Poet-turned-Tony-and-Pulitzer-winning playwright August Wilson made a career spinning gold from straw, gossamer from grief, epiphany from chains and chitlins, resurrection from rage, hope from low-down wrist-slittin’ despair.
“The Piano Lesson,” an installation from Wilson’s much-accoladed Century Cycle, opens at Pasadena’s A Noise Within later this month.
Wilson’s decalogy illuminates the last hundred years of the Black American experience, generation by generation, decade by decade, and forms a regular part of this company’s annual programming.
A quick recap: Wilson wrote about the advance and retreat of vast social changes, often set in Pittsburgh where the poet-playwright, born in 1945, grew up. Wilson won a Tony, two Pulitzers, and seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, among many other honors. Wilson died in Seattle during 2005.
We recently caught up with veteran actor Alex Morris on his way to a staged reading. Morris has appeared in five previous productions of this play. He’s usually been cast in the central role of the hard-headed Boy Willie Charles, fresh out of prison, who wants to sell the family heirloom piano he shares with sister Berniece. Boy Willie’s dream: to buy land and no longer “have to work for someone else.”
This time around, however, Morris plays Boy Willie’s uncle Doaker, the rational and compassionate voice who stands strong in chaos.
Whirling and colliding around Doaker is the fallout of four centuries of generational trauma, sharpened with fanged, flying debris formed from crushed dreams and festering family betrayals that turn this play into a Halloween-worthy ghost story by the climax in the third act.
Wilson famously said that he was inspired first and foremost by the blues. He recalled discovering a scratched Bessie Smith 78 RPM for a nickel at St. Vincent DePaul thrift store, and how that groove carved down into his DNA and freed his true self, not only as an artist but as a Black man in America.
Fittingly, the play opens with a quote from Delta griot Skip James’ “Illinois Blues”
Gin my cotton
Sell my seed
Buy my baby
Everything she need...
…and that’s what Boy Willie intends to do. Mind you, the land he hopes to buy isn’t just any ol’ swathe of swampy Mississippi farmland: it’s where, not so long ago, the white Sutter family owned, sold and traded the Black Charles family, Boy Willie and Berniece’s elders. It’s also inferred that the descendant of the slave-owners killed the siblings’ father.
At various points throughout the play, Boy Willie threatens to steal the piano or simply saw it in half since Berniece has no intention of selling.
“I grew up a country boy in the sticks, Pembroke Township, Illinois,” says Morris in a honey-over-a-warm-biscuit baritone. Even though “The Piano Lesson” is set in 1936 Pittsburgh, he adds “I think growing up being raised by a single mother, in a house without running water, gives me an empathy for these characters who are just entering the modern age almost a century ago.”
He’s also performed in other plays representing the Century Cycle, including “Seven Guitars” and “Radio Golf.” Anybody with a television will recognize Morris from “Baskets,” “Malcolm in the Middle,” and Netflix’s “The Family Business.” He is a five-time NAACP Award winner, an Ovations Theatre award winner, and a Los Angeles Theatre Critics Award recipient for Best Actor in Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.”
“One of the things I love most about Los Angeles is the small, equity-waiver theaters,” he says. “Those 99-seaters. I love it! It puts me right there. I’m glad that there are movies, and I am very interested in seeing Denzel’s new take on ‘The Piano Lesson.’ But seeing it live is a different experience for the audience, and for the actors. As an actor working live, you’ve gotta just bring it, lay it all right out there on the line every night, 130 percent.”
These ten plays reference a past of genocide, and unrelenting, systematic attempts by mainstream society to deny, deflect, scrub and erase the Black experience. Of the ravaged history that Wilson evokes, Morris says, “We can complain about how slow the change has come. But I’ve lived long enough now to say even in the last ten years, there is some powerful change happening. America has already elected our first Black President, and we may be about to elect our second, and she’s a Black woman. We’ve still got ourselves a whole lot of road ahead, yes. But this play reminds us of what we all need to remember: we all bleed the same red.”
He says his absolute favorite part of working with A Noise Within is the student matinees and “Talkbacks” where the cast interacts with kids, answering their questions and asking for their feedback.
“Kids will tell you straight up if you stink,” he says with a deep chuckle. “For so many of these young people, in their teens and younger, live theater is a completely new dimension for them. They need to know that there’s more out there for them than just video games.”
In the increasingly eerie last moments of “The Piano Lesson,” pastor Avery warns Berniece “Don’t let that candle go out!” as a Pentecost-like wind of ancestral voices whips through the well-ordered Charles home. Berniece has summoned the orishe by at last returning to the literally blood-soaked piano she has shunned for years because the stories told by its carved figures were just too damn painful.
Keeping that candle lit is the poetic command by Wilson from beyond the grave to face down our past – what some call a legacy – to move forward.
He wrote, “Confront and wrestle with your demons to make your angels sing.”
DEETS
- “The Piano Lesson” by August Wilson
- A Noise Within
- 3352 East Foothill Boulevard, Pasadena
- www.anoisewithin.org
- (626) 356-3100
- Previews October 13 – 18, Performances October 19 – November 10
- TICKETS
- Tickets start at $51.50 (including fees)
- Student tickets start at $20
- Wednesday, Oct. 16 and Thursday, Oct. 17 (previews): Pay What You Choose starting at $10 (available online beginning the Monday prior to that performance)
- Discounts available for groups of 10 or more
- OF SPECIAL INTEREST
- A one-hour INsiders Discussion Group will take place prior to the matinee on Sunday, Oct. 20 beginning at 12:30 PM
- The performance on Thursday, Oct. 24 is “Black Out Night,” an opportunity for an audience self-identifying as Black to experience the performance together; tickets include a post-show reception (non-Black-identifying patrons are welcome to attend, or to select a different performance).
- Post-performance conversations with the artists take place every Friday (except the preview) and on Sunday, Oct. 27
- Student matinees are scheduled on select weekdays at 10:30 AM. Interested educators should email [email protected].
Wonderful article! Thank you for sharing the insights of the amazingly talented and insightful Alex Morris. We’re so fortunate to have a theater of the caliber of A Noise Within, with its impressive roster of Resident Artists and guest artists, that is committed to producing all ten of Wilson’s American Century Cycle plays (and all directed by LA treasure Gregg Daniel). Thanks again.