Most August Wilson plays build initial momentum with a loud, annoying character who often turns out to be the center of the play's ideas. The tough assignment is for the actor to make him rankle enough to stir things up but not turn the audience off so much that they stop paying attention to him. In 1989's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Piano Lesson, Boy Willie disrupts his sister's, Berniece's, household wanting to sell the family piano. Dynamic Carl Coffield makes Boy Willie annoying and disturbing but sexy and intriguing enough for us to want him to stick around. The fascinating piano has beautifully carved memorial portraits of their family members traded off as slaves to pay debts. So Berniece sees herself as preserver of the family heritage and refuses to sell it. But Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy the land the family was enslaved upon, to move forward, not merely regard their past with rueful reverence.
It's a rich, flavorful play filled with involving characters, comic wit, much music, and like all the ten-play cycle (each play about a different decade) a masterful, memorial history of African-American life. The overwrought ending is unnecessarily mystical (Wilson is seldom satisfied with merely symbolic ghosts; he likes supernatural high jinks), but it plays like gangbusters, even if most take it not as deeply spiritual but as fantasy fun. And the set pieces, lighting and special effects work wonderfully.
Karen Perry's costumes include some delicious, laugh-getting outfits for the old-fashioned, touring lounge performer Wining Boy, Boy Willie's uncle. Actor/musician Glenn Turner has a field day playing Wining Boy.
Thee uniformly strong cast, tautly directed by Seret Scott, make this a worthy revival in Geva Theater Center's continuingly first-class presentations of Wilson's epic recreation of African-American history. Looking at the hill district of Pittsburgh from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, these plays cover far more than a century of racial struggle. They suggest with all their overplayed symbolisms a human tradition as old and encompassing as the written word.
