AugustWilson.net
CHAPTER FIVE: Mythological Conversions in The Piano Lesson
By Michael Downing
February 1, 2004
"Like all Wilson protagonists, both the brother and sister must take a journey,
at times a supernatural one, to the past if they are to seize the future. They
cannot be reconciled with each other until they have had a reconciliation with
the identity that is etched in their family tree, as in the piano, with blood."
---Frank Rich
"Within the imaginative world of the play, the piano also serves as a site of
direct mystical connections with the ancestors, functioning similarly to sacred
ancestral shrines or altars in many traditional Africa cultures. In the terms of
Yoruba cosmography it is an orita meta, a crossroad between the world of the
living and the world of the dead."
---Michael Morales
Compared to the prolific, complex, and readily available mythological system
offered by Wilson in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, the emerging mythology in
The
Piano Lesson seems somewhat more disguised--somewhat more embedded--within the
structure of the play. It is as if the didactic nature of the work, as signaled
by the titular word, "lesson," interferes with Wilson's mythic explorations. As
a result, the play is somewhat schizophrenic, vacillating between pedantic moral
instruction and mythological revelation. John Simon has suggested that such
conflicting elements might be a result of the play's "long gestation period . .
. [which] makes the play come across as palimpsest, with earlier versions
distractingly discernible underneath" (457).
Wilson's tendency toward the didactic in The Piano Lesson has provided several
critics in addition to Simon with the opportunity to review this play harshly.
Robert L. King writes that
In The Piano Lesson, August Wilson writes speeches of exposition and hangs out
symbols as if he were a neophyte rather than a prize-winning dramatist . . .
Wilson seems to be manipulating a limited past of his own making only to gain
sensational effects. He employs standard images of black culture like flashy
clothing and one real watermelon from an offstage truckload. (452-53) It seems
that instead of surrendering himself completely to the unconscious mythic
impulses which had previously driven his dramaturgy (as he did so successfully
with Joe Turner's Come and Gone), Wilson is more consciously concerned with
providing specific moral instruction with his piano "lesson." The result of this
blending of didacticism and mythology has left some scholars searching for
thematic closure.
Robert Brustein, whose opinion of Wilson is clearly biased due to what Brustein
calls Wilson's and Lloyd Richards' use of non-profit institutions as "McTheater,"
argues that Wilson's blending of the didactic with the supernatural detracts
from the play's resolution. He writes, "What makes this piano unplayable,
however, is the ending, which tacks a supernatural ending onto an essentially
naturalistic anecdote" (458). For Brustein, "the supernatural element is a
contrived intrusion" which creates an insurmountable interpretive dissonance
(458).
Upon further consideration of the text, however, it becomes clear that although
the didacticism certainly does exist, the mythological features are still
present. The play carries both, and by blending the twin features of didacticism
and the supernatural, Wilson has written a play that is both morally instructive
and mythologically revealing. In other words, it is not as if the mythological
conversions are irretrievably overshadowed by Wilson's didacticism; instead, the
mythological conversions in The Piano Lesson emerge as frequently as conversions
of concept as they do as conversions of character. The piano itself, for
example, functions as a repository for the history of the Charles family and, by
extension, functions as a repository for the spiritual history of all Africans
living in America. In this way, Wilson converts--through the archetype of the
piano--the concept of a collective history rather than converting a particular
character.
To cite this page:
Downing, Michael. "Chapter
Five:
Mythological Conversions in
The Piano Lesson."
AugustWilson.net. Date of Publication.
Today's Date. URL.
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