Maegan Clearwood — Writing Sample mclearwood2@gmail.com • (240) 529 - 7855
Program Note for The Piano Lesson, May 2014 “Ultimately Wilson becomes a myth maker, recasting the amber past in the crucible of his memory. The products of his alchemy are plays that, as their characters make decisions in the light of the hard-earned lessons of their ancestors, point to the future.” –Dr. Sandra Shannon, The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson “The train don’t never stop. It’ll come back every time.” – Doaker, Act I, Scene I of The Piano Lesson When Boy Willie and Lymon’s truck pulls up to Berniece’s house at the opening of The Piano Lesson, August Wilson seems to be coming home. The play is, after all, the fourth in the playwright’s colossal Century Cycle—ten plays that stand alone or as a series, each documenting one decade of the African American experience, and all but one taking place in Wilson’s native Pittsburgh neighborhood, the Hill District. Although The Piano Lesson returns to Wilson’s eternal stomping grounds, it is, more than any of his other Century Cycle plays, a transitional story. As soon as Boy Willie bursts through his sister and uncle’s front door, it becomes clear that some kind of conflict is imminent; as Wilson describes it in the opening stage directions, “a coming together of something akin to a storm.” For a story that takes place entirely within the four walls of the Charles family’s cramped house, The Piano Lesson is teeming with movement—even its setting is in flux. The play takes place in 1936 in the midst of the Great Migration, the mass movement of African Americans from their Southern homeland to the urban North. The Charles family represents only a small portion of the 6 million children and grandchildren of former slaves who sought economic and social opportunity in such Northern cities as Chicago, Detriot, and Pittsburgh. This uprooting hardly yielded the idyllic results the migrants anticipated; after traveling hundreds of miles by boat, bus, train, or on foot, they faced a new wave of discrimination and economic turmoil, especially during the Great Depression. Wilson described this mass exodus as “a transplant that did not take,” a failed attempt to run from a traumatic past that was ultimately inescapable. The Charles family is at the crossroads of this Great Migration. Each of the characters in the play is a migrant to some degree or another, struggling to rectify with the past and move toward the future. On one side, Wilson presents us with Berniece and her Uncle Doaker; content in their new Northern neighborhood, they have left their past behind with little more than an old piano to remind them of their ancestors. Boy Willie, meanwhile, arrives at his sister Berniece’s house in passing; anxious to sell his share of the piano’s worth and invest in farmland, he wants to reclaim his family’s stake in their homeland and return South. And at the center of this brother-sister conflict is the titular piano, an instrument that embodies the Charles family’s traumatic, sprawling ancestry. After years of ignoring this history, The Piano Lesson wrenches Berniece and Boy Willie into a battle between past, present, and future. Wilson poses a very specific question in this confrontation: “What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?” In initial drafts, the playwright avoided giving an answer to this enormous debate. When long-time collaborator and director Lloyd Richards began work on the original 1987 production, however, he implored Wilson to provide some sense of closure; as it stood, the fate of the piano was left unanswered, an ending that Wilson defended but ultimately changed. In its final version, and in the version Olney is presenting this season, Berniece and Boy Willie’s battle finally culminates in a definitive conclusion. Like millions of other uprooted African-Americans in the ‘30s, the Charles family is on a journey. Even with his revised ending, however, Wilson never intended for The Piano Lesson to be about the family’s destination; the importance of the legacy question lies not in winning or losing, right or wrong, but in the courage to face these demons of the past. The ultimate lesson is, as Wilson described it, “the willingness to do battle.” To learn more about August Wilson and the world of the play, pick up a context guide from the lobby or visit our dramaturgy blog at http://olneypianolesson.wordpress.com.