Sturdy ‘Piano Lesson’ Withstands Its Weight

A second encounter with August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” reminds you, foremost and happily, of how Wilson’s richest language has enlivened the American stage.

The richness comes with some excess baggage. Like other plays Wilson has written, before and after rising to national prominence with the 1984 Broadway premiere of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “The Piano Lesson” can be accused of reiterative generosity, let’s say. It is longish, three hours in all. Wilson has “more stories than the devil got sinners,” as Bono says to Troy in Wilson’s biggest Broadway hit, “Fences.”

Yet all the characters’ anecdotes and stories of ghosts, metaphoric and real, don’t detract from the story. They are the story. As a dramatist, Wilson lets his people go, in symbolic terms, by letting them talk, allowing them the time to look back at the lives they’ve lived, along with those of their Deep South ancestors in the grip of slavery.

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In “The Piano Lesson,” now in a sturdy and strong South Coast Repertory revival, a piano provides the central conflict for an estranged brother and sister, uneasily reuniting after three years. The year is 1936. Boy Willie (Victor Mack) and his friend Lymon (Ricco Ross) have driven a truck full of watermelons from Mississippi to Pittsburgh, with the intention of selling their goods.

Boy Willie’s widowed sister, Berniece (Kim Staunton), lives with her daughter Maretha (Myierdra Miles) with Berniece’s Uncle Doaker (Charlie Robinson). In Doaker’s house sits the family piano, its wooden face carved with the images of their enslaved ancestors, two of whom were sold for the instrument itself.

The father of Berniece and Boy Willie was murdered in retaliation for stealing the piano from his former owner’s plantation home. Berniece hasn’t played the piano since her mother died, and hasn’t passed on its history to her daughter. Yet she doesn’t want to sell it.

Boy Willie does. Why not sell, take the money and buy the Mississippi farmland worked by his own family under slavery?

“The Piano Lesson” has its simple, clear narrative stream--to sell or not?--fed by dozens of side-winding tributaries. Some are realistic and anecdotal; others are paranormal but accepted as fact, as part of the family. The ghost of Sutter, the white man whose land Boy Willie intends to buy, has traveled north to Pittsburgh, just ahead of Boy Willie. Doaker and his gambling-man brother, Wining Boy (Al White), believe in its presence, as do Berniece and her daughter. The Reverend Avery (Ted Lange), determined to marry Berniece, agrees to bless the house and exorcise the ghost. Ultimately it’s Boy Willie who goes mano-a-mano with the spirit.

The play takes a while to start chugging. Then, near the Act 2 climax, Wilson takes a major detour. He allows Boy Willie (not the most compelling character on view, merely the most single-minded) to state his case and goad his sister once too often. En route, however, the stories within stories have a way of opening up gradually, with unexpected beauty, like flowers.

Director Seret Scott’s South Coast Repertory production honors the material. Mack has it the toughest as Boy Willie, simply because the character is distinguished by his verbosity and butt-headedness. He does well with the challenge, refusing to make him a larger-than-life figure in the mode of Charles S. Dutton, who played the role on Broadway and on television. Mack’s is a smaller-scale but truthful attack, one that doesn’t make a play for our sympathies.

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Staunton’s Berniece works in unerring counterpoint. She’s a real scrapper, her nerves far more obviously frayed than those of Alfre Woodard’s in the TV version. The entire ensemble is good, right down to Terrilynn Towns as a splendidly behind-the-beat Pittsburgh good-time gal. Robinson’s Doaker in particular takes the stage with natural authority; he’s playing the most heavily cloaked character, yet he tells you all you need to know about the man’s life and times.

There’s a top-heavy quality to scenic designer Ralph Funicello’s interior setting. The nicely detailed living room and kitchen is dominated by a bland expanse of second-story wall. Also, a corny detail has been added in the finale: We don’t need the eyes of the ancestors carved in the piano to light up, horror-movie style. There’s enough going on.

Too much, at times, in terms of sheer bulk and length. I wouldn’t rank “The Piano Lesson” with “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” or “Fences,” or the first act of “Ma Rainey”; there’s something constricted and constricting about the brother-sister relationship at its center. It probably wouldn’t kill Wilson to bring a play in at around two hours and 40 minutes, which he hasn’t done since “Fences.”

His voice is simply too valuable to squander, or to overindulge.

* “The Piano Lesson,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 21. $28-$47. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 3 hours.

Charlie Robinson: Doaker

Victor Mack: Boy Willie

Ricco Ross: Lymon

Kim Staunton: Berniece

Myierdra Miles: Maretha

Ted Lange: Avery

Al White: Wining Boy

Terrilynn Towns: Grace

Written by August Wilson. Directed by Seret Scott. Set by Ralph Funicello. Costumes by Dione H. Lebhar. Lighting by Peter Maradudin. Original music and sound by Mitch Greenhill. Wigs by Carol F. Doran. Production manager Patrick Heydenburg. Stage manager Julie Haber.