The interior of the newly restored and rechristened Walter Kerr theater (it was formerly the Ritz), where August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” opened last week, is truly exquisite. I have an idea that parts of Wilson’s play must be exquisite, too. Unfortunately, I found it difficult to see past the head of the extremely tall man sitting in front of me. Offhand, I can think of no playwright whose work is harder to appreciate in such a situation. Wilson is unusual among contemporary playwrights in that he writes for the proscenium stage. His plays tend to present two juxtaposed areas—the adjoining rooms of a recording studio, or the world within someone’s back yard and the world outside it, or a boarding house where people stay briefly and the city of roads and bridges that carry them away—and you have to be able to view the whole stage to get the full effect of what is happening there.
In the case of “The Piano Lesson,” which takes place in the house of a black family in Pittsburgh in 1936, the stage is divided into two rooms (evoked by E. David Cosier, Jr.): a living room, where the piano in question sits, and where the person who wants to sell it does most of his talking; and a kitchen, where people mostly talk about why it couldn’t or shouldn’t or won’t be sold. There are some spellbinding scenes in “The Piano Lesson”—like the one in which a man sits in the living room talking about his hands while in the kitchen a woman goes through the elaborate process of taming her little girl’s hair with a hot comb and grease. What the man is talking about—working to produce something that white men will own—goes back to slavery. What the woman is doing—using her hands to make her daughter conform to white fashion—looks toward the future. Because of where the actors were placed in this sequence, something of its meaning came across to me. But most of the important scenes in Act I—like the one in which a room comes alive with the movement of men singing a work song, and the one in which we hear the history of the piano—take place on the right side of the stage, the side that this very tall man and I were sitting on. I would have gone back the next night, but I quailed at the prospect of sitting through Charles S. Dutton’s performance again.
Dutton is the central character, Boy Willie, whose arrival and departure frame the play, and Dutton’s performance, which which has already won the actor praise and could all too easily win him a Tony Award (it seems calculated to) is, I think, terribly damaging to the delicate structure of Wilson’s play. Like the performances that Lloyd Richards—who directed “The Piano Lesson”—elicited from James Earl Jones, Mary Alice, Courtney Vance, and Frankie Faison in Wilson’s “Fences,” it is essentially a bid for attention. It’s not so much stagy as self-conscious; indeed, self-consciousness is virtually its only quality. Stagy acting is what Maggie Smith does so well in “Lettice & Lovage”—projecting the mannerisms of someone who doesn’t behave the way real people behave. What Dutton is doing is stagy only in the sense that you know (because something in the actor’s bearing or timing or intonation tells you) when a big line is coming up; for the rest, it’s projected realism: the simulation of a feeling—anxiety, say, or indignation—at such a pitch that the audience is constantly aware of watching the performance of an actor in a play.
What impresses people about this sort of acting may be its effortfulness. In Mr. Dutton’s case, effort means speed. Dutton bursts onto the stage at the beginning of the play acting at such a level of hysteria that his performance has nowhere to go; his character talks incessantly, compulsively, and Dutton delivers practically every speech with an unvarying and frenzied purposefulness, like a crazed auctioneer. He induces a sort of delirium, so that by the end of the evening it’s impossible to focus on anything Boy Willie is saying.
To be fair, it’s hard to know how else an actor could approach the role. “The Piano Lesson” is a play that desperately wants cutting and Boy Willie has most of the long speeches. Yet Dutton’s performance isn’t about subtlety, and all the rest of the performances are, as is the play. With the exception of “Fences,” all Wilson’s plays are subtle: they explore complex ideas by constructing around some aspect of the experience of black Americans an intricate system of theme and imagery. If “Fences” was Wilson at his least interesting, that’s because it was linear: its eponymous image meant basically the same thing to all the characters. The central object in this play—the piano, a beautifully carved upright, decorated with faces and scenes—means something different to everyone. To Boy Willie, who wants to use money from the sale of the piano to buy the land his family worked as slaves and sharecroppers, the piano means the future and his spiritual emancipation. To his widowed sister Berniece (S. Ephatha Merkerson), whose father died stealing it from the man who owned it, the piano means a heritage of grief, bitterness, and women without men. To Berneices’s would-be suitor, Avery (Tommy Holis), the piano represents the baggage of sorrow he wants her to relinquish. For Berneice and Boy Willie’s uncle, Wining Boy (Lou Myers), a former recording artist, the piano was once a living and is now a burden. To the head of the household, Doaker (Carl Gordon), whose grandfather carved pictures of his wife and son on the piano for the master who sold them in order to buy it, the piano embodies the family’s history—symbolically and in concrete terms—and to Boy Willie’s friend Lymon (Rocky Carroll), an interloper, it’s just a good story.
If a man carves pictures of his wife and son on a piano, to whom do the pictures belong: the artist or the man who owns the piano and once owned the wife and son? Which is more important, the future or the past? How do you measure the abstract value that one person puts on an object against the practical use to which another person can put it? And what is the best way of making your way in a world where whatever you make with your hands belongs to someone else? Wilson never answers any of these questions. Instead, he tacks on an ending that takes refuge in mysticism and melodramatic event—a tendency of his.
Like the stages for which he writes them, all Wilson’s plays are divided in two—between earth, represented by women and home, and mysticism, embodied in the men who travel around in a world no part of which, they feel, can ever really be theirs. And mysticism always wins out. Usually, though, some marriage between the two forces has been effected in the audience’s mind by means of music. “O Lord Berta Berta O Lord gal well, go ’head marry don’t you wait on me,” sing the men in the kitchen. “I am a rambling gambling man,” sings Wining Boy pounding the piano “I’ve traveled all round this world.” Later he sings “It takes a hesitatin’ woman wanna sing the blues,” while Doaker makes up a song out of the names of the towns on the Katy Line. All the music in “The Piano Lesson” is about traveling men and hesitating women—except for the prayer that Berneice improvises to resolve the conflict and bring the play to a close.
I suspect that at one time Wilson had it in mind for there to be an an actual piano lesson in the play. He has said that it was inspired by a painting of “a young girl at the piano with a woman standing behind her who seems to be admonishing her to learn her scales.” I think this image got translated into that wonderful hair-fixing scene, in which Berneice stands behind her seated daughter (Apryl R. Foster). At one point, the child tries to play the Papa Haydn piece out of the old Thomson piano primer; Wining Boy pushes her away, in disgust, and launches into some boogie-woogie. But there isn’t a piano lesson in the literal, down-to-earth sense. It’s clear that, by the time Mr. Dutton makes his final exit, Wilson wants us to feel that the piano has taught Boy Willie something—or that he’s learned something about it—but the overall sense of Wilson’s mystical ending eludes me.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, April 30, 1990