TV REVIEW : A ‘Piano Lesson’ Smartly Taught : TV Version of the Pulitzer-Winning Play Results in a Bit of Ethnic Magic

August Wilson has adapted his much-honored play “The Piano Lesson” for television, and the result is striking: a sweeping arpeggio of exuberance and African American culture that will reach its widest audience ever Sunday, fittingly during Black History Month.

Not much for affirmative action when it comes to drama, TV potentates rarely make room in their prime-time exclusive club for serious works about non-whites. Bucking that trend, here is a family that is black, looks black and sounds black without beginning every sentence with “Waz up?”

So if not quite a seminal moment for TV, Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is at least a notable one, a lovely bit of ethnic magic that mightily deserves this proscenium space on the CBS “Hallmark Hall of Fame.”

Director Lloyd Richards and much of the original stage cast--including the marvelous Charles Dutton, for whom the co-lead role was written--reunite for this TV-tailored translation set in Wilson’s native Pittsburgh in 1936. It sings, it saddens, it stimulates, but above all, it entertains.

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There’s a lilting musical grace to this rich, lively tale about a family whose history has been deeply carved into an antique upright piano by an ancestor. The piano is part of that history, and a sometimes-humorous squabble over possession of this glorious heirloom puts these boisterous family members in close touch with their slavery roots and some misbehaving spirits.

The play’s butting forces are a combative brother and sister. The bellowing, mouthing, harrumphing, big-dreaming Boy Willie (Dutton) wants to sell the piano and use his half of the profits to buy some Mississippi land that their ancestors worked as slaves. But the rigidly conservative Berniece (Alfre Woodard) cherishes the unused relic as an ornate shrine to 130 years of family history and doesn’t want it budged from the parlor of the home she shares with her young daughter and Uncle Doaker (Carl Gordon).

Just who is right is not really the issue. Actually, they both are, and there’s a universal, ever-contemporary message here about pragmatism versus preservation and the meaning of legacy.

Although not quite a buffoon, Boy Willie is so top-heavy with hot air that you can’t see him pulling off his scheme, which initially seems callous and opportunistic. Yet he yearns deeply for freedom from a future of trucking in sugar-sweet watermelons from the South with his wide-eyed country boy of a friend, Lymon (Courtney B. Vance), and selling them on the streets of Pittsburgh. And there’s something especially noble, as well as ironic, about his plan to gain economic liberation through owning land on which his ancestors once toiled in servitude. A swirling, fast-talking twister of energy, he pursues his dream relentlessly, and you can just feel his frustrations.

The widowed Berniece is just as tenacious and commanding in her own purse-lipped way, though. And when the camera moves in for lingering close-ups of the figures sculpted into wood, giving life to the genealogy they represent, you side with her. “Money can’t buy what that piano cost,” Berniece says.

Here is why. It seems that the piano was originally sold to a white family for “one and a half” slaves--Berniece’s and Boy Willie’s great-grandmother and her 9-year-old son. It was their great-grandfather, left behind by the transaction, who turned the piano into a living frieze by carving into it the faces of his wife and son and scenes from their life together. Post-Emancipation, the piano was stolen by grandsons, including Berniece’s and Boy Willie’s father, who was later killed.

In a supernatural twist--replete with mysterious, ghostly sounds and inexplicable whooshes that are never quite as scary as they should be--all of these vaguely defined ancestral spirits are churned up by this sibling dispute and now haunt the old house where the piano sits in its own dust.

You can probably foresee how “The Piano Lesson” will end. But the journey to that mellow finale is so scintillating that the give-away is forgivable.

A big reason is Wilson’s characters--so vivid and distinctive from top to bottom--and the actors playing them. Dutton’s man/child Boy Willie, for example, is one blustery explosion after another. He thrashes about irresistibly, pulling the story to him each time he speaks. Meanwhile, complex emotions simmer beneath the exterior of Woodard’s unyielding Berniece. And at one point when she fleetingly softens, surrendering to tenderness with Lymon, it becomes one of the story’s most beautiful moments.

Dutton, Gordon, Lou Myers (playing Doaker’s betting, boozing, piano-playing brother, Wining Boy), Tommy Hollis (playing Avery, the preacher/elevator operator who is Berniece’s suitor) and Rosalyn Coleman (playing a young woman passed from Boy Willie to Lymon) were in the Broadway cast of “The Piano Lesson,” which originated in 1986 as a staged reading at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., and played at L.A.’s James A. Doolittle Theatre in 1990.

Dutton and Gordon also appeared together in the late, occasionally great, Fox comedy “Roc.” Their skill at working in both media is symbolic of how adaptable theater is to television (which itself was nurtured by the work of young playwrights during its infancy in the 1950s) and of how sweet and memorable that relationship can be.

* “The Piano Lesson” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).