- Stephen Tyrone Williams as Boy Willie and Erika LaVonn as Berniece. Also pictured: a relevant piano.
After watching August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, I looked for the source of the play’s name. I was puzzled because the title is not connected with any character or development in the plot. There are no piano lessons in The Piano Lesson. It is instead about a piano that a brother and a sister inherited from their father. This piano has economic and sentimental value. The brother is interested in the former; the sister is invested in the latter. The brother, Boy Willie (played by Stephen Tyrone Williams—his performance is packed with energy and flows through the bluesy language like a fish in water), has a plan to sell the piano and some potentially stolen watermelons he and a friend have brought to Pittsburgh from the South, using the little capital to buy the land of a dead white man. The sister, however, is completely resolved that the piano must not be sold, and is a living part of their family’s history, blood, sweat, and tears. These differences lead to a final and even apocalyptic showdown. But why didn’t August Wilson, the last great black American writer of the previous century, not simply call it The Piano?…
