The Piano Lesson, winner of August Wilson's second Pulitzer Prize for drama, is a play about memory. It asks the important question, how is history preserved when a group is "erased," as slaves were in U.S. history? In Delicia Turner Sonnenberg's Cygnet Theatre production of The Piano Lesson (playing now through February 28), the stellar cast seems to understand this point but is still acting as if the play is about a quarrel over rights to a piano.

If there is no written history, memory can be preserved in a number of ways. Primary among these is an oral tradition of stories and songs that are simple enough to learn by note but which carry complex cultural meanings. Other ways are through the production of art than can be passed down as family heirlooms as continual reminders of historical events. Still others are found in the accumulation of land or possessions, as these can provide a physical site for the collection of memories.

The cast of The Piano Lesson.

^{Photo by Daren Scott}

Set in 1936, The Piano Lesson incorporates all of these elements of memory. It is the middle of the Great Depression in the U.S., and ordinary people are doing the best they can to get by. For African Americans in the south, there were not many opportunities. Sharecropping on someone else's land yielded at best a poverty-level existence, and non-farming jobs were hard to come by. White-run law enforcement stood ready to imprison children of former slaves for minor offenses. Many emigrated north and were eventually able to acquire property in segregated black neighborhoods in northern cities.

Doaker (Antonio "T.J." Johnson) is one of the latter individuals. A long-time railway worker, he has a house in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, a neighborhood where Mr. Wilson set many of his plays. Living with him is his niece, Berniece (Monique Gaffney) and her daughter, Maretha (Madeline Hornbuckle). Early one morning, Berniece's brother, Boy Willie (Mark Christopher Lawrence), arrives with his friend, Lymon (Laurence Brown), in tow. They have come from Mississippi, where the family formerly lived, and they've brought with them a load of watermelon. Boy Willie announces that his plan is to sell the watermelon and the piano that Berniece and he inherited, and use the money to buy a parcel of land back in Mississippi. Ironically, the land that Boy Willie wants to buy was owned by Sutter, the descendant of the family that had owned his ancestors as slaves. Sutter had recently died a mysterious death by falling into a well.

Berniece insists that the piano not be sold. It was originally the property of the Sutter family, though Doaker and his brother Wining Boy (Grandison Phelps III) had helped Berniece and Boy Willie's father, Boy Charles to steal it. Through a complicated set of circumstances, Doaker's grandfather had carved on it images of the family's history (kudos to Bonnie L. Durben for designing the piano and other properties). While Berniece felt a spiritual connection to her family history through those images, she had given up playing the piano after the death of her husband, Crowley. Crowley was shot when the police caught him stealing firewood along with Boy Willie and Lymon. Moreover, Berniece believes that the ghost of Sutter has taken up residence in Doaker's house.

The story is a complicated one, and Mr. Wilson unravels it through a rich tapestry of all of the ways of preserving memory: stories told in monologue, songs, and constant reminders of the symbols carved into the piano. Eventually, the spiritual crisis evoked by the conflict over the piano explodes when Avery (Keith Jefferson), a budding preacher and would-be suitor of Berniece, tries to exorcise Sutter's ghost, and both Berniece and Boy Willie are forced to confront their fears.

There is much going on, even when the scenes seem to be simple ones, and while the cast had digested some of a fair amount of it by opening night, there is some deepening that still needs to occur. The story works least well as a continuing conflict over selling the piano because that conflict is repetitive without understanding what the piano means to all concerned, but that's the point that the cast keeps emphasizing. As Berniece, Ms. Gaffney makes you ache for her every time she's on stage, but it takes a long time to realize why she's aching. Mr. Lawrence is all bluster, and sets a tone for the conflict to escalate quickly and scenes to be played at a monotonously loud volume. Mr. Johnson wisely underplays Doaker and has the unenviable task of reciting a good deal of the family history in a long Act 1 monologue. Mr. Jefferson shows off his preacher skills and manages to let his insecurities shine forth as well. Mr. Brown makes Lymon entirely believable as a mark for just about everyone, including Wining Boy and a woman he meets named Grace (Tanya Johnson-Herron). Ms. Hornbuckle plays Maretha straightforwardly and without affectation.

The technical elements are all well in place, especially the evocative scenic design by Jerry Sonnenberg.

The Piano Lesson is an important play, and Cygnet should be commended for presenting it. But, it's also a difficult play for audiences to digest. Hopefully, the cast will find ways of evolving its performances beyond surface levels as the run progresses.

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