Tom's Life Bits

Because we have to attend MAAVS next weekend, we were able to swap our tickets from next Sunday for today's performance. The play was fantastic, as usual, RLT never disappoints. It was quite long, our 3 PM performance didn't get out till 6:11.
The story is about a guy who drives a truckload of watermelons up from Mississippi to Pittsburg to sell them and use the money to buy his own farm. The rest of the money will come from his share of the piano he owns jointly with his sister. She refuses to sell saying that their family legacy is carved into the piano. Carvings depict her grandparents who were slaves and several other family members. The ending was disappointing, we think the writer got tired and just ended it without much thought. Character development and entertaining characters make this work anyway. The set, an old Pittsburgh living room, dining room and kitchen and also stairs going up to the second floor is quite nice. Everything in this story works well - the sets, characters and lines. The only thing that didn't work well was the ending.

BY Roy C. Dicks Oct 14, 2010

RALEIGH – August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Piano Lesson,” displays the writer's lauded elements: lovable characters, deep sense of history and poetic use of dialects. But it also exhibits his established shortcomings: minimal plotting, repetitive dialogue and overly lengthy scenes.

Raleigh Little Theatre puts considerable effort into its staging, but audiences must overlook Wilson's significant liabilities to reap his rewards.

The setting is 1936 Pittsburgh at the house shared by Berniece, her uncle Doaker and her young daughter Maretha. Berniece has moved north from Mississippi, bringing with her the family heirloom piano on which her grandfather carved the faces of his wife and son, slaves traded away for it. Later, the son, Berniece's father, stole the piano from the slave owner but was murdered for it.

Boy Willie, Berniece's brother, shows up to ask his sister to sell the piano for money to start his own farm. Berniece adamantly refuses, the piano representing so much family history, but Boy Willie thinks his father would have wanted him to use it to better himself. Various family members and friends are drawn into the contentious debate.

Along the way, there are colorful anecdotes from all the characters, as well as songs, romantic encounters and a lot of household activities, giving the narrative a realistic, everyday atmosphere but pulling focus from the main story. Still, the characters are endearingly funny and warmly moving by turns, especially in the hands of this engaging cast.

Joseph Callender's strutting, boasting Boy Willie has enough energetic charm to carry the whole show. Randi Martin-Lee's Berniece hides painful sorrows under no-nonsense sternness, and Janelle Netterville fills Maretha with sweet innocence. Jeremy V. Morris gives Lymon, Boy Willie's friend, a winning shyness mixed with plucky determination, his extended scene with Berniece in act two the show's most involving sequence.

Phillip Bernard Smith gets a lot of laughs as Avery, the revved-up preacher sweet on Berniece. John Rogers Harris makes the moocher Wining Boy an amusing conniver. Kyma Lassiter turns in a fine cameo as woman-on-the-town Grace, and Warren Keyes plays the peacemaker Doaker believably.

At Sunday's performance, the cast often struggled with lines, understandable with Wilson's dense, repetitive sequences throughout a three-hour duration. Haskell Fitz-Simons' direction emphasizes humor over drama, deploying his cast in every corner of Jim Zervas' two-story set. Vicki Olson's costumes add period authenticity.

Despite the play's extreme length and often rough slang dialogue, there are pleasures to be had, evidenced by the constant laughter and sympathetic murmurs from Sunday's audience.

by Byron Woods

A half-capacity house—a fairly rare experience at Raleigh Little Theatre—greeted a notable production of African-American playwright August Wilson's The Piano Lesson last Saturday night.

Wilson's drama won him his second Pulitzer Prize, in 1990, and is the fourth in his “Pittsburgh Cycle,” a series of 10 plays devoted to the African-American experience during the 20th century.

It is 1936, and the Charles family has been split—in several ways—during the first Great Northern Migration. While Uncle Doaker and the widowed Berniece, his niece, live in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Berniece's troublesome brother, Boy Willie, still lives as a sharecropper in Mississippi. Willie has a chance to buy the land his family labored on during slavery, but to raise the money he's convinced he has to sell the family's one connection to that past: an upright piano in his sister's possession—one with the faces of his and Berniece's ancestors carved into it.

If Wilson's script meanders a bit as it introduces the extended relatives of this one-family diaspora, sharp performances under the direction of Haskell Fitz-Simons keep things in focus. Comedian Joseph Callender's dramatic turn as Boy Willie is a sardonic, sarcastic pleasure, propelled at times by an effective collection of physical tics and gestures that nearly suggest what the dawn of popping and locking might have looked like. Phillip Bernard Smith's solo account of the character Avery's call to preach was a sanctified Act 1 showstopper, and John Rogers Harris' account of the life of saloon pianist Wining Boy and other scams was robust. Randi Martin-Lee was understated but authoritative as Berniece, and Warren Keyes gave a solid performance as Uncle Doaker.

Wilson's characters grapple—literally, at times—with the troubled legacy of their pasts in this compelling production. Recommended.