Act one

There is a mood of conflict. The basic premise of the conflict is simple and quickly expressed, within five minutes of the start of the show. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano. Berniece wants to keep it. Cue conflict. But since the piano is a symbol for the family’s history, it runs much deeper than that. The scholar Alan Nadel sums it up succinctly: “Berniece, we could say, wants to hide from history and Boy Willie wants to get rid of it. Wilson, however, wants to rewrite it, even if he has to use traditionally white instruments, even if he has to resurrect some ugly ghosts, for the alternative, it would seem, is to deny African Americans their art and their history.”