Nija Okoro and Jernard Burks (Photo by Craig Schwartz)
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
A Noise Within
Through Nov. 10
RECOMMENDED
This is the fourth play in August Wilsons “American Century cycle.” That would be the 20th century, to which Wilson was primarily attached, in his life and in his work. The Piano Lesson is set in 1936 Pittsburgh, where a family piano that’s up for sale becomes an emblem of legacy. Wilson writes in a storied old-school tradition, picking up where Eugene O’Neill (among others) left off and transferring focus from the colloquial Irish-seafaring American experience to colloquial Black American legacies. Storytelling, and an underlying poeticism, interlink these two masters of American drama, along with the telling fusion of their plays to both Ancient Greek mythology and the Bible. Legacy.
By “old school,” I mean a kind of baroque dramaturgy in which characters banter a lot about the recent past, and then expound with soliloquies (stories) that are akin to arias. Front-loaded exposition rolls in, as though on a slow-moving tide, contrasted against the rat-a-tat distributed-exposition that later plays employ to hold their grasp of our century’s ever diminishing attention spans. With notable exceptions, the standard length of a new play today is 90 minutes without intermission. Broadway plays in the 1930s were often four hours with two or even three intermissions. It takes 90-minutes for just The Piano Lesson‘s first act to play itself out. And there’s another equally hefty act to come. Among the many probing questions that Wilson’s play addresses is the degree to which the American public has developed a collective Attention Deficit Disorder, exacerbated by various social media. The Piano Lesson is a test of patience and a test of our collective ability to be present, in any of the drama’s accruing moments, without permitting ourselves diversion or distraction: to concentrate, to reflect more deeply than has become our custom.
Director Gregg T. Daniel has made (or been invited to make) staging Wilson’s plays at this theater a cottage industry: King Hedley II, Radio Golf, Seven Guitars and A Gem of the Ocean. As an illustration of his commitment to Wilson’s dramaturgical rhythm, the family on stage breaks into song, one by one, until the ensemble becomes a choir, accompanied only by percussion (hands slapping a table). A contemporary impulse might be to curtail this song in order to get back to the play. Daniel will have no part of such a diminishing impulse. The song continues until it plays itself out on its own terms, and no other; the music takes over the action for a spell — and it is a spell. It makes one realize that this play is as much an oratorio as it is a drama, where a song can be a character, entitled to its own stature.
His ensemble is flawless. Kai A. Ealy and Nija Okoro portray brother and sister, living in their Uncle Doaker’s (Alex Morris) house. Well, not quite: Boy Willie (Ealy) is just visiting; he’s a sharecropper from Mississippi ostensibly up north to sell watermelons with his partner Lymon (Evan Lewis Smith). The pair served a prison sentence together, but that’s a different story. Boy Willie’s aim is to sell the piano (stage center) that he half owns with his sister, to purchase the land where his ancestors once worked as slaves (distant echoes of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard): social mobility; from a legacy of slavery to becoming landowner. But there’s a hitch or two, or this wouldn’t be a drama. First, the most recent descendent of the slave-owners, a man named Sutter, recently fell down a well to his death, and Boy Willie’s sister Berniece (Okoro) is convinced that people don’t just tumble into wells by accident, that her brother shoved the man to meet his maker. Sutter makes his ghastly, ghostly appearance to both Berniece and her kid daughter (Madison Keffer). (Sutter’s ghost doesn’t appear to us, as in, say Hamlet; call him a ghost-by-repute.) The second and more pertinent obstacle is that Berniece has no intention of separating herself from the family heirloom, though she no longer plays on the piano. Will it take her late husband’s pistol to resolve this sibling dispute? And there’s poor Doaker feebly attempting to mediate.
The piano has the family’s ancestors, their faces, carved into its wood: The symbolism could not be more apparent: Does one sever oneself from one’s legacy in order to move beyond it, or does one treat legacy as a road from past to future, on which one must tread in order to sustain identity and purpose? Is the past a burden or guide? And what happens, as in the 21st century, when the narratives of the past are so at odds? In the 20th century, we were slightly closer to dwelling in one reality. No more.
Credit must also go to Gerald C. Rivers, LeShay Tomlinson Boyce and Jernard Burks as, respectively, a fast-talking, “slick” dressing street philosopher; a party gal who glues herself to Boy Willie for a one-night stand, until Berniece thrown them both out of the house; and a once lost soul who’s converted himself into a preacher, capable of sprinkling holy water on the abode to rid the place of ghosts.
But the ghosts are omnipresent, and a séance to summon them will resolve this plot, one way or another.
Tesshi Nakagawa’s realistic, interior set is faithful to Wilson’s attention to detail, as are Alethia Moore-Del Monaco’s period costumes. Composer Jeff Gardner’s sound design is particularly subtle and effective, employing almost subliminal, haunting tones to suggest the presence of spirits who populate this play alongside the flesh-and-blood residents.
A Noise Within, 3352 Foothill Blvd., Pasadena; opens Sat., Oct. 19, 7:30 pm; perfs Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 pm; mats Sat.-Sun., 2 pm; dark Oct. 31; thru Nov. 10. https://anoisewithin.org Running time: Three hours and 10 minutes, with one intermission.
