The Piano Lesson is a play by August Wilson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright. It won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
The play concerns a brother and a sister who argue about whether they should sell their family piano. Boy Willie, a sharecropper from the South, wants to sell his family's ancestral piano to buy land. His Pittsburgh sister Berniece insists on keeping it. The piano has the carved faces of their great-grandfather's wife and son, who were sold in exchange for the piano during the days of enslavement.
The play premiered in 1989 at the Yale Reperatory Theater and debuted on Broadway in 1990. It won Wilson the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and his second Pulitzer (his first came in 1987 for Fences). The original Broadway cast featured Charles S. Dutton, Carl Gordon, Rocky Carroll, and S. Epatha Merkerson.
Under August Wilson's supervision, The Piano Lesson was made into a made-for-TV movie in 1995. Charles S. Dutton plays Boy Willie and Alfre Woodard plays Berniece.
Set in 1936, this play represents the 1930s and the fourth in The Pittsburgh Cycle.
1930's Pittsburgh, a brother comes home to claim "my half of the piano", a family heirloom; but his sister is not wanting to part with it. This is a glimpse of the conditions for African-Americans as well as some of the attitudes and influences on their lives. But whether he is able to sell the piano so that he can get enough money to buy some property and "no longer have to work for someone else" involves the story (or lesson) that the piano has to show him. Written by BOB STEBBINS
Like most children, Conrad is often distracted and can't find time to fulfill the strict practice demands of his piano teacher. When he arrives unpracticed and late for his weekly lesson, Conrad begins a comic struggle to outwit his haughty old teacher and survive the piano lesson. Written by Anonymous
