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.”
Character Analysis
Boy Willie is not the villain of the play, and Wilson is careful not to make him one. His argument — sell the piano to buy land, transform ancestral suffering into material ownership — is a coherent theory of how to honor the past. His energy is the play's engine: loud, alive, impatient with paralysis, shaped by Mississippi into someone who moves before the world can stop him. His failure is not moral but epistemological: he cannot fully comprehend what the piano contains because he is not carrying the grief that Berniece is carrying. He leaves without the piano and without the money, but he leaves changed — he has seen the ancestors, and he tells Berniece not to let the piano go silent again.
Mississippi vernacular, direct, action-forward, impatient with abstraction. Double negatives, contractions, rhythmic repetition.