Striking a Powerful Chord
The Rep makes history with a compelling production of an August Wilson masterwork
by Martin Brady
The Piano Lesson
Presented by Tennessee Repertory Theatre
Through May 7 at TPAC's Polk Theater
For the first time in its 20-year existence, Tennessee Repertory Theatre is producing a work by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson. The current production of The Piano Lesson is the final entry in Rep artistic director David Alford's first season at the helm of our city's most important theatrical institution. The Rep smartly opens the door to a modern American classic with a gutsy presentation featuring Nashville's finest African American actors.
Three of Wilson's plays have been staged seriously in Music City in the past five years—Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Fences and Seven Guitars. Like those works, The Piano Lesson is a lengthy (three hours-plus), two-fisted encounter with black history. Wilson's never at a loss for words, but therein lies the danger. You need passionate, skilled actors who understand and can effectively drive home his characters, without inviting the audience simply to mark time till the final curtain.
Luckily, veteran director Woodie King Jr. is working with one of the tightest ensembles ever pulled together locally, and the results are commensurately first-rate. Leading the way is Barry Scott, who makes a triumphant return to the Rep, where he hasn't worked in years. (Scott has excelled in the recent past at the Tennessee State University-based American Negro Playwright Theatre, before lamentably sparse crowds.) Joining him are other TSU-affiliated artists, most notably Kimberley LaMarque and jeff obafemi carr. It is a significant event that this trio find their considerable talents showcased all at once in the same high-profile venue. Here they are provided an opportunity to exhibit to a broader audience what a few observers already knew: there are no better thespians in Nashville.
The setting is Pittsburgh, 1936. Boy Willie (Scott) arrives at the house of his sister Berniece (LaMarque), accompanied by his pal Lymon (carr), with whom he has traveled some 1,200 miles from Mississippi with a truckload of watermelons. Willie wants to sell the watermelons—and the family heirloom piano in Berniece's living room—so he can purchase a piece of land back home. But the piano means far more to Berniece than mere money: engraved into the wood are carvings by their grandfather, which tell the tale of their enslaved forebears. The elemental battle ensues, the piano serving as the metaphorical prize that determines whether the legacy of a dark past will win out over the hope for self-determination and a brighter future.
Act 1 is divided into two scenes, the first of which is nothing short of brilliant, acted with clarity and commitment. Scott and carr playfully dominate the early going, like long-lost, drifting uncles who have finally landed, gratefully, in the lap of family. Here, too, we see some foreshadowing: Boy Willie's eagerness to make his deals so that he can return to his roots, and Lymon's recognition that, like so many other African Americans from the South, he's reached a new land, where the possibility of a hopeful and prosperous life awaits. LaMarque's character is haunted by ghosts, and her gut-wrenching histrionics close out the act. It's an effective setup for the sometimes harrowing confrontations of Act 2, in which guns are drawn, and, depending on one's interpretation of the controversial ending, demons are possibly exorcised.
Wilson's highly regarded body of work is dedicated, in part, to examining black American society in each of the decades since 1900. The incidentals of setting may change through the years, but Wilson stays true to his basic belief: "As African Americans," he once wrote, "we should demand to participate in society as Africans. That's the way out of the vicious cycle of poverty and neglect.... I think the process of assimilation to white American society was a big mistake."
The world of The Piano Lesson is one of hobos, trains, preachers, pawnshops and sippin' whiskey. Those icons are evoked through the presence of old man Doaker (Carl Gordon, re-creating a role he played on Broadway with Samuel L. Jackson), aging dandy Wining Boy (Ralph McCain) and minister-in-training Avery (Kenneth B. Dozier, who makes a significant Rep debut after just a few years learning his trade in community theater productions at TSU and elsewhere). These characters effectively supply a socio-historical backdrop for the greater drama that Boy Willie and Berniece play out in the foreground. Further solid support comes from Chandra Norman Lipscomb as a feisty floozy and young Assata Hefner as Berniece's daughter, Meretha.
Director King unleashes his cast onto the Wilson script with general abandon and moving results. There's a lot of stage business, too, and it's handled cleanly and logically. A couple of minor gripes: there's a critical Act 2 scene between LaMarque and Dozier begging for more specific and closer interaction; and it's too bad that McCain, whose character is supposed to be a musician, can't really wail on that piano. His bare-minimum chording stagnates what ought to be a lively moment.
Per usual, Gary Hoff's set is a masterwork of design and construction. Under Chris Wilson's lighting, it practically radiates, which brings into question whether the visual feel is completely consistent with Depression-era Pittsburgh. Trish Clark's costumes are very natty throughout, though Boy Willie and Lymon look a little too well-dressed for a couple of rural bumpkins who've just driven cross-country in a broken-down truck. Their work boots, for example, look like Florsheim Comfortechs fresh out of the box.
The centerpiece piano, donated by the University of Central Arkansas, is a thing of beauty, as it should be. A symbolic cast member, it plays its part to perfection.
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