The Piano Lesson by August Wilson (1990)

Summary:  Boy Willie returns to his sister's house to claim their heirloom family piano (they each own half of it).  With the profits from this piano, he hopes to buy some of the land that his ancestors worked on as slaves and start a new life for himself "down South."  His sister Berniece refuses, reminding him that the faces of their great-grandparents (slaves) are carved into the wood.  The piano was first owned by a white slave-owner named Mr. Sutter and then stolen by Berniece and Boy Willy's father.  Shortly after stealing the piano, he was killed...but the piano remained as inheritance for his children.  To Berniece, the object represents family history, pride, struggle and a connection to the past.

Thoughts:  As I began this project, I became more interested in various projects of great ambition by playwrights, notably Suzan Lori-Parks' 365 Days/365 Plays project (November 2002-2003) and The Pittsburgh Cycle, which contains two Pulitzer Prize winning plays.  Also called The Century Cycle, this set of Wilson's plays each represent a decade of the 1900s and were written from 1982 to 2005.

They are:
1900s:  Gem of the Ocean (2003)
1910s:  Joe Turner's Come and gone (1988)
1920s:  Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984)
1930s:  The Piano Lesson (PP) (1990)
1940s:  Seven Guitars (1995)
1950s:  Fences (PP) (1987)
1960s:  Two Trains Running (1991)
1970s:  Jitney (1982)
1980s:  King Hedley II (1999)
1990s:  Radio Golf (2005)

Having also read Wilson's Fences for this project, I naturally found myself drawing connections between these two works.  Both of the plays examine familial relationships and are aided by the perspective of an outsider (Bono in Fences, Lymon in The Piano Lesson).  These characters are able to offer more tempered advice and perspective as they are not relatives but have decades experience participating in the interpersonal relationships of the families.  Additionally, both of these plays contain elements of the supernatural.  In Fences, Troy's mentally handicapped brother Gabriel believes he is the angel Gabriel and has a divine vision in the final scene.  The supernatural is much more prevalent in The Piano Lesson as the ghost of Sutter (the white slave-owner whose piano was stolen by the Charles' family) appears multiple times to different members of the cast, making it very clear that he does not want the piano moved.

While critics certainly have their favorites, I am reminded of the words of my professor David Jones, who described following progress of The Pittsburgh Cycle as:  "It was like watching someone build a Gothic cathedral."

Topdog/Underdog by Suzan Lori-Parks (2002)

Summary:  Lincoln and Booth are adult brothers whose parents named them as a joke and later abandoned them when they were 16 and 11, respectively.  Younger brother Booth has recently developed an affinity for three-card monty, a game accompanied by a painful history for Lincoln.  While Booth is attempting to make money on the street, Lincoln holds a job as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator at an arcade.  At work, he sits in a chair (in whiteface) and gets "shot" by children on field trips and those seeking interesting entertainment.

Throughout the play, Booth attempts to get Lincoln to play three-card with him--arguing that they could go into business together and be wildly successful.  As the play progresses, the brothers laugh and fight and laugh and fight--until Booth reveals that he has killed his girlfriend and then kills his brother.

Thoughts:  I read this play shortly after reading some of Parks' other work (Fucking A, In the Blood, Venus) and it is evident that there are themes and characters that continue to reappear in her work.  In all four of these plays, Parks seems to argue that, whether we like it or not, our relationships with our families are significant and binding.  Even when her characters do everything in their power to break these bonds (including murder), they still remain.

The play also examines the the imperfection of memory--individuals in the same household remembering things in vastly different ways.  Although Booth is the younger brother, he saw his mother leave and was given the task of taking care of Lincoln--though he was certainly not old enough for this kind of responsibility.

"People are funny about they Lincoln shit.  Its historical.  People like they historical shit in a certain way.  They like it to unfold the way they folded it up.  Neatly like a book.  Not raggedy and bloody and screaming." 

-Topdog/Underdog, Scene 3  

 

Fences by August Wilson (1987)

Personal photo:  Fences at The Cort Theatre.  1 May 2010.

Summary:  The play takes place in front of 53 year-old Troy Maxon's house.  Alternately, Troy has conversations with his friend Bono, his wife Rose, his sons Cory and Lyons and his mentally disabled brother Gabriel.  Through these interactions, Troy's life story is revealed including a distant past that involves a previous marriage and prison time, and a current affair with a woman named Alberta.  Spliced throughout these interactions are Troy's monologues about facing death and direct-address to Death...staying that whenever He comes, Troy will be waiting.  Ultimately, the family finds themselves back in the front yard preparing for Troy's funeral--eight years after the start of the play.

Thoughts:  This was my second read of this play, and in the middle of my readings I was fortunate enough to see the Kenny Leon-directed production starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis (who both won Tony Awards for their performances).  While I really liked the play the first time, the second read was infused with the voices of Washington and Davis.  Much like the Jimmy Stewart effect on Harvey, my memories of the performance greatly enhanced my second reading experience.

Our seats were about three rows from the back of the theatre (photo above taken from my seat); but the work of Davis and Washington was palpable throughout the entire space.  The audience was at least 85% black...and very vocally responsive to the action on stage.  When Troy confesses his affair, there was a collective gasp in the audience.  Moments later when he reveals that he has no plans to stop seeing Alberta because she makes him feel something, there were groans and clucking noises of disbelief and judgment.  At the climax of his revelations, he informs Rose that Alberta is pregnant.  At this point, a woman in the orchestra section loudly shouted, "Get him!" to Rose onstage.  While reading this scene, I vividly remembered not only these outbursts but the effect that having to hold for these responses had on the rhythm of the scene.

Although The New York Times had positively reviewed Washington's performance, I was skeptical.  Struggling actor friends had expressed their displeasure with the fact that two very successful film actors were taking Broadway jobs that could have been given to actors who actually needed the money.  Moments before the production began, my friend Nick gave voice to my own skepticism.  He said, "I mean....yes...Denzel is a good actor, but I feel like I am always seeing a different version of him instead of an actual character."  Fifteen minutes into the play, we both knew that this was performance was different.  The only time I felt like I was watching Denzel Washington was when he entered for the first time and the swoons of the audience overpowered the action on stage.  Otherwise, the performances of both Washington and Davis were so powerful that I literally held my breath during each of their longer monologues.

Personal photo:  Fences with Nick and Ryan at The Cort Theatre.  1 May 2010.

"Some people build fences to keep people out...

and other people build fences to keep people in." 

No Place To Be Somebody by Charles Cordone (1970)

Summary:  Johnny Williams is a young black man who owns a bar in New York City in/around the late 1960s.  The people who come in and out of the bar have their own set of agendas and each character fulfills a very specific role/purpose.

Thoughts:  The summary above is probably the most insufficient I've written since starting this project.  There's no way to compactly summarize this play without a scene-by-scene plot description and an annotated character list.  Much like The Time of Your Life (1940), the dramatic action of this play is dependent on the actors who enter and exit the bar, but unlike ...Life, there is an enormous amount of action in this play.  The play makes a number of statements about race, ethnicity and gender in the way that it casts it's characters.  For example, the primary female characters (Dee, Evie) are whores, and the only other important female in the play is Mary Lou--a white civil rights activist who is ultimately used only as a pawn because her father is a judge and Johnny is trying to outsmart some Italian mobsters.

Most of the statements about equality and civil rights are relegated to Gabe, the poet of the group who is given long soliloquies in the form of poems that talk about black anger, white oppression and the relationship between whites and blacks in the 70s.  Gabe's statements are often eloquent, but sometimes seemed forced in a play that details the day-to-day activities of a bar.  At intervals throughout the play, a character will say something to the effect of, "Gabe!  Give us a poem now!" and the soliloquy/diatribe/important social message will begin.

Additionally, the subplot involving Johnny and the mobsters seems incredibly out of place.  With a few days distance, it almost feels like Cordone wrote a play about a bar and the characters who come through the doors, didn't think it was enough and needed to add another element of drama.  Though this play is unquestionably important (first black playwright and first off-Broadway play to win a Pulitzer), I found a surprising number of flaws.

A Soldier's Play by Charles Fuller (1982)

Summary:  A black soldier has been found dead just outside of Fort Neal---a segregated army camp in Louisiana (1944).  First, the shooting is blamed on the omnipresent KKK, then on racist white soldiers, before finally on a black officer who hates black men who (to him) perpetuate the stereotype of lazy and uneducated.

Thoughts:  Fuller’s character list is a simple list of names, with no description provided noting the age or race of any of these characters.  For me, this made reading the play confusing at times because I was trying to track the race relations without being certain of which characters were white and which were black.  After finishing the play, I feel confident that this was an intentional choice for Fuller.  Clearly, if you were watching the play, this wouldn’t be an issue; but the omission of these details demands a more careful reading of the text…which results in more attention to the nuanced relationships and dialogue of Fuller’s characters.

Ruined by Lynn Nottage (2009)

Summary:  Mama Nadi owns a bar/brothel in The Democratic Republic of Congo.  One of her rules involves serving any paying customer:  including soldiers on either side of the conflict.  The setting never changes, but stakes are raised when she is asked to take in more girls than she can handle and is visited both by rebel leaders and soldiers from the current government.   

Thoughts:  I feel like it is really difficult to offer any sort of critique of this play without appearing racist or culturally insensitive.  While the subject matter is unquestionably compelling, I was not extraordinarily moved by the actual text.  I was, however, moved by the photographs of the women in the appendix of the play (taken by Nottage’s husband) and information included in the Introduction (by director Kate Whorisky).  While the play is not an ethnography, Nottage’s work was primarily informed by interviews with women (in the Congo) who have experienced sexual violence as a result of the political upheaval in their country.  Unlike other interview-based work (The Laramie Project, The Exonerated) this play veers away from traditional monologue storytelling…and perhaps this is why I felt emotionally removed from a very emotional subject.

Other nominees in 2009 included In the Heights and Becky Shaw—both largely about families and their internal conflicts, so perhaps the committee decided it was time to award a play set outside of a nuclear family in the United States (from 2000-2010, over half of the recipients involve a central theme of dysfunction in the American family).