Video: WORKING IN THE THEATRE Docuseries Spotlights THE PIANO LESSON

The episode features exclusive interviews and discussion on their collaboration on August Wilson's The Piano Lesson.

By: Apr. 27, 2023
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The hit Broadway revival of August Wilson's The Piano Lesson is featured in the latest episode of "Working in the Theatre" with director LaTanya Richardson Jackson and set designer Beowulf Boritt. The episode features exclusive interviews and discussion on their collaboration on August Wilson's The Piano Lesson.

Check out the full episode below:

The Piano Lesson was directed by Tony Award nominee LaTanya Richardson Jackson, who made her Broadway directorial debut and is the first woman to ever direct an August Wilson play on Broadway. The production starred Samuel L. Jackson as Doaker Charles, John David Washington as Boy Willie, and Danielle Brooks as Berniece. The cast also featured Michael Potts as Wining Boy, Ray Fisher as Lymon, April Matthis as Grace, and Nadia Daniel and Jurnee Swan as Maretha at alternating performances.

The Piano Lesson played at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and remains the highest grossing revival of a play on Broadway this season.

August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, which premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1987 and starred a then 39-year-old Samuel L. Jackson as Boy Willie, is the fourth play in the American Century Cycle. Three years later, a new production, starring Carl Gordon, Charles S. Dutton and S. Epatha Merkerson, opened at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, and soon transferred to Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama, The Piano Lesson won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, the Peabody Award and was nominated for the 1990 Tony Award for Best Play.

The Piano Lesson is set in Pittsburgh's Hill District in 1936. A brother and sister are locked in a war over the fate of a family heirloom: a piano carved with the faces of their ancestors. The Piano Lesson, wrote Frank Rich in The New York Times, "has its own spacious poetry, its own sharp angle on a nation's history, its own metaphorical idea of drama and its own palpable ghosts that roar right through the upstairs window of the household where the action unfolds. Like other Wilson plays, The Piano Lesson seems to sing even when it is talking."

The design team for The Piano Lesson included Tony Award winner Beowulf Boritt (Set Design), Tony Award nominee Toni-Leslie James (Costume Design), Tony Award nominee Japhy Weideman (Lighting Design), Tony Award winner Scott Lehrer (Sound Design), Drama Desk Award nominee Cookie Jordan (Wig Design), Tony Award nominee Jeff Sugg (Projection Design), Alvin Hough Jr. (Music & Music Direction), Otis Sallid (Choreographer). Casting is by Calleri, Jensen, Davis. General Management is by Foresight Theatrical.


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