When you unleash The Ensemble Theatre on an August Wilson play, you should stand back. The tidal wave will knock you over and curl your hair.
Ghosts haunt Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning playwright August Wilson's mammoth ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle, plays that cover each decade of the 20th century seen through the black experience. Wounds that never heal; ancestral scars that mar the descendants; and chasm-deep memories that are both balm and stinging astringent to his characters as they battle their way out of the past and into the future.
But Wilson always gives his people hope – sometimes only a glimmer – while love of family and deep historical bonds manifest a healing balm whenever the trauma of the past infests the present. Like Faulkner, his characters move ever forward within a past that is ever present.
The fourth play in his epic cycle, The Piano Lesson (which debuted at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1987) is set in Wilson's beloved Pittsburgh in 1936. Like the opening drama, The Gem of the Ocean, this play is racked by ghosts – literally. It is the family heirloom piano that conjures them.
Once owned by the Mississippi plantation's matriarch, Mrs. Sutter, who had the faces of her slaves carved into the woodwork, the old piano now sits unplayed in the home of those very descendants, the Charles family. It casts its spell when Boy Willie (a wild and untamed Jason Dirden), sharecropper and recently released from prison, arrives in Pittsburgh to reclaim the piano and sell it so he can buy the property where his ancestors were enslaved.
But the piano is half-owned by his sister Bernice (a simmering, ready-to-boil Lakeisha Rochelle), who adamantly refuses to part with it, although she never plays it anymore. The family ties are too strong. Its very heritage cries out to her, a cherished though painful reminder of the past. Heritage be damned, cries Boy Willie. Our family's history can be avenged by buying the same property on which our family toiled and died. We need to sell that piano and I'm taking it.
The conflict, while melodramatic – a gun is prominently displayed, not once, but twice – is deftly handled within Wilson's fragrant operatic dialogue, adept storytelling, strong and potent family bonds, and the subsidiary characters who nimbly dance around the sibling rivalry.
Uncle Doaker (a delightfully spry Alex Morris), former railroad cook, in whose house Bernice and the piano reside, is the avuncular tie to the past and the referee among the siblings. Bernice's staunchest ally, he knows the painful history of the upright and its significance to the family. Boy Willie's accomplice and former prison inmate,
Lymon (Kendrick “Kay B” Brown), is one of Wilson's wise fools. Running from the authorities, he's got to stay up North, a place which is intoxicating to this southern boy who's out for a fast time. He's also a bit out of his league and purchases a suit that doesn't fit him to woo the ladies. In the family squabbles, he doesn't quite know whom to believe and makes a somewhat unsuccessful pass at Bernice when she's most vulnerable. Bernice's young daughter Maretha (Kendall Goode), when not suffering through hair treatments from her mother, also witnesses the Sutter ghost.
Doaker's elder brother Wining Boy (a most ingratiating Timothy Eric) always arrives at the family home when he most needs money. He's a victim of the past, chewing on his failed marriage and stalled music career as if they were wads of fine tobacco. But he's slick enough to sell bumpkin Lymon a discarded silk suit and a pair of shoes that don't fit. He's the eternal wastrel and grifter, yet always one or two steps behind the others.
Avery (Curtis Von) is a preacher wanna-be if he can find a place to preach. Solid and forthright, he woos Bernice, who's almost on the verge of saying yes, as long as her demons and memories of her dead husband can be mollified. Avery's the one who's asked to perform the exorcism of old man Sutter. And then there's Grace, the good-time city gal (Krystal Uchem), who entices both Boy Willie and Lymon for as long as she can. Once she realizes the house is haunted, she's outta there.
For all the well-rounded subsidiary roles and confrontations, emotionally and lovingly rendered under Eileen J. Morris's pinprick direction, Piano Lesson comes down to the clashing sibling confrontation between Boy Willie and Bernice. He wants that piano. She says, No. Dirden and Rochelle match each other's intensity with an all-too-familiar familial rivalry. He's all bluster and glowering glances, with a panther's wary movements; she's calm but seething underneath, a sleeping Vesuvius waiting to erupt.
It's a great pairing, as sparks fly and threaten to combust the theater. When the smoke clears – perhaps a bit too easily – the old engraved upright remains where it is. The wicked ghosts from the past are expelled, but you can't help feeling that the scars will take a bit longer to heal.
The Piano Lesson continues through February 25. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays; and 3 p.m. Sundays at Ensemble Theatre, 3535 Main. For more information, call 713-520-0055 or visit ensemblehouston.com. $34 to $55.
