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CHAPTER FIVE:  Mythological Conversions in The Piano Lesson

By Michael Downing

"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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