Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington in The Piano Lesson.The house has the look of a skeleton. 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. 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. 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.
In the play, the characters’ pasts enter by way of Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington). 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. She’s aspiring to city life, trying to teach her daughter to play the piano even though she herself has given it up. In the first scene, Boy Willie storms in, in a furious bluster, with plans of his own. He has come north with a truckful of watermelons. He wants to sell them, and the piano, to buy back the land their family once worked as slaves. He brings the news that Sutter, the white man who owned that land and their ancestors, has died. As the action progresses, Sutter’s ghost makes itself known to Berniece, exerting hegemony of its own.
August Wilson’s drama — fourth in the chronology of his ten Pittsburgh Cycle plays — seesaws around Boy Willie and Berniece’s debates over the piano and metes out rich motivations for each character’s side of the argument. Berniece is all dignity and duty, barely containing her anger toward Boy Willie, whom she blames for the death of her husband. She believes in keeping the piano and honoring her ancestors. Playing her, Brooks does a lot of small things with her hands — cracking open pea pods or tying an apron. She’s an actress I’ve seen go big before, in The Color Purple and Much Ado About Nothing, but here, you feel her drawing things close to herself, establishing a force field. Boy Willie is looking out toward the future. By selling the piano and getting the land, he sees a way to reclaim something. Washington brings it all forward in his performance — mouth jutting ahead, eyes at the horizon.
Unlike Brooks, an established talent onstage, Washington is a newcomer, making his Broadway debut, and he falters on his side of the seesaw. As Boy Willie, he needs to be a live wire, exhausting but enthralling, and he manages the mania but can’t quite pull you deeper. He comes in hot, punctuating each line delivery with force, and that doesn’t leave him room to escalate or modulate. He gets caught in similar decisions — there’s a lot of pointing to emphasize his anger in moments that blur together. Onscreen, in Tenet or BlacKkKlansman, Washington tends to be better when he runs at a lower temperature. An August Wilson lead is a hell of a tough way to get started on Broadway, a marathon of language, and you feel a bit of Washington’s hard breathing trying to keep up with his fleeter co-stars. During one of Willie’s longer speeches in the second act, your attention should flow to him as he makes his case for selling the piano, but you keep watching Brooks as she does her daughter Maretha’s hair. He’s trying hard to define himself. Each time she presses a finger down, it feels like a thought.
Around Brooks and Washington, there are the old pros, who seem comfortably at play in Wilson’s writing: Samuel L. Jackson, as Doaker, works the audience with each mumble and grumble, puttering around in the kitchen as he slowly unspools old wounds and resentments. Michael Potts, as Wining Boy, his prodigal musician brother, gives you pizzazz and whimsy spun around a certain loneliness. Wilson’s dialogue is full of tangents and anecdotes, and when the two of them are onstage together, you just want to watch them shoot the shit for as long as they are willing. They sink into each exchange like they’re luxuriating in leather armchairs.
Of the younger actors, Brooks and Ray Fisher, playing Boy Willie’s friend Lymon, most closely emulate that level of ease. Fisher gets the comedy in some of Lymon’s slow-on-the-uptake responses to city folk around him but turns him into a sort of gentle giant discovering yearnings of his own. Brooks works that forcefield of quietude well, letting you into Berniece’s world on her own terms. Their flirtation, in the second art, feels as though they’re tentatively stepping into the sun. LaTanya Richardson Jackson, directing the production, has talked about wanting to expand the audience’s understanding of Berniece, a character Wilson once said he’d intended to be as large as his tragic male heroes like Troy in Fences but did not end up rendering as such. There’s definitely an expansion there in Brooks’s self-certainty, though you can expand only so far when Wilson lets the men around her crowd in so insistently.
That’s the nature of The Piano Lesson: It’s a play about the possibilities of the present that are cut off when other demands, like those of the past, make themselves known. This production operates well on its own terms but, perhaps more pressingly, brings others into view. Samuel L. Jackson, as you may have read, played Boy Willie in the play’s 1987 premiere at the Yale Rep. Seeing him across from Washington onstage has a spectral charge of its own. How could this kid live up to him?
Jackson seems to know that the play’s own ghosts will make their way onto the stage, and he invites them up there. It’s part of the ghostly feeling that this production is in the shadow of others, continuing along a chain with the rest of Wilson’s plays and with previous productions of this one. There’s something of it in that split-open set by Beowulf Boritt, which leaves room for you to fill in the walls and ceilings of the sets of other Pittsburgh homes in other Wilson dramas you might have seen.
And it’s in the design of the prop piano, too, which by contrast is disarmingly intricate. The piano, we learn in the course of the play, was carved by Berniece and Boy Willie’s great-grandfather. He re-created in it the faces of his wife and child, sold away from him to another enslaver, as well as images of their ancestors. This version is nearly covered in reliefs — all teeming with faces and bodies that spill over the sides, face, and legs — apparently inspired by Makonde sculpture and made via 3-D printing. It looks like a wall full of skulls in a catacomb or, maybe, an audience watching with expectations of its own.
The Piano Lesson is at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
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