August Wilson's 'Piano Lesson' at the McCarter

Jade King Carroll directs at McCarter for the first time, though her work is known locally through her People's Light & Theatre Company productions (Wilson's Seven Guitars, The Persians, Splittin' the Raft). She assembles a fine cast for a production wisely staged in the relative intimacy of McCarter's smaller Berlind Theatre. What starts as a complex family drama delves into bigger themes about slavery and the post-World War I emigration to the North by Southern blacks, as well as spiritual and even supernatural issues.

Classic family conflict

Boy Willie arrives at his sister Berniece's Pittsburgh home in 1936 to sell a truckload of watermelons with his friend Lymon. Boy Willie wants to buy land down South from a late sharecropper's family, whose people once owned his ancestors. He's saved a third, the melons will bring another third, and he plans to sell the family piano for the rest.

Berniece, however, will not sell. The piano was purchased for a slaveowner's wife with proceeds of the sale of their great-grandmother and grandfather. Later, its wooden surfaces were carved with the story of their family. Berniece won't play it, but can't let it go. "Money can't buy what that piano cost," she insists.

The struggle seems elemental — they can't cut the instrument in half, so someone's got to give — but swirling around the sibling's battle are the stories of other family, both present and absent. The past and future collide: preserve the past, or use it to fund the future?

Smart acting, smart direction

Wilson is famously verbose — full of stories and songs — but this great production makes his prose sing.

Stephen Tyrone Williams makes an ideal Boy Willie, whose hyperactive selfishness often results in a bratty, dislikable character. Here, his passion is tempered by conviction; we may not admire his insensitivity toward Berniece's bottled-up pain, but we can appreciate his point of view. Miriam A. Hyman's Berniece is similarly nuanced, as she reveals the character's layers of loneliness and pain. David Pegram's Lymon is less aw-shucks, more believably adult than I've seen him played. John Earl Jelks's Doaker — the uncle who tries to referee the siblings' fight — is strong and noble, and Cleavant Derricks wins us over as perpetually destitute piano man Wining Boy. The rest of the cast is similarly accomplished, their nuanced performances a testament to the director's fine work.

Balancing the realistic and the supernatural

Neil Patel's set makes the house both vast and intimate. The walls seem ripped from an old picture and pasted together, in order to show the colorfully askew Hill District looming around them like a Marc Chagall painting. His work, augmented by Edward Pierce's lighting, balances the play's realistic and supernatural elements, which culminate in a finale that's logically conclusive yet also otherworldly. It's an unsettling yet clarifying ending that seems unlikely on the page ("a rustle of wind blowing across two continents," the stage directions explain), but satisfying when sculpted well.

I'm not sure why Wilson's plays — among them Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone — haven't reached the level of ubiquity of Tennessee Williams's and Arthur Miller's most famous plays as classics of American drama, but they're produced regularly and should reach that pinnacle someday. For further evidence, catch the Arden Theatre Company's production of Two Trains Running March 10 through April 10 after seeing this excellent production of The Piano Lesson.