Moline’s Playcrafters Theatre Offers Relevant Lessons Today from ‘30s-Era “Piano Lesson”
An August playwright has a July drama opening this weekend at Playcrafters Barn Theatre, 4950 35th Ave., Moline.
While the Pulitzer-winning “The Piano Lesson” by August Wilson (1945-2005) is set in the 1930s of The Great Depression, its discordant,
Alisha Hanes at the piano at Playcrafters.
clashing notes resolve in peaceful harmony that carry forceful lessons for our fractious times today.
Directed by Kermit Thomas of Moline, part of Wilson’s epic “American Century Cycle,” in “The Piano Lesson,” it’s 1936, and Boy Willie arrives in Pittsburgh from the South in a battered truck loaded with watermelons to sell. He has an opportunity to buy some land down home, but he has to come up with the money quick.
He wants to sell an old piano that has been in his family for generations, but he shares ownership with his sister and it sits in her living room. She has already rejected several offers because the antique piano is covered with incredible carvings detailing the family’s rise from
The cast of “Piano Lesson” includes Alisha Hanes, left, Renaud Haymon,
Ashley Harris, Antonio Stone, and LuAnne Sisk.
slavery. Boy Willie tries to persuade his stubborn sister that the past is past, but she is more formidable than he anticipated.
“The Piano Lesson” (which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama) follows the lives of the Charles family in the Doaker Charles household and the heirloom instrument is decorated with designs carved by an enslaved ancestor.
The brother, Boy Willie, is a sharecropper who wants to sell the piano to buy land where his ancestors toiled as slaves. The sister, Berniece, remains emphatic about keeping the piano, which shows the carved faces of their great-grandfather’s wife and son during the days of their enslavement.
Kermit Thomas, a 52-year-old Texas native, has acted in “A Woman Called Truth” and “MASH” at Playcrafters, and “Water By the Spoonful” at New Ground Theatre.
Playcrafters Barn Theatre is at 4950 35th Ave., Moline.
“This is my first time directing just ‘cause I love a challenge,” he said recently, noting “Piano Lesson” was among the Playcrafters postponed shows from 2020. Fred Harris, Jr. is one of just two from the original 2020 cast, and he played the lead Troy in August Wilson’s “Fences” at Playcrafters, in July 2010.
Thomas is a big Wilson fan, and the “American Century series” that “goes over the way Blacks evolved in the 20th century and how they went — like this one, ‘The Piano Lesson,’ shows how they went through the Great Depression and just the strength of the family and the history and just remembering the history.”
Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, also often referred to as his Century Cycle, consists of 10 plays (“Piano Lesson” was the fifth to be performed) — nine of which are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District (the other being set in Chicago), an African-American neighborhood that takes on a mythic literary significance.
The plays are each set in a different decade and aim to sketch the Black experience in the 20th century and “raise consciousness through theater” and echo “the poetry in the everyday language of Black America,” Wilson has said. His writing of the Black experience always featured strong female characters and sometimes included elements of the supernatural, according to an author bio.
In his book, he wrote: “My mother’s a very strong, principled woman. My female characters . . . come in a large part from my mother.” As for the elements of the supernatural, Wilson often featured some form of superstition or old tradition in plays that came down to supernatural roots.
Fred Harris, Jr. and Shanna Cramer in Playcrafters’ 2010 production of “Fences.”
In “The Piano Lesson,” the piano is used and releases spirits of the ancestors. Wilson wanted to create such an event in the play that the audience was left to decide what was real or not, according to the bio. He was fascinated by the power of theater as a medium where a community at large could come together to bear witness to events and currents unfolding.
Wilson noted:
“I think my plays offer (white Americans) a different way to look at black Americans,” he told The Paris Review. “For instance, in Fences they see a garbageman, a person they don’t really look at, although they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy’s life, white people find out that the content of this black garbageman’s life is affected by the same things – love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives.”
“The Piano Lesson” premiered in 1987 at Yale Repertory Theatre, and in 1995 was made into a Hallmark TV movie starring Charles S. Dutton and Alfre Woodard. In September 2020, it was announced that Denzel Washington is planning to direct a new film adaptation for Netflix with Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington.
Washington directed and co-starred in the 2016 film version of “Fences,” with Viola Davis. Last year, Davis starred in a Netflix film of another Wilson play from the cycle, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
From the Army to theater
Thomas is a 27-year veteran of the U.S. Army, mainly working in logistics, and his deployments included Iraq, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Hawaii. He retired in 2016 at the Rock Island Arsenal, working for Army Sustainment Command. He holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing
Thomas, a 27-year Army veteran, is making his directing debut at Playcrafters.
and earned two master’s degrees from Florida Tech – an MBA and a master’s in acquisition and contract management.
Thomas plans to move back to the Dallas area and run for Congress in 2022. He’s a single parent, and his daughters (one who finished at Moline and two at Black Hawk College) will attend his alma mater, Prairie View A&M University, outside of Houston.
“When I was talking about August Wilson and the legacies that the family has, that’s one of our legacies. A lot of our family went to Prairie View,” he said. “My aunt and uncle taught there. So there’s like a back story to that school, and it’s an HBCU as well.”
Kermit Thomas is a 52-year-old native of Austin, Tex., and is moving back to Texas to run for Congress.
Thomas absolutely loves his “Piano Lesson” cast, and the big help the cast and crew have given him as a new director.
“I think we just fit together. It’s just, it’s coming together and they all just work very hard,” he said. “Then I also like the part where they talk about the legacies of the family and the things that were left to him and in this case, the piano and the struggles that they used to deal with it. But at the end, it all just comes together and just shows how we as a culture going through the century, that everything just kind of comes together as we evolve as Black America, through the 20th century, got through the Depression and got through segregation and slavery.”
“And 100 years later, we’re still going through segregation and all these things that we’re going through and still keeping it together and maintain families, and keeping it together as a culture,” Thomas said, noting the play shows parallels with what America has gone through the wrenching past couple years.
“Absolutely — just this is strength that we have to come together, and we can have our differences and disagreements,” he said. “But when it’s all said and done, like that last powerful scene when Avery is pushing the house and the piano, and everyone in the house just came together and that certain calm just came over the house and Boy Willie and Berniece — who were at each other’s throats throughout the entire play — how they just resolved the issues and let that calm take over and just make rational decisions.”
“But right now, let’s take this calm and embrace it, and enjoy it and just go on for right now,” Thomas said. “Just have everybody in a safe place.”
Antonio Stone at the piano at Playcrafters.
Wilson shows how a chaotic, major disagreement can be resolved – which is also a lesson for our current hyper-partisan, polarized time, when it seems so hard for the nation to agree on universal issues like masks, vaccines and voting rights.
“I think we’re seeing the peak of our chaos, and we just going to have to come down with some kind of resolution,” Thomas said. “We’re gonna to have to take all that chaos and come to a calm and come to a resolution. And it’s not what’s good for Democrats or what’s good for Republicans, but what’s good for America. And we have to be willing to negotiate and make sacrifices and give up this to get that. But what we want is, what’s best for America.”
“I want everyone healthy. I want everybody and I don’t even believe in mandating shots. But everybody to have access to them that want them and have the correct information on the medical part of it,” he said. “And voting rights — everyone should have a right and access and not make it challenging or difficult for someone to express their vote.”
Playcrafters’ new production is supported by Quad City Arts, through the Arts Dollars re-granting program, supported by the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the Hubbell-Waterman Foundation.
Performances dates are July 16 & 17 at 7:30 p.m. (plus July 23 and 24), and July 18 (plus July 25) at 3 p.m. General admission is $15, and senior/military admission is $13. For details and tickets, visit Playcrafters.com.
