Tom's Life Bits

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.