Lessons from The Piano Lesson

I originally scheduled two plays by Tom Stoppard for 2024. But sometime last summer, for various reasons I remember, I decided to replace one with a play by August Wilson, and, for various reasons I don’t remember, I settled on The Piano Lesson. The decision paid off: I enjoyed the play and found great sympathy for and with the character who can’t play her piano because of haunting memories.

My edition has a foreword by Toni Morrison in which she says that critics have faulted Wilson for his use of the supernatural in a way that seems to imply that they think the play would be better without the ghost. Now, I can’t say too much about the ghost, because I don’t want to give anything away, but he seems so central, I don’t see how the play could exist without him, much less be better. It’s like saying Hamlet would have been better without the ghost of Hamlet’s father. It’s like saying a three-legged stool would be better without the leg that you find least attractive.

My case also rests on three legs. (1) A black family moving from Mississippi to Pittsburgh in the 1930s has to be thinking about the frequent deaths they hear about in the news from home, and they have to be wondering if they have truly escaped. Do I have to say that a ghost represents death and fear? This ghost stands (or floats?) as a personification of the unspoken worries of the Charles family, allowing these characters to speak about other things, like watermelons and broken trucks, with subtext and depth. (2) The ghost also represents memory, as does the piano with its legs adorned by carvings of the family’s ancestors. The play’s central theme concerns, to my eyes, the problems of starting a new life without letting the memories of the things you moved in order to escape ruin the new life as well, and the ghost brings these problems to a head. (3) I’m more duty bound to silence here even than in the first two points, because the third has to do with the end of the play. I’ll just say that the ghost becomes a foil to Boy Willie in the last scene and made me rethink this main character’s whole story.

So I didn’t like Morrison’s point (or Morrison’s critic’s point) about the ghost. But I did very much approve of her argument that it’s better in many ways to read a play than to see it, which is just what I did.