The Spring 2008 ENGL 112 Common Text and Related Events

All students enrolled in ENGL 112 Critical Reading and Writing II: Drama and Poetry read August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson this spring semester.

Set in 1936 Pittsburgh at the house of a family of African-Americans who have migrated from Mississippi, Wilson’s play focuses on an ornately carved piano that was once traded by the family's white master for two of the family's ancestors. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano so that he can buy the land that the family formerly worked on as slaves but his sister Berniece sees the piano as representative of her family's legacy and refuses to part with it. As the back cover of the book notes, the "dilemma is the real 'piano lesson,' reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present." The Piano Lesson is the fourth book in August Wilson’s ten book Century Cycle, which dramatizes the twentieth-century African American experience decade by decade. Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for Fences; The Piano Lesson earned him another Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

The Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul staged The Piano Lesson from February 21 through March 16th. For those who wish to see even more of Wilson’s drama, the first play in the Century Cycle, Gem of the Ocean, is being performed by Penumbra Theatre actors on the McGuire Proscenium Stage at the Guthrie Theater from April 25 through May 18.

Event

Backstage on Campus: Meet the Director and Actors from August Wilson's
The Piano Lesson

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Director Lou Bellamy's daughter Sarah and actors Ansa Akyea (Boy Willie) and Greta Oglesby (Berniece) took part in a discussion panel about August Wilson's drama, The Piano Lesson, which was in production at Penumbra Theatre from February 21 - March 16.