The Piano Lesson

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?

Wilson says he wanted each play in the Pittsburgh Cycle to use a 'song, a myth, and a historical event' as its foundation. What are those three elements in The Piano Lesson?

Compare the piano debate in The Piano Lesson to the reparations debate in American political life. What does the play illuminate about that debate that political argument usually obscures?

Wilson is often criticized for writing female characters who are passive or reactive. Is Berniece an exception to this pattern? How does her transformation in the final scene reframe her behavior throughout the play?

Doaker has been living with the piano for years — he knows its history better than anyone. Yet he does not take a side in the sibling argument. Why? Is his neutrality wisdom or avoidance?

Wining Boy is the one character who has actually played the piano for a living and walked away from it. What does his story add to the play's argument about whether to use or preserve the piano?

The play is set in 1936 Pittsburgh during the Depression. How does the economic context change the weight of Boy Willie's argument? If the family were financially secure, would selling the piano be the same kind of act?

Boy Willie's final line tells Berniece not to let the piano go silent — that if she stops playing, both he and Sutter might come back. What does this mean? Is it a threat, a warning, a blessing, or all three?

Compare The Piano Lesson to Fences. Both are plays by August Wilson set in the Pittsburgh Hill District. How do Troy Maxson and Boy Willie represent different versions of the same problem — a Black man formed by a system designed to destroy him trying to build something in spite of it?

Wilson deliberately set each play in the Pittsburgh Cycle in a specific decade of the twentieth century. The Piano Lesson covers the 1930s. What aspects of Black American life in the 1930s does this play document that you would not find in a history textbook?

The piano was traded for two human beings. What does it mean that this object — purchased with lives — is now the most valuable thing the family owns? Is there any way to use it that is not tainted by its origin?

Berniece is raising Maretha to play the piano — teaching her technique — while keeping her ignorant of what the piano is. What is Wilson saying about how grief and history get transmitted (or don't) across generations?

The play's title is The Piano Lesson. Who is giving the lesson, and who is learning it? Is the 'lesson' musical, historical, or spiritual?

Wilson was influenced by the painter Romare Bearden, whose collages juxtaposed African-American faces, objects, and symbolic elements. How is the piano itself a kind of Bearden collage — faces and symbols layered into a single object?

How would this play be different if Berniece won the argument simply by saying no and refusing to engage further — if she never sat down to play? Would that be a satisfying resolution? What would be lost?

Lymon is the only character in the play with no history attached to the piano. How does his presence change the dynamics of the Charles family argument? What can he see that the family cannot?

Wilson was a self-educated man who educated himself largely in a public library. He has spoken about the blues as the 'wellspring of African-American culture.' How does this biography show up in the play's argument that the real spiritual authority belongs to music rather than to Christian scripture?

The Ghosts of the Yellow Dog — the men burned alive in a boxcar — are said to have gotten revenge by killing those responsible. How does this backstory of supernatural retribution prepare the audience for the play's literal use of a haunting as a historical reckoning?

Is it possible to read Sutter's ghost as purely a projection of the family's unresolved trauma — a collective hallucination — without losing anything essential about the play? What does Wilson lose if the ghost is merely psychological?

The play ends with Boy Willie leaving for Mississippi without the piano or the money. Is this a defeat for him? What has he gained or lost from coming to Pittsburgh?

A 2021 Netflix film adaptation was made of The Piano Lesson. Film allows the past to be shown directly — the history Doaker narrates could be dramatized in flashback. Would showing Bowing Willie's carvings in detail strengthen or weaken the play's central argument? What does keeping the history as oral testimony preserve?

Compare the piano to the fence in Fences. Both are central objects that accumulate symbolic meaning over a Wilson play. How are these objects different as symbols? What does each one say about what its central character is trying to do?

Wilson has said that the blues is not just music but 'a way of looking at the world.' How does the blues worldview — that suffering can be transformed by being named and sung — shape the play's resolution? Is Berniece's incantation a blues act?

Boy Willie says he wants to put his name on the land, to stand on the ground where his grandfather stood as a slave and own it. Is this a form of healing, or a form of revenge, or something else?

The Piano Lesson is set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh — a neighborhood that was demolished by urban renewal projects in the late 1950s and 1960s. If the play were written after that demolition, could it have the same ending? What does the intact neighborhood — the house that can hold the piano — make possible?

August Wilson died in 2005 with the Pittsburgh Cycle complete — ten plays covering every decade of the twentieth century. If he had lived to write about the 2000s and 2010s, what version of the piano debate would appear? What object would hold the ancestors' faces now?