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.”
This page prints on a single page. Use Ctrl+P / Cmd+P.
The Piano Lesson
August Wilson (1987) · 108pages · Contemporary / Pittsburgh Cycle · 7 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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 singul...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Black Pittsburgh vernacular rooted in the Mississippi Delta — oral, rhythmic, drawn from blues music and African-American church tradition
Narrator: The Piano Lesson has no narrator — Wilson's stage directions function as a kind of authorial voice, describing the wo...
Figurative Language: Moderate
Historical Context
1936 Pittsburgh / The Great Migration / The Depression: The 1936 setting is chosen precisely because it sits at the midpoint of the Great Migration — the Charles family has already made the move North, but Mississippi is still present and immediate. Boy...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Boy Willie's argument — sell the piano to buy Sutter's land — is not obviously wrong. Make the strongest possible case for his position using evidence from the play. Then explain where that argument fails.
- Berniece refuses to sell the piano AND refuses to play it. How are these two refusals different? What does the refusal to play reveal about her condition that the refusal to sell doesn't?
- Avery's Christian exorcism fails completely. Berniece's ancestral invocation at the piano succeeds. What is Wilson arguing about the difference between these two forms of spiritual authority?
- Wilson's stage directions say Sutter's ghost should be treated as real, not as a hallucination or a metaphor. How does this change your reading of the play? What is lost if you interpret the ghost as purely symbolic?
- The piano was originally carved by Bowing Willie, who was then worked to death. How does this origin — a man carving his family's faces to honor their loss, then being killed for it — shape the play's argument about what the piano is and what can be done with it?
Notable Quotes
“I come to sell that piano. I got Sutter's land and all I need is that piano.”
“Berniece don't like to talk about the piano. But we got to talk about it.”
“He took and carved all them pictures on it. Took him three years. He carved all them things to go along with it... that's when my daddy went up and...”
Why Read This
Because the argument at the center of this play — sell it or keep it, use the past or preserve it — is one you will have. Maybe not about a piano. Maybe about a grandmother's ring, a family house, a language, a tradition someone in your family wan...