Research Guide to American Literature

purposefully didn’t read them.” Unencumbered by tradition, Wilson created his
own rules, relying instead on what he refers to as the “4 B’s”: the Blues, Amiri
Baraka, Jorge Luis Borges, and painter Romare Bearden. Combined with per-
sonal experiences growing up in Pittsburgh, these influences are evident in the
Pittsburgh, or “Decade Cycle,” for which Wilson is best known. Within each play,
Wilson is honest about poverty and racism while also celebrating the richness of
African American life. Each of the cycle’s ten plays is set in a different decade
of the twentieth century; all but one take place in Pittsburgh. They are, in order
of the decade covered: Gem of the Ocean (2003), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Run-
ning, Jitney!, King Hedley II (2000), and Radio Golf (2005).
Wilson was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for both The Piano Lesson and Fences and
received many other awards and playwriting fellowships. The last of the “cycle” plays,
Radio Golf, premiered at the Yale Repertory Theater the day after Wilson’s sixtieth
birthday. That year he was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. Wilson died on 2
October 2005, in Seattle, where he had lived since 1994. To honor his achievements,
Broadway’s Virginia Theater was renamed the August Wilson Theater.
Written in 1986, The Piano Lesson was Wilson’s fourth play to be produced
on Broadway. It is set in 1936 and focuses on the question of who has the right to
a 137-year-old piano: Berniece Charles, a widow struggling to raise her daughter
in Pittsburgh, or her brother, Boy Willie, a Southern sharecropper who would
like to sell it to buy land made available by the recent drowning of Sutter, the
descendant of the owner of the Charles family’s ancestors. The piano has sym-
bolic value and monetary worth, both of which are invoked as the play progresses.
The history of the piano is intertwined with that of the Charles family. Papa Boy
Willie, the siblings’ great-grandfather and Boy Willie’s namesake, carved portraits
of his wife and son on the piano after their owner traded them for the piano. Years
later, their father, Boy Charles, was murdered after reclaiming the piano; for him,
Sutter’s ownership of the piano symbolized and ensured his family’s historical and
current bondage. Berniece wants to keep the piano as a reminder of the past—in
particular, her family’s hardships; Boy Willie wants to exchange it for the promise
of a future.
In The Ground on Which I Stand, an address delivered in 1996 to the Theatre
Communications Group national conference at Princeton University and cited
below, Wilson mapped out what can be an ambitious course of study. He said: “In
one guise, the ground I stand on has been pioneered by the Greek dramatists—by
Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles—by William Shakespeare, by Shaw and
Ibsen, and by the American dramatists Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Ten-
nessee Williams. In another guise, the ground that I stand on has been pioneered
by my grandfather, by Nat Turner, by Denmark Vesey, by Martin Delaney, Marcus
Garvey and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” Students can fruitfully begin
study of this play by identifying and describing the significance of those refer-
ences and suggesting how they relate not only to The Piano Lesson but to Wilson’s
cycle of history plays as well. It is always important in studying a literary work to
determine the ground the author stands on, and Wilson has provided an eloquent
statement to guide students of his work.

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