The Piano Lesson

For its sixth production from August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, Portland Playhouse inaugurates Season 7 with a triumph of late twentieth-century American theatre: The Piano Lesson, widely considered Wilson’s greatest work. Winner of the Pulitzer, Tony, and Peabody awards when it premiered in 1990, The Piano Lesson transports us to post-Depression, Great Migration-era Pittsburgh in 1936. Boy Willie returns home with a plan to sell his family’s heirloom piano in order to buy himself a piece of land. But his sister Berniece won’t let this storied instrument and all the memory, pain, and sacrifice it contains, leave the Charles family. Who wins when the past competes with the future?