He comes in hot, punctuating each line delivery with force, and that doesn’t leave him room to escalate or modulate. 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.

Unlike Brooks, an established talent onstage, Washington is a newcomer, making his Broadway debut, and he falters on his side of the seesaw. Washington brings it all forward in his performance - mouth jutting ahead, eyes at the horizon.

By selling the piano and getting the land, he sees a way to reclaim something. Boy Willie is looking out toward the future. 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. Playing her, Brooks does a lot of small things with her hands - cracking open pea pods or tying an apron. She believes in keeping the piano and honoring her ancestors. Berniece is all dignity and duty, barely containing her anger toward Boy Willie, whom she blames for the death of her husband. As the action progresses, Sutter’s ghost makes itself known to Berniece, exerting hegemony of its own.Īugust 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. He brings the news that Sutter, the white man who owned that land and their ancestors, has died. He wants to sell them, and the piano, to buy back the land their family once worked as slaves. He has come north with a truckful of watermelons. In the first scene, Boy Willie storms in, in a furious bluster, with plans of his own. She’s aspiring to city life, trying to teach her daughter to play the piano even though she herself has given it up. 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. In the play, the characters’ pasts enter by way of Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington). 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.

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. 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. Jackson and John David Washington in The Piano Lesson.

The piano lesson by august wilson