On the surface, the play focuses on the fight between a brother and a sister over a piano. “The Piano Lesson” is in the fourth decade, set in 1936 its characters still reeling from the brutalities of the South, as they adjust to an unfamiliar Northern world of movies and skyscrapers. Called The Pittsburgh Cycle, or sometimes the American Century Cycle, it dramatizes the African American experience in the twentieth century, one play for each decade, all taking place in the Hill district of Pittsburgh. It would be foolish to deny the appeal and the power of their celebrity.īut they work as an ensemble, portraying a family of storytellers in a play haunted by ghosts – literal, metaphoric, historic…above all, by August Wilson, who died in 2005, the year he completed his ten-play series that he had spent the last 26 years of his life writing. Danielle Brooks, who delighted fans nationwide with her portrayal of Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black is returning to Broadway a half dozen years after her Tony-nominated Broadway debut in “The Color Purple.”
newly minted movie star John David Washington is making his Broadway debut a dozen years after his movie star father Denzel Washington won a Tony Award for his role in August Wilson’s “Fences” (which, like “The Piano Lesson,” earned Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama)
Jackson, veteran of some 150 films, returns to the play in which he made his Broadway debut as an understudy three decades ago, which is now directed by his wife, Latanya Richardson Jackson The ghosts are what make it brilliant.ĭon’t misunderstand. The first Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” is full of stars and ghosts.
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