Two River Theater continues exploring August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle with ‘The Piano Lesson’

MICHAEL HULL

Brandon Michael Hull and Danielle Moné Truitt co-star in “The Piano Lesson,” at The Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank.

The ornately decorated piano — centrally placed on the stage in the current production of August Wilson’s 1987 play “The Piano Lesson” at Two River Theater in Red Bank — is played by several characters during the course of the show. But no actual piano lesson is ever shown. The “Lesson” in the play’s title suggests that the piano — this piano — has something to teach these characters. And it does.

The Tony-nominated, Pulitzer Prize-winning play — which is part of Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle” of 10 plays, each one set in a different decade of the 20th century — is a lot of things. It’s a family drama but it also has some eerie supernatural elements. It is loaded with earthy humor but also makes a serious statement about the way the memory of slavery still exerted a psychologically constrictive force over a Black family that had been subjected to it, even decades after The Civil War.

MICHAEL HULL

J. Bernard Calloway in “The Piano Lesson.”

The actors in this Francois Battiste-directed production fill their characters with lots of personality, with standouts including Brandon Micheal Hall as the ambitious, headstrong Boy Willie (no longer a boy, despite his name), Danielle Moné Truitt as his no-nonsense sister Berniece, and Keith Randolph Smith as their wise but somewhat weary uncle Doaker.

I felt that that too much of dialogue is delivered in a rapid-fire manner, though, so that Wilson’s carefully crafted words don’t always resonate as much as they should. Maybe this is an attempt at realism: People do talk that way, sometimes. But too many lines become indecipherable.

The play is set in Depression Era 1936, and takes place entirely in the home that Doaker owns and shares with Berniece and her daughter Maretha (Elaán Battiste, the director’s daughter). It begins with Boy Willie and his friend Lymon (Joshua Echebiri) arriving there early in the morning, having come back to Pittsburgh from Mississippi with a truck full of watermelons to sell.

The tension between Boy Willie and Berniece is felt almost immediately, and only intensifies when Boy Willie announces his plan to sell the piano and use the proceeds — adding in some money he has saved, and what he will make from selling the watermelons — to buy a piece of farmland.

“Walk in there! Tip my hat! Lay my money down on the table! Get my deed and walk on out!” he says, almost like a preacher in the midst of a passionate sermon. It is clear that he has been thinking about this for a long time, and that it means a tremendous amount to him.

Berniece, who co-owns the piano with him, resists. It is not clear why, at first, but we learn that the piano has a lot of history to it — and that there are ghosts who are interested in whether or not the piano stays in the house.

MICHAEL HULL

Joshua Echebiri in “The Piano Lesson.”

The widowed Berniece has two romantic possibilities. An earnest preacher (Brian D. Coats) seems like a nice-enough guy, and proposes, though Berniece doesn’t seem ready to remarry. There seems to be a stronger attraction between her and Lymon.

Boy Willie, meanwhile, pursues a local woman, Grace (Arden Carethers), whom Berniece takes an immediate dislike to — primarily because Boy Willie is staying on the couch in the house’s living room, and tries to have sex with Grace there while the others sleep upstairs. “You know I don’t allow this kind of stuff in my house,” Berniece says.

There is a very funny scene in which Lymon, feeling rich with the money he has made from selling the watermelons, is basically conned by another uncle, Wining Boy (J. Bernard Calloway), into buying a expensive, garish silk suit from him. And there is a wonderful scene in which Wining Boy, who has worked as a professional musician and even released a record or two, sits down at the piano and dazzles us with his blues prowess.

Wining Boy also talks, eloquently, about the trap that a musician’s life can be — another lesson that he, in his experience, has learned from the piano.

“You look up one day and hate the whiskey, and you hate the women, and you hate the piano,” he says. “But that’s all you got. You can’t do nothing else. All you know how to do is play that piano.”

This is the eighth “Pittsburgh Cycle” play Two River Theater has presented since its 2011-2012 season; it intends to do all of them. The two that are left are “Fences” and “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”

Two River Theater in Red Bank will present “The Piano Lesson” through Oct. 4; visit tworivertheater.org.

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