Interview with Tim Bond

INTERVIEW: The Piano Lesson Interview by Joseph Whelan

JW: This is your second time directing The Piano Lesson.

Are there any unanswered questions hanging around from that first production?

TB: Well, I’m sure there will be. In re-exploring the play I have rediscovered many of the things that struck me the first time. There have been a couple of little details I missed the first time around or I didn’t emphasize as much as I will this time. There are a number of discoveries I know I’m going to make because I have an entirely new cast.

Even in auditions I’ve already heard things I didn’t hear the first time around because these particular actors—because it is a piece of poetry, as all of Wilson’s work is—there are so many interpretations. I’m keeping myself open to discovery. It is like a new play for me again.

JW: Ten years down the road for you, the country ten years further along, do you find any new resonance, even in just reading the play?

TB: It could be just having come through the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and thinking a lot about slavery and the legacy of slavery and thinking about the Civil Rights Act of ’64 turning 50, this year has made me think of this play more pointedly in the way that dangers are present outside of this house for the characters coming up from the South. What’s it’s like in the Pittsburgh streets in 1936. The conditions under which this family is trying to grapple with issues of their ancestry, I think are more poignant now than they were the last time I worked on it, partly because of what is going on in race relations in this country now. I feel like I have a little bit of a different take on the protectiveness of this house and how heightened the tensions are going to get for these characters. There’s more life and death stakes going on than appears on the page.

JW: Do you mean the threat form the ghost? I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Within the text there doesn’t appear to be an outside threat. Boy Willie and Lymon do fine selling the watermelons. Avery has a decent job. Wining Boy travels freely from Kansas City to Pittsburgh.

TB: Well, it reads like that, but it is not worthy of the playwright’s knowledge of the world outside of this house, and of these characters’ understanding, and for our memory of history for the characters to take too lightly the constant potential for danger. Bernice is still mourning the death of her husband three years after he was killed by a sheriff.

When you really know the history of Jim Crow and what was going on in Mississippi and what was going on between Mississippi and Pittsburgh—I feel like those issues are poignant and not just footnotes in an otherwise warm, comic, family drama. So for example, when there is a knock

on the door at the beginning of the play, Doaker comes to the door, in my mind, with a gun. I feel that the heightened tensions have to be brought on the stage, the things that are going on outside of the house are quite real.

JW: Wilson once said that Boy Willie was one of his favorite characters. He is a whirlwind but also full of youthful brashness and arrogance.

TB: He’s a great character. He comes on the stage like a ton of bricks. Boy Willie is a force of nature. He is determined to right the wrongs that were visited on his family through slavery and through the murder of his father by selling that piano and selling the watermelons and getting enough money to buy that land. He feels that is going to set some things right. But he is not really aware of the consequences, not really in touch with the consequences of letting go of something that so much blood was spilled for. I do feel that he can become so brash and so full of himself that you come to a point where he seems naïve and insensitive to his sister. And he is somewhat. Those are flaws in him.

He’s not a perfect character, but he’s trying to do the right thing. And he’s attractive. He has a sense of humor and a sense of defiance of the world outside that’s pretty infectious.

JW: He gives himself license to comment on anything and everything. You might say he has an inflated sense of himself. What does that say to you about how he perceives his own place in the world?

TB: He feels he has not been given his due for what he has to offer. I think he feels that’s true for the black race. I think he feels that that’s the legacy that has been handed to him that he doesn’t like and that he is going to change and that he wants Maretha [his niece] to know. He wants his sister to pass that on to her daughter: “You matter in the world. You have something to offer. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not as good as them. You’re better than them.” And that comes from a place of someone who has had things taken from him and who has not been given due in his life to fully realize his potential. Spending three years at Parchment Farm, hard labor, does that to you. You know, you feel like something’s been taken away, part of your life has been taken away, he’s coming out and he’s going to make good on his promise to himself, and to his own self worth and dignity.

JW: And in contrast to all the other characters, he wants to go back and buy the land and return to the South. Everybody else has come north to try to find a new life. What drives that? Everyone is looking for a new start, but he is the only one going back.

TB: I think he represents a pretty strong faction within the totality of the African American community who would never leave the South, who are not comfortable up North, who still believe that their legacy is in the South, and until they can be in the South in the way of equality and opportunity they should have, then the world isn’t right. And that is built into their cellular existence on the planet. And I think August is giving that point of view, that group of African Americans a voice in saying, “You should be able to go back and buy your own plantation, work your own farm, build a legacy for yourself down there.” There are many people who believe that when we left the South as African Americans to go up North for the dreams is when we lost the true power of the African American community. That we’ll never have full freedom up north that we think we’ll have. In 1936 Mississippi is still a really tough place to be an African American. Still is. He’s standing in contrast to everyone else saying, “You all can do what you want to do. You can go up north and believe they’re going to give you—he makes fun of Avery, they’re going to give you a Turkey every Thanksgiving so now you’re a man—I’m going to go down South and buy that land and I’m going to show you. He’s playing out the same kind of spirit his father had in taking that piano back that cost him his life. That’s the ancestor that he picked up on that is still living strong in him.

JW: Wilson was inspired by Romare Bearden’s painting The Piano Lesson. He said when he saw the painting he immediately thought of a woman who for some reason wouldn’t acknowledge her past, but had to do so before she could move on. Why do you think Wilson has her refusing to acknowledge that past?

TB: There’s a psychological and there’s a spiritual component, almost always in all of August’s plays, the same for Boy Willie, the same for all his characters. Bernice psychologically and emotionally is struggling with the fact that she is still in mourning for the loss of her husband who was killed by a sheriff down in Mississippi. She blames Boy Willie for that occurring. If she goes back and thinks about that too much, she gets very angry and very indicting of her brother, and that is a very painful place for her to live and she hasn’t been able to shake that feeling. What happened to her father, who was murdered for having taken that piano, she has lived with her whole life up until her mother died. Her mother wanted her to keep the piano polished, and to play for her. In doing that it, it not only awakened all those terrible feelings of the murder of her father, but also, the cost of him taking that piano. And it cut her off from her ancestors. In a very poignant speech she talks about when she would play that piano and polish that piano, the ancestors, those spirits that are in that piano would come alive in her mind and potentially be in the house because she watched her mother talking to those spirits, and in a way it was almost a madness for her mother. And it is revisited on Bernice by losing her husband and she’s thinking I don’t want to be that crazy woman walking around my house talking to these spirits. So the past represents madness, it represents being haunted, and it represents being stifled in the way she felt her mother had become. She doesn’t want that. She’s trying to put all that away and move on. And understandable from a psychological point of view. What she doesn’t understand is that spiritually reconnecting with those ancestors is where she has strength, and where the continuum of her family, in terms of creativity, in terms of counsel, in terms of life-blood support, of inner strength will come to her from those ancestors when they speak to her and will allow her to pass that on not only to her daughter, but for her to be able to get passed her anger and sadness and debilitation at the death of her husband. But she’s not aware that it will do that for her. She figures that by putting it away it keeps those spirits from haunting her and driving her mad. Once she able to work through that, she is able to reconnect to those ancestors and it’s a release for her.