THE PIANO LESSON Broadway Revival Officially Recoups

The Broadway revival of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson which concluded its Broadway engagement on January 29, 2023, has officially recouped its investment. Last season, The Piano Lesson remained the highest grossing revival of a play on Broadway, and played a total of 124 regular performances (and 27 previews).

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

Producer Moreland commented, “We are immensely grateful to LaTanya Richardson Jackson for her singular vision.  Her ability to so vibrantly expose Wilson’s masterwork to a whole new generation of theater loves is what made this production a hit.  Kudos to her, our wonderful cast, and our amazing co-producing team.”

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.”

Photo Credit: Julieta Cervantes