A young man named Boy Willie (Washington) arrives in Pittsburgh’s Hill District (the site of all but one of Wilson’s plays) with his countrified friend, Lymon (Ray Fisher) escaping the racist legal system of Mississippi. Wilson, of course, wrote a play for each decade of the Black experience and “The Piano Lesson,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, covers the 1930s. I’ve seen “The Piano Lesson” several times, but never with such a grand upright piano, replete with the faces of long-dead enslaved people staring out at a Broadway audience. And the titular prop piano, which Wilson employed as a modest symbol for the ancestral sacrifices of those who perished on the Middle Passage and plantation fields beyond, has such elaborate and detailed carvings that you can imagine it being stored and later used on a soundstage for an upcoming movie, even if a modest one already was made.
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