The Piano Lesson is a play by American playwright August Wilson, the fourth in his series, The Pittsburgh Cycle. The play premiered on 26 November 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theatre and debuted on Broadway in 1990. The original Broadway cast featured Charles S. Dutton, Carl Gordon, Rocky Carroll, and S. Epatha Merkerson. Wilson received received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and his second Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the work.

Plot synopsis

The play concerns a brother and a sister who argue about whether they should sell their family piano. Boy Willie, a sharecropper from the South, wants to sell his family's ancestral piano to buy land. His Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania sister Berniece insists on keeping it. The piano has the carved faces of their great-grandfather's wife and son, who were sold in exchange for the piano during the days of enslavement. In essence, the piano serves as an embodiment of their struggles as a family and how they overcame. However, the piano is mystical in many ways owing to its history. Being seen as a symbolic embodiment of their past ancestry, a subtle, reserved fear is also a part of their feelings toward their piano.

Film adaptation

The play was adapted for a television movie in 1995 directed by Lloyd Richards with Charles S. Dutton as Boy Willie and Alfre Woodard as Berniece.

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