Reading Plays

A family history entwined with the legacy of slavery. Black urban poverty in 1930’s Pittsburg. Criminality and working class aspirations. Intersectionality and the patriarchy of the poor. August Wilson’s Piano Lesson is an issue play, and winner of the Pulizer prize. Does this relentlessly grim parlour drama descend into stereotyped kitsch, or lend it’s denigrated characters a nobility transcending their circumstances?

Download: Episode 13 – The Piano Lesson

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

The Title: The Piano Lesson

Title taken from the Matisse painting, which in turn depicts a painting of woman on a high stool looking down on a child learning piano. The painting contrasts the soft image of the child with the harsh painted viewer and a stiff sculpture in the foreground, evoking ‘sensuality and hard work’.

The title obviously also refers to the fable like nature of the narrative, which contrasts elements of social realism with an extremely broad tone, reminiscent of the Uncle Remus stories of the African American South.

Similarity to Brian Friel

The Piano Lesson is thematically reminiscent of Brian Friel in the Irish context. Like much of Friel’s work, it’s a historical drama about the dignity and indignity of working class people. Again, like Friel, Wilson seems concerned with the power of education and the legacy of colonialism. As well as the desire for land as route to respectability – colliding with modernity and the rise of the city.

“You’d be surprised how many people trying to go North get on a train going West. They think the train’s supposed to go where they going rather than where it’s going… If everybody stay in one place I believe this would be a better world.” (Doaker).

Both playwrights are concerned with the value of land: Land as a continual form of oppression, and as a possibility of reparation.

Numerology and the role of three

The number three is used repeatedly in the play. Lymon’s truck broke down three times. It’s been three years since Boy Willie has seen his sister. Crawley was 3 times 7 (a southern term for 21, i.e.: a grown up), at the time of his death. Bernice’s husband died three years ago. Sutter died three weeks ago. There were 3 hobos and 3 doors in Avery’s dream. We speculate that these may be references both to the frequent two on one interactions in the play, and to the oedipal triad evoked by the many missing fathers in the play.

Literal Deux et Machina

Sutter’s ghost and it’s connection to the piano is an example of magical realism animism and the storytelling of subjugated people.

This ties into the fusions of spiritualism and evangelical religion: As a way out of the mental trap of poverty and violence.

The ‘Ghosts of Yellow Dog’: The story of the purchase, carving and theft of the piano and murder that followed. The ghosts provide a manner of redressing injustice from the afterlife.

But spirituality also represents the danger of that connection to past. E.g.: Berniece’s mother whispering to the piano.

The argument over the value of the piano is one of economics and utility vs family and history. Berniece is aware of the human cost of the piano, and it’s importance as a symbol in the cycle of violence.

Missing Fathers

The constant absence of dead or fled fathers, and the broken family at the heart of the story, are contrasted with the power of family, religion and community, to stand against poverty, facilitating a foothold in communities.

Slavery

In the world of the play, the history of slavery is almost a living memory. The character’s family (whose surname we never hear), were literally owned by the Sutter family. Repeatedly we hear of brutal white punishment of minor crimes. E.g.: Crawley (benieces husband) killed for stealing wood. E.g.: ‘Boy Charles’ (Father of berniece / boy willy) burned alive for stealing piano. Thus the legacy of slavery continues in the intergenerational transmission of violence and criminality.

Aspiration and class conflict

At one point in the play, Bernie leaves Maretha at the ‘settlement house’.

Here they represent an avenue for internalised racism. Berniece tells Maretha ‘Don’t be going down there showing your colour’.

The ambitions of Avery, an elevator operator seeking to gain respectability through his ministry; are contrasted with noble, almost class conflict driven ‘hustler’ archetype of Boy Willie.

Internalised Racism

The plays characters (particularly Boy Willie), make constant use of racial epithets like ‘nigger’.

Berniece straightens her daughter Maretha’s hair with hot grease & tells her if she were a boy she wouldn’t have to. Boy Willie gives out to Berniece for her child rearing technique and neglect in not telling Mareta the history of the piano. He’s not going to be like his father, who had no access to land and worked all his life for someone else. For him land represents parity with white people, respectability. For Berniece – she has to be realistic about her lowly status.

Intersectionality / Patriarchy

The conflict between Berniece and Boy Willy demonstrates the repression of women in poor African American communities at this point in history. The bullying nature of Boy Willie’s entry into the house. His patriarchal refusal of Berniece’s request to leave – and assumption of ownership of piano. No man ultimately defends Berniece, not Lymon nor Doaker nor Avery. But it’s her peaceful appeal to their ancestors that ultimately saves the day.

Other examples: Wining Boy slept with Lymon’s mother in return for helping to get his father out of jail. This wasn’t compulsion exactly, but it was certainly exploitation.

The Use of women by Lymon & Boy Willie. E.g.: Boy Willie’s pursuit of Grace (irony) ‘My grandaddy used to take women on the back of horses’. Both see women as a comfort and an object. While Lymon claims a desire for a more meaningful relationship he in a sense betrays his moment with Berniece by chasing Grace at the end of the play.

The Hustler archetype

Wining Boy & Boy Willy.

Towards the end of the play Berniece threatens him with a gun. But he’s not scared of dying. He relates the story of trying to raise his dog from the dead and killing a cat when Jesus wouldn’t bring him back. The event taught him learned he has the power of death too. “Nigger that ain’t afraid to die is the worse kind of nigger for the white man”.

Songs of the oppressed

Several songs are sung by the men in the play. Most notably, the prison song sun by all the men (all of whom served time at the same forced labour farm). ‘O’Berta’ is about telling your love to move on while you’re imprisoned, which ties into the theme of the legacy of slavery in the breakup of families. And it’s connection to urban poverty.

Some peanuts are eaten, some water bottles empties, some hotel rooms vandalised. Outside of that Neil LaButes ‘Some Girls’ is a less than action packed look at relationships. Love through the eyes of an immature ‘every guy’ whose self absorption drives his quest to reexamine a history of failed relationships. There are plenty of plays featuring assholes, but this is perhaps the first play we’ve read primarily about one. Instead of seven dwarves this sleepwalking beauty has four girls, each of whom seem more than happy to meet a self satisfied ex-lover unbidden in an anonymous hotel room.

The version we read of the play – the printed piece, is as written – but not as performed at first run (starring David Schwimmer of all people) – when it was ‘streamlined’ to make the protagonist a little more palatable. A film version of the play, starring the OC’s Adam Brody premiered last year at South by South West.

Download: Episode 12 – Some Girl(s)

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

His autobiography boasts that Steve Martin began working at age ten in the newly opened Disneyland, graduating to study poetry and philosophy and spend 18 years performing as “America’s best loved stand up comedian”. Martin has in addition managed a career an accomplished banjo musician and movie star. He writes “I was not naturally talented… though working against that made me inventive”. The open question is whether inventiveness is enough to moderate a lack of dramaturgic ability.

Picasso at the Lapin Agile recounts an imagined meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein, while both are in their early twenties, yet to make their mark on the century. The play is a sweetly antique ribald sex comedy set in a real Montmartre cabaret immortalised in Picasso’s painting ‘At the Lapin Agile’. It was first staged at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in 1993, and won the 1996 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off Broadway Play.

Download: Episode 11 – Picasso at the Lapin Agile

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: Some Girls by Neil LaBute.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

Arriving at the end of the nineteen nineties, at exactly the time Martin McDonagh was exploding the Irish national theatre with the first of his Leenane trilogy, Disco Pigs articulated a radical new vision of Irishness. An Irishness deracinated of nationalism, appalled by republicanism, raised on television and clubland. A dissolute Irishness – frozen in the decaying embrace of the still powerful church. Our soi-disant twin protagonists Pig and Runt are, like the nation, awakening just before the dawn of the 21st century: Becoming self aware in a final desperate defence against perpetual inferiority. The plays ostensibly simple dialogue takes us deep into an expressionist teenage universe, where sex, violence and imagination dissolve the surface of a mundane world.

First staged in 1996 at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork, Disco Pigs moved on to the Dublin and Edinburgh festivals. The first production starred Killian Murphy and Eileen Walsh. Eileen would go on to star in the Magdalene Sisters and win best actress award at the Tribeca Film festival for her performance in the 2008 film Eden. Although she was to replaced in the role of Runt for Kirsten Sheriden’s film version, by Elaine Cassidy.

Download: Episode 10 – Disco Pigs

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

Quantum Physics, synchronicity, English mustachios, it has to be Eugene Ionesco’s ‘The Bald Soprano’ (La Cantatrice Chauve). This is a play for which context is essential: Beckett’s growing reputation in France at the beginning of the 1950’s. The efforts of dramatists who became known as the ‘theatre of the absurd’ to acknowledge the horrors of fascism. The birth of post-modernism with it’s portrayal of the fragmentary nature of subjective reality. And Ionesco’s own inspiration – bizarrely banal English language learning tapes. In attempting to recreate the imaginative truth of these unheimlich lessons, Ionesco engaged with some of the most complex intellectual problems of his time.

The play begins as a parody of urbane English parlour comedies, spearing every convention from obtuse bon-mots to farcical misunderstandings, from trite social commentary to ironic contradictions. Out of this meta-humour, brilliantly trivialising the trivial, develops a slow horror, as identities dissolve, time disappears, life and death become confused and disorder reins.

The Bald Soprano was Ionesco’s first play, originally written in his native Romanian, before being rewritten in French. Since it’s first performance on May 11th 1950, the play has become one of the most performed works in France. We read the 1964 translation by Donal M. Allan.

Download: Episode 9 – The Bald Soprano

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

We conclude our discussion of JP Shanley’s classic play, doubt.

Download: Episode 8 – Doubt (Part 2)

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: ‘The Bald Soprano‘ or La Cantatrice Chauve by Eugène Ionesco.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.