An exquisite revival of August Wilson’s 'The Piano Lesson'—starring Samuel L. Jackson and Danielle Brooks—combines comedy, drama, and ghostly special effects in examining the legacy of slavery, inherited pain, and family bonds. Read TimTeeman's review:
is pure dramatic pleasure—a richly involving play, beautifully staged, costumed, played, and directed on a grandly decked-out Broadway stage.
Doaker’s niece Berniece lives in the house with her uncle and her 11-year-old daughter Maretha , their peace shattered by the arrival of her brother Boy Willie and his friend Lymon , who are in town to sell watermelons. And there, stage left, is a piano carved in great detail with the outlines of faces and bodies—the cause, in both past and present, of the fractured rafters.
Under Latanya Richardson Jackson’s fluid and skilled direction, Wilson’s writing is bought to life, drama and comedy expertly folded into one another, with penetrating comment about racism, memory, trauma, and legacy laced deftly through it—and fabulous ghostly special effects too, thanks to Jeff Sugg and Japhy Weideman, which are so good it’s almost like Robert Zemeckis has taken up a temporary Broadway residency.
The symbolism of the piano stretches into the present day. Berniece feels strongly that the piano belongs in the house; it is, quite literally, family. Boy Willie sees selling it as a way of converting the pain of the past, and the lack of control the family had as slaves, into a vehicle of wealth-making that can form the bedrock of an independent and self-sustaining future. For him, this symbol of one-time oppression can be profitably sold: a very real, lucrative symbol of liberation.
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