A Ghostly Past, in Ragtime

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

THE PIANO LESSON by August Wilson

The piano in Doaker Charles' living room is a family heirloom, and like most heirlooms it is prized more than used, its value measured less in money than in memories. For this piano, the Charles family was torn asunder in slavery times: to acquire it, the white man who owned them traded away Doaker's grandmother and father, then a nine-year-old. On this piano, Doaker's grieving grandfather, the plantation carpenter, carved portrait sculptures in African style of the wife and son he had lost. To Doaker's hothead older brother, born under the second slavery of Jim Crow, the carvings on the piano made it the rightful property of his kin, and he lost his life in a successful conspiracy to steal it.

Now, in 1936, it sits admired but mostly untouched in Doaker's house in Pittsburgh, and it threatens to tear the family apart again. Boy Willie Charles, son of the man who stole the piano, wants to sell it and use the proceeds to buy and farm the very land where his ancestors were slaves. Boy Willie's sister Berniece denounces as sacrilege the idea of selling away a legacy her father died to obtain.

That is the premise of The Piano Lesson, which opened last week at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. The lesson of the title -- an instruction in morality rather than scales or fingering -- makes the work the richest yet of dramatist August Wilson, whose first three Broadway efforts, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, each won the New York Drama Critics Circle prize as best play of the year. The fact that producers are not shoving each other in haste to bring Piano Lesson to Broadway, especially in a season when the Tony Awards are likely to be given to mediocrities by default, underscores the all but defunct place of serious drama in our commercial theater.

Piano Lesson debuted more than a year ago at the Yale Repertory Theater, where Wilson has launched all his plays. In that production, the work seemed an intriguing but unpolished amalgam of kitchen-sink realism (there is literally one onstage) and window-rattling, curtain-swirling supernaturalism. Not much of the actual text has changed. But at the Goodman the play confidently shuttles spectators between the everyday present and the ghostly remnants of the past, until ultimately the two worlds collide. The first glimpse of the spookily poetic comes before a word is spoken, when a shaft of white light illumines the piano, which by itself plays an eerily cheerful rag.

The other major change since Yale is the recasting of Boy Willie with Charles S. Dutton, who gives a performance as energized as his Tony-nominated Broadway debut in Ma Rainey. Puffing his cheeks, waving his arms, hopping around like Jackie Gleason in a one-legged jig, the burly Dutton seems a rustic buffoon. But when conversation turns to conflict, his jaw tightens and the clowning stops. In Boy Willie, Dutton and Wilson achieve that rarity in literature, a truly common, ordinary man of heroic force.

The rest of the cast is equally fine, notably S. Epatha Merkerson as Berniece and Lou Myers as the dissolute uncle Wining Boy, who leads family members in musical interludes that include a haunting, African-influenced chant. Director Lloyd Richards needs to tinker with the ending, a sort of exorcism in which a sudden shift from farce to horror does not quite work. But already the musical instrument of the title is the most potent symbol in American drama since Laura Wingfield's glass menagerie.