August Wilson (1945-2005) left behind a body of nearly 20 plays, but a good deal of his life’s work consists of an incredibly ambitious project, one not really attempted by anyone else in recent memory, if at all. Wilson wrote a cycle, or a set of plays on a loosely related theme. Wilson’s theme is […]
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play
August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet.
At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play
August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet.
At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.
The Piano Lesson
144The Piano Lesson
144Paperback(Reprint)
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780452265349 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 12/28/1990 |
Series: | Drama, Plume Series |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 144 |
Sales rank: | 31,513 |
Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.38(d) |
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