The Piano Lesson |
| The Piano Lesson | by August Wilson | Directed by Ron OJ Parson | Produced by Portland Stage Company, at the Portland Performing Arts Center’s Main Stage | through October 21 | 207.774.0465 |
A piano doesn’t produce anything except notes, insists Boy Willie (Ronald Conner). It’s sure no match for good, solid ground: “The land give back to you,” he tells his sister Berniece (Tyla Abercrumbie). “That piano don’t put out nothin’ else.” But the fruit of this family piano is a strange one, all right: a slavery-era legacy of past, family, violence, and pride. Rascally Boy Willie and upright widow Berniece share inheritance of the instrument, once owned by the family that owned their family. But they are at turbulent odds about how — and whether — to harvest it, in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, tautly directed by Ron OJ Parson for Portland Stage Company.When Boy Willie shows up at Berniece’s house in Pittsburgh, with his sidekick Lymon (Patrick J. Sims) and a truckful of watermelons they’ve driven up from Mississippi, it’s both a family reunion and a confrontation between Southern ways and Northern ones. Down there, folks are still farmers. Up here, Berniece’s live-in uncle, Doaker (A.C. Smith), works for the railroad; Berniece’s stubborn suitor Avery (Allen Edge) is an elevator operator with aspirations to the pulpit. These Northern Depression-era occupations are decidedly different from the Southern ones. They’re industrial, and — in Boy Willie’s view — less independent than the old agrarian tradition, which black folks now can and should claim as their own. Boy Willie wants to be that yeoman farmer of the South, and it’s why he’s here: He wants land. And not just any land, but the land that belonged to the man who was once his family’s owner. For that, he needs capital, and plans to cash in the family piano to get it.
To say that Berniece is not pleased with Boy Willie’s arrival, not to mention his intentions, is a grave understatement, particularly since he gets on so well with her 11-year-old daughter Maretha (alternating between Nyanen Deng and Dorcas Thete). Berniece is at his throat from the moment he comes yelling through the morning’s early hours. Their cross-purposes seem irreconcilable: She wants to keep both the piano and its bloody past intact, preserved but unexamined, while Boy Willie wants to stir it up, cut it open, and sell it off for a fresh, new start at life.
In this excellent, dynamic production, the sibling tension is merciless and exhausting; Conner swaggers, cajoles, coerces, and inveighs tirelessly against Abercrumbie’s focused smolder. Boy Willie’s country-boy arrogant exuberance is both infuriating and extremely entertaining. This big personality needs no fancy city duds to get noticed, and he certainly isn’t going to dress up for any of Pittsburgh’s women.
He and the guys, all portrayed with great wit and vitality, do have a ball together, ribbing and hooting and harkening back. And the piano figures in as more than symbol, as the guys soar through a couple of fabulously rollicking musical performances. Doaker’s juke-joint musician/gambler brother Wining Boy (Victor J. Cole, wiry, giddy, and at one point dressed in costumer Jacqueline Firkins’s drop-dead blue-and-peach suit ensemble) leads a spirited ragtimey number. And a real show-stopper is the moan and shout of an old work song punctuated by powerful claps and stomps. The overall physical energy required of this cast is staggering, from drunken fooling to fraught altercations.
