![]() He brings the news that Sutter, the white man who owned that land and their ancestors, has died. He wants to sell them, and the piano, to buy back the land their family once worked as slaves. He has come north with a truckful of watermelons. In the first scene, Boy Willie storms in, in a furious bluster, with plans of his own. She’s aspiring to city life, trying to teach her daughter to play the piano even though she herself has given it up. ![]() It’s 1936 in Pittsburgh, and Berniece lives in this house with her uncle Doaker, her daughter, and the prized musical instrument of the title, her family having recently made its way up from the South in the midst of the Great Migration. In the play, the characters’ pasts enter by way of Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington). August Wilson’s drama deals directly in ghost stories, and this revival seems especially haunted - internally and meta-theatrically toiling under the weight of the past. ![]() It’s an appropriate sort of place to be filled with memories of the dead, and when Danielle Brooks’s Berniece wakes up after the curtain rises, there’s a fluttering projection of a spirit slipping away from her. ![]() The set of The Piano Lesson is all posts and beams, no walls and ceilings, and some of those bones look like they’ve been cleaved apart. ![]() Jackson and John David Washington in The Piano Lesson. ![]()
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