LumiScore
Taste Test
← Back to books

The Piano Lesson

by August Wilson

First published 1990

LumiScore—

Insufficient ratings

Your Match—

Take the Taste Test or rate books to see your match.

About this book

August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences.

In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home.

Read more

When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future.

But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.

Source: Open Library

YOUR RATING

Rate this book

Sign in to add your rating. Browsing remains open without an account.

Book information

Author
August Wilson
First published
1990
Edition
The piano lesson
Publisher
Theatre Communications Group
Language
ENG
ISBN-13
9781559363006