Hartford Stage, Hartford, CT
through November 13, 2016
by Bernadette Johnson
“The Piano Lesson,” Hartford Stage’s latest production, is a
Pulitzer-Prize winning play set in the 1930s, the fourth in American playwright
August Wilson’s “The Pittsburgh Cycle,” in which he chronicles the poverty and
struggles of his people and the emergence of Black culture in each decade of
the 20th century.
The title itself is misleading, in that the play is not
about a piano lesson, but rather about the hard-learned lesson the drama’s
principal characters eventually grasp — the importance of history and the
legacy of the past. The upright piano itself, though set off to the side,
merits the designation “main character,” being as it is, by its very presence,
central to the drama. Simply stated, the play focuses on the disagreement
between a brother and sister (Boy Willie and Berniece) as to whether the family
heirloom, intricately carved by their great-grandfather, “a legacy of all that
bloodshed (slavery, thieving and killing),” is to be treasured or sold.
Boy Willie, forcefully played by Clifton Duncan, storms onto
the scene excited over the prospect of purchasing land back in the south. His
scheming includes the sale of the piano, bequeathed equally to him and his
sister, who vehemently opposes the sale.
This seems a simple plot, that is, until you add in a few
subplots, including hauntings by a few ghosts connected with the history of the
piano. It’s all very confusing, and by the end of Act I, the audience is left
still trying to figure out who or what is the “ghost of Yellow Dog,” who Sutter
is/was, and why his ghost is haunting the home.
Sesame Street veteran Roscoe Orman, as Doaker, the home’s
owner, charged with recounting the piano’s (and family’s) history, seems
somewhat tired in the telling, and it’s easy to get lost in the dialogue. There
are long conversations among the characters, refreshingly accented, however, by
the foot-stomping rendition of an old Negro field song, led by Duncan, along with
Orman, Cleavant Derricks as Wining Boy and Galen Ryan Kane as Lymon.
Duncan is, by far, the drama’s driving force, and Christina
Acosta Robinson, as Berniece, is a balancing, stable presence to his live-wire
outbursts and ramblings.