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.”
For Students
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 wants to let go. Wilson built the most enduring version of that argument, and he built it so that neither side is simply wrong. You will come out of this play knowing more about how to have an impossible disagreement.
For Teachers
The piano as symbol does everything a symbol is supposed to do without ever becoming merely symbolic — it is a real object with real weight, contested by real people, for reasons that are simultaneously material and spiritual. Every major theme of the play (legacy, identity, history, property, the living and the dead) radiates from a single piece of furniture. For close reading instruction, the dialogue structure alone is a semester's worth of analysis: how Wilson builds arguments through repetition, how his characters think in stories rather than propositions, how the blues informs theatrical form.
Why It Still Matters
The question the play asks — who owns the past, and what do we owe it — is the central question of the twenty-first century. Reparations debates, Confederate monument disputes, the fight over what gets taught in schools, who controls community archives, what gets preserved and what gets demolished: all of it is a version of the argument Boy Willie and Berniece are having over that piano. Wilson wrote it in 1987. It has not dated by a day.