Like the blues music from which August Wilson took so much influence, a great production of “The Piano Lesson” must pulsate with a syncopated rhythm: there should be moments of high energy and quiet poignance, riotous laughter and solemn spirituality, razor-sharp family drama and abiding love. It should never forget the spirit of ancestral ghosts that attend constantly on the performance
At Red Bank’s Two River Theater, director Francois Battiste has found this rhythm, as his “Piano Lesson” taps the spirit and deep spirituality of Wilson’s blues and produces a vivid, resonant production of this contemporary classic.
“The Piano Lesson” is a standout from Wilson’s “American Century Cycle”: Ten plays, each exploring Black life in America in a different decade of the twentieth century. Not all the cycle plays are as great as others. “The Piano Lesson” is among the best.
Wilson’s fourth full-length play, “The Piano Lesson” is set in 1930s Pittsburgh, where Boy Willie (Brandon Michael Hall) arrives in the middle of the night after a long drive from Alabama to the home of his sister, Berniece (Danielle Moné Truitt), and uncle, Doaker (Keith Randolph Smith). Boy Willie and his buddy Lymon (Joshua Echebiri) have a plan to make some money by selling watermelons in Pittsburgh so that Boy Willie can return home and buy a piece of land to farm. But watermelon proceeds aren’t all that Boy Willie needs: He plans to sell the piano that he and Berniece inherited from their father and pocket his half of the proceeds toward his land purchase. Berniece resists because of the long family history grounded in the piano. The clash between Boy Willie and Berniece gives the play the tension from which it winds through themes of family, spirituality, and memories that live in the very ghosts of ancestors who refuse to allow themselves to be forgotten.
Wilson emulated blues in his playwrighting, and “The Piano Lesson”—like the dance between a guitar and harmonica or a singer and the audience—invokes in Boy Willie and Berniece blues call-and-response, which is to say a push-and-pull between energies that are vying for dominance at the same time they collaboratively define their shared space.
At Two River, this energy is vibrant thanks to two fabulous performances. Truitt’s Berniece is warm and caring but unafraid to express her love in stern forcefulness when the situation demands it. This is her house and she has made a life for herself and her daughter Maretha (Elaán Battiste) that she is not about to permit her brother to disrupt. Truitt’s excellence shows in how natural she makes the many phases of Berniece feel. Truitt defines Berniece as committed to dignity and love, and shows with clarity how the character’s actions emanate from those attributes. The play’s climax belongs to Berniece, an opportunity that Truitt seizes to capture the play’s greatest and most moving poignancy.
Opposite Truitt, Hall’s Boy Willie is a thunderous force. He storms into Pittsburgh in the dead of night and barely takes a breath for the rest of the play. Hall, however, understands with a keen insight where those breaths should come. He is a house ablaze throughout most of the play, as Hall and Battiste bring to the fore all the incredible urgency that drives Boy Willie even as it risks his overlooking the abiding spirit of his ancestors that keeps him afloat. But Hall is at his best when he finds the right moments to ease off the throttle and let Boy Willie express himself in a way that allows the other characters and his audience to see greater depth than just the boisterous surface. Hall’s is an excellent, insightful, and radiant Boy Willie.
This excellent “Piano Lesson” is the latest in Two River’s strong journey through Wilson’s cycle plays. Shortly after its 2012 production of “Jitney,” the theater committed to producing the full cycle of ten plays. “The Piano Lesson” marks production number eight. In fourteen years, Two River’s Wilson project has assembled an ever expanding community of new and familiar artists (Brian D. Coats, for example returns as Avery in “The Piano Lesson” after featuring in the casts of “Seven Guitars,” “King Hedley II,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and “Gem of the Ocean”; Hall and Truitt are welcome new faces) and highlighted the many recurring themes which Wilson reinvestigated again and again. Only two plays remain before Two River completes the journey: “Fences,” Wilson’s most popular play, and “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” his best.
This “Piano Lesson” fittingly carries the torch of fine Wilson production in Red Bank, and signals great work still to come.