[1] The Piano Lesson received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and earned five nominations at the 44th Tony Awards.
A Romare Bearden painting, The Piano Lesson, inspired Wilson to write a play featuring a strong female character to confront African-American history, paralleling Troy in earlier Fences.
[1] However, on finishing his play, Wilson found the ending to stray from the empowered female character as well as from the question regarding self-worth.
The sister, Berniece, remains emphatic about keeping the piano, which shows the carved faces of their great-grandfather's wife and son during the days of their enslavement.
Scene 1: Boy Willie and Lymon arrive in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from Mississippi and enter the Charles' household at five in the morning.
Berniece enters with Avery, and Willie asks whether she still has the prospective buyer's name, explaining he came to Pittsburgh to sell the piano.
Berniece changes the topic and asks Avery to bless the house, hoping to destroy the spirit of the Sutter ghost.
Avery then brings up the piano and tells Berniece she should learn to not be afraid of her family's spirits and play it again.
Berniece breaks down her story of her mother's tears and blood mingled with her father's soul on the piano and refuses to open her wounds for everyone to see.
Excited to sell the piano, Willie quickly partakes on his actions without a care of his sister's words.
A tall and thin 47-year-old man, Charles recounts the most detailed parts of his lives with his job on the railroad.
Doaker plays the role of the storyteller, giving detailed and long accounts of the piano's history.
Doaker is also one of the only characters that truly understand Berniece's desire not to sell the piano so that the legacy of their family may remain.
A sharecropper and recently delivered out of prison from Mississippi, Boy Willie plans to sell the piano and use the earnings to buy the land where his ancestors had formerly toiled.
His use of the legacy comes down to practicality; Willie finds the rich culture of his history engraved on the piano through pictures, blood, and tears to be a simple conversion to money.
In the last scene of the book, after Berniece calls to the ancestors, Boy Willie finally understands that there is no escape from living his ancestral legacy and the only way to benefit from it is to learn from it.
Lymon is also obsessed with women and plays a large role in allowing Berniece to slowly relieve the mourning of Crawley, her deceased husband.
His desire to please women and find his soul mate softens Berniece's gaze on crude men and gives him a slight leeway to kiss her.
[5] Originally playing the role of the messenger between the dead ancestors and the living descendants, Berniece prefers to stop channeling her family's ghosts after her mother's death.
Constantly stressing his Christian view on things and advocating his hopes to build a congregation, Avery is aware that Berniece will never sell her piano heirloom.
Also not related to the Charles family, Avery often offers advice to Berniece in an effort to help her let go of the fears of her past and the lingering mourning of her husband.
Avery's humble personality further emphasizes Berniece's lack of relieving her deceased husband's memory.
In the final scene, Avery's blessings on the house help bring Berniece back to her position of communicating between the living and the deceased.
Whenever he ends up bankrupt, he wanders back into the Charles house to retell the days of the glory and fame.
The Piano Lesson debuted as a staged reading at the 1986 National Playwrights Conference held at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center.
[9] The cast featured Carl Gordon, Samuel L. Jackson, Rocky Carroll, Starletta DuPois, Chenee Johnson, Ylonda Powell, Tommy Hollis, Lou Myers, and Sharon Washington.
[11] The Piano Lesson was revived off-Broadway in 2012 in a production directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson and with a cast including Chuck Cooper and Brandon J.
"[13] A Broadway revival of the play, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, began previews on September 19, 2022 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre,[14][15] starring Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Trai Byers, Michael Potts, and April Matthis.
According to Gloria Oladipo of The Guardian, "Wilson's seminal work is tonally misread, flattened into a sitcom about a haunted piano versus a family struggling to forge anew amid their past.
[31] A Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie titled The Piano Lesson aired on CBS on February 5, 1995, starring Charles S. Dutton, Alfre Woodard, Carl Gordon, Tommy Hollis, Lou Myers, Courtney B. Vance, Zelda Harris, Rosalyn Coleman, Tommy Lafitteá, Lynne Innerst, Harold Surratt, Elva Branson, Tim Hartman, Ben Tatar, and Alice Eisner.