![]() ![]() Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. There is finally some hope within these walls. Watch what happens to the broken home in the last seconds of the play. She is not so keen, and honestly, Avery seems a little too polite for the fire and brimstone expected of him, and perhaps inadequate to the task that Berniece requests of him of blessing the house and ridding them all of Sutter.Ī further, more profound exorcism-and piece of self-discovery-belongs powerfully to Brooks who finally plays the piano, and in so doing releases many manifestations, past and present, of pain and trauma. Lovelorn preacher Avery (Trai Byers) is desperate, after years of courting, to finally marry Berniece. (The suit and shoes he ends up mis-selling the naïve young man are hopelessly, wrongly sized, but Lymon loves it.) ![]() Wining Boy (Michael Potts) is Doaker’s 56-year-old brother-extravagantly attired, louche, and keen to ensure-in a cracklingly funny scene-that Lymon is as spiffingly dressed for a night on the town as possible. A treat for all those who saw her dazzle as Toni Stone three years ago, April Matthis plays a glamorous woman and apparent one-night stand, who has more grace (her character’s name) and sense than the men trying to bed her. The Piano Lesson’s secondary characters are just as beautifully drawn and played and played as its leads. For him, this symbol of one-time oppression can be profitably sold: a very real, lucrative symbol of liberation. Boy Willie sees selling it as a way of converting the pain of the past, and the lack of control the family had as slaves, into a vehicle of wealth-making that can form the bedrock of an independent and self-sustaining future. Berniece feels strongly that the piano belongs in the house it is, quite literally, family. The symbolism of the piano stretches into the present day. The ghosts and the piano are inextricably linked every time it is moved by Boy Willie and Lymon a terrible groaning starts up, and the house seems to slip into a kind of frenzied trance of its own. ![]() With the piano now in Doaker’s house, Sutter’s ghost has been freaking Berniece and Doaker out, with random encounters upstairs and in the living room. Sutter himself died in mysterious circumstances he may have been pushed to his death by a very real killer, or another set of spirits called the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog. The house may or may not be haunted by the ghost of the unseen Sutter, from whose family Doaker’s descendants stole the piano back. The carvings on the piano, done by Doaker’s grandfather, are carvings of Doaker’s family and their significant life moments, done to be gazed upon by the white slave-owning matriarch who missed the slaves she once owned. The story of the piano is at the heart of the play Doaker relays it in great detail, and it goes right back to when the family’s descendants were slaves, being traded for the piano we see before us. (In the original 1987 production, Jackson himself played Boy Willie.) ![]() There is quite the opposite of A-list-Hollywood-star-on-Broadway grandstanding from Jackson, but rather a sensitive portrait of a father not only trying to keep his niece and nephew from all-out war, but also making sense of his family’s past and present, and trying to have a quiet few minutes with his newspaper. Brooks’ Berniece has a regal watchfulness, a perfect scene partner to his quiet warmth and generosity. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano, while Berniece fiercely wants it to stay where it is, even if she cannot bear to play it.īrooks’ fierce strength is contrasted with Jackson’s gravelly, kind paterfamilias. And there, stage left, is a piano carved in great detail with the outlines of faces and bodies-the cause, in both past and present, of the fractured rafters. Doaker’s niece Berniece ( Danielle Brooks) lives in the house with her uncle and her 11-year-old daughter Maretha (Jurnee Swan), their peace shattered by the arrival of her brother Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his friend Lymon (the excellent Ray Fisher), who are in town to sell watermelons. ![]()
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