“The Piano Lesson”– 1987 Play by August Wilson, 1995 film directed by Lloyd Richards
This is part of Wilson’s intense “Pittsburgh Cycle” of 10 plays,
this one set in 1936. The central
conflict is between a brother, Boy Willie, up from Mississippi with a load of
watermelons to sell, and a sister, Berniece, living in Pittsburgh. It is about a jointly
owned piano sitting in their uncle’s two-story home. Willie’s a sharecropper and Berniece is a
mother and housekeeper.
The piano is unique, carved with images of the family’s
relatives, but was originally owned by a slave-owner named Sutter who had this odd
carving done by accident. Their mother
kept the piano clean for 17 years as a servant to later Sutters. Their sharecropper father eventually stole it
from the bossman’s house and he subsequently died in a fire set by Sutter’s son
or grandson in revenge. But the piano was hidden and later moved to Pittsburgh.
This is the piano’s ‘legacy.’
Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to buy the last Sutter’s
land, as that Sutter is now dead. He’s
fallen down a well. Willie’s father, as
a sharecropper, had taught him to revere the soil. Berniece wants to keep the piano as a link to
her toiling mother and the long lost relatives carved on it. So what to do?
Various local people – one taciturn uncle, one musician
uncle, an on-the-make preacher and Boy Willie’s hulking, slow-minded buddy - populate
the tale, taking various positions on the fate of the piano. The complicating factor is that Berniece
thinks Boy Willie is a criminal and got a man she was sweet on killed back in
Mississippi. She also suspects him of
pushing Sutter into the well to get the land.
He blames the death on a mysterious ‘yellow dog’ that had been flipping
bosses into wells for years. This might
be a hint that the oppressed were engaged in payback for Jim Crow and blaming
magical ‘yaller dogs.’
The problem with the play and film is that Gothic horror
takes over, as ghosts of the dead are seen in the hallways and mysterious
waters flood the floors, seen by both Berniece and her young daughter. During an exorcism of the house by the
preacher, the lights go off, the ground shakes, dishes break and there is a lot
of commotion, yelling and fear. It’s
like a scene from The Exorcist. A dead apparition of Sutter even physically wrestles
with Boy Willie upstairs. Loudmouth Boy Willie never took the ghost sightings
seriously, but now he does. This causes
him to give up his plan to sell the piano, as it seems black magic haunts it. It’s a happy ending and the siblings embrace.
Right.
 |
| The Yaller Dog? |
A side story is that Berniece does not want to get married
to the preacher in a feminist stand for her independence, and perhaps love for
her dead sweetie. The preacher offers
the exorcism to get in her good graces about the piano.
Now this Gothic and magical approach to solving the conflict seems to be a literary slight of hand saying ‘respect’ your ancestors. However buying Sutter’s land and getting back at that family for slavery and the death of their father seems to be a concrete form of respect. So it’s ‘respect’ mother or ‘respect’ father in their eyes, but in different ways. One is a material solution and one is a cultural solution. The play fails to make the point that keeping the piano was the best idea, as Berniece refuses to play it except in the midst of the exorcism. Perhaps she will teach piano later and earn some money that way, but that is not indicated. So the ‘horror’ is a fake deus ex machina* solution. There is no ‘lesson’ here at all. Wilson took the weaker choice, enabled in the play by Boy Willie's arrogance and magic.
The last scene
shows Boy Willie driving by a “For Sale”
sign on Sutter’s land in Mississippi, but there’s no indication he’ll be buying
anything soon. Dark-skinned
sharecroppers and farmers losing land is a historic trend that has not slowed
even today.
Perhaps
they could have sold the piano to a museum of African American history with a
heritage like that, and perhaps won both battles. But that is a big ‘if.’ A poignant film,
similar to Fences and other Wilson
plays. A highlight is the music: a work song from Parchman Farm, a blues singer and band at a crowded club and an uncle tickling the keys. Worth watching amongst all the
violent and stupid muck that populates streaming nowadays.
In Greek and Roman drama, a god lowered by
stage machinery to resolve a plot or extricate the protagonist from a difficult
situation.”
Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Things of Dry Hours,” “The Dutchman” and “Owl Answer” (Amiri Baraka); “Marie and Rosetta,” “The Butler,” “One Night in Miami” (King); “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “12 Years a Slave” or the word ‘slavery.’
The Cultural Marxist / December 4, 2024
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