IS the family's archive, and the debate over what to do with it is the play's entire dramatic engine.
Diction Profile
Black Pittsburgh vernacular rooted in the Mississippi Delta — oral, rhythmic, drawn from blues music and African-American church tradition
Moderate