Old haunts

Trinity masters The Piano Lesson

by Carolyn Clay

THE PIANO LESSON. By August Wilson. Directed by Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe. Set design by Michael McGarty. Costumes by Andre Harrington. Lighting by Yael Lubetzky. Music by Mitch Greenhill. With Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, Keskhemnu, Kevin Maurice Jackson, Rose Weaver, Brianna McBride, Robert Jason Jackson, Abdul Salaam El Razzac, and Pamela Lambert. At Trinity Repertory Company, through March 11.

Keskhemnu, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, and Kevin Maurice Jackson

Ghosts both literal and figurative hover over August Wilson's The Piano Lesson. Downstairs in a house in Pittsburgh in 1936, grown siblings war over the fate of an heirloom piano into which their slave-family history is carved. Upstairs lurks the demon-shade of a recently departed cracker whose family once sold a couple of human beings for the instrument. And at Trinity Repertory Company, where the 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner is getting a spirited production in more ways than one, director Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe offers a specter Wilson didn't think of. The play opens, in near darkness, with an appearance by the Piano Spirit, a mournful-looking figure in turned-up collar and pulled-down hat, who gives the keyboard a rousing workout as an ominous bass rumble suggests we may soon be needing an exorcist big-time.

Indeed, The Piano Lesson is an exorcism cloaked in a slice-of-1930s-black-life drama. There is talk in the play of a railway crossroads where men talk to ghosts. And the work itself sits at the intersection of realism and metaphor -- which can be a jarring place unless you accept that Wilson, arguably the pre-eminent American playwright of his generation, believes in ghosts and has not just stirred supernatural mumbo-jumbo into the kitchen sink. The Piano Lesson is the fourth in Wilson's decade-by-decade chronicle of the African-American experience in the 20th century (there are eight plays so far), and as with its immediate predecessor, the 1911-set Joe Turner's Come and Gone, its spiritual element is as palpable as corn bread. The Piano Lesson is not the masterpiece Joe Turner is; it's repetitious, imperfectly resolved, and sometimes richer in the margins than in the middle. But Wilson, as always, spins gold from the rhythms of black speech, while capturing the transience of a culture uprooted. And the play's central question, about what to do with the legacy of slavery, knows no bottom.

The Piano Lesson begins at five o'clock in the morning, when Boy Willie Charles, up from Mississippi, clamorously descends on the Pittsburgh house where his widowed sister, Berniece, lives with their uncle Doaker and Berniece's 11-year-old daughter, Maretha. He and friend Lymon have driven a moribund truck north with a load of watermelons to sell. But, really, Boy Willie has come for the piano. So, apparently, has Sutter, the newly deceased representative of the white family on whose land the Charles's antecedents were slaves and then sharecroppers. As is explained by Doaker, the piano's past is bittersweet. Berniece and Boy Willie's grandfather and great-grandmother were bartered for the instrument; grieving, their great-grandfather carved his lost relatives' faces, along with other portraits and scenes, into its wood. Years later, Berniece and Boy Willie's father stole this totem of family history from the Sutters and lost his life in the process, setting off a cycle of ghostly vengeance. Boy Willie is determined to sell the piano to buy the last of the Sutter land. But for Berniece, "money can't buy what that piano cost."

In the end, the sibling conflict and the metaphor culminate in a quite literal dust-up, out of which comes healing. But at Trinity, Wilson's treasures -- linguistic, humorous, and tender -- are mined along the way by a splendid cast that commits to the work with guts and heart. And Cooper-Anifowoshe, taking her cue from Wilson, fills the piece with period detail, from a metal bathtub hauled into the middle of the kitchen and filled with saucepans of hot water to a painful session with hair grease and a hot comb. It's hard to resist Boy Willie striding about the kitchen eating greens out of the pot or a stamp-and-clap rendition of a prison-farm ditty undertaken by Boy Willie, Lymon, Doaker, and another uncle, Wining Boy. I don't know where costume designer Andre Harrington came up with the wardrobe for once-dapper Wining Boy, who long ago traded a musician's career for the whiskey bottle. But the screaming vintage suits, including a yellow silk number that transforms Lymon from bumpkin to Big Bird, are a sight to behold.

As Boy Willie, Keskhemnu gives a performance that is expansive, single-minded, and bursting with bulldozing life. Rose Weaver's Berniece, by contrast, is all suspicious containment, so that when fury or sweetness bursts out, the effect is poignant. Ricardo Pitts-Wiley is folksy yet authoritative as the wise, practical Doaker. Kevin Maurice Jackson is a simple, open Lymon, hilarious in his attempt to cut a cool figure in tight shoes, touching in his late-night reaching out to Berniece. And Robert Jason Jackson captures both the essential goodness and the ineffectualness of elevator-operator-turned-preacher Avery. Best of all, perhaps, is Abdul Salaam El Razzac's weathered and aristocratic Wining Boy, at his lanky, dandified ease whether reeling drunk, hustling a few bucks, or offering up blunt wisdom about "the difference between the colored man and the white man." In these capable hands, we get a Piano Lesson taught by maestros.