By Peppur Chambers
Award-winning director Patdro D. Harris is no stranger to theatre excellence, nor to the local Phoenix theater scene. Making his fourth appearance with the historic Black Theatre Troupe, Harris returns to direct August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, running February 2-18, 2024 at the Helen K. Mason Performing Arts Center.
Harris was first courted by executive director, David J. Hemphill in 2017, with his most recent production the 2019 production Simply Simone: The Music of Nina Simone.Harris, who calls Atlanta home, had an affinity for the production as he was introduced to Nina Simone through a dear friend’s aunt and felt called by a higher power to tell her story. “You never know what part the ancestors are going to play in your life, how the ancestors are going to bless you. It’s beautiful.”
The same can be said for The Piano Lesson. Harris sat next to August Wilson for a performance of The Piano Lessonat the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And now, as this is his first time directing a Wilson play, Harris, cites this special directorial moment as coming ‘full circle’ for him.
This mysticism rooted around messages from the ancestors is important to note because it is a core theme of the piece Harris will be directing here in Arizona. Written in 1987, The Piano Lesson is August Wilson’s fourth masterpiece in the “Pittsburgh Cycle,” Wilson’s ambitious achievement of ten poignantly African-American dramas (each taking place in his native Pittsburgh) and representing a different decade in the twentieth century.
Set in 1936, The Piano Lesson is a multi-dimensional story about a brother and a sister who are at odds about what to do with an heirloom piano. The piano, which becomes a significant character itself, is carved with portraits of their ancestors and thereby hauntingly captures the family’s rise from slavery. Through the ghosts of the past and the descendants who navigate the present, this poignant play explores identity, generational wealth, love, and longing.
“There are many lessons in this play,” Harris explains. “One lesson is that you have to use what the ancestors have provided… and do something better with it.” Harris explained that this concept includes not just financial wealth, but also spiritual and cultural wealth and wealth of community.
This theme of “doing better,” is common in Wilson’s plays. Wilson’s characters often want to do better but are met with some conflict that doesn’t allow them to do so. It is here where the ancestral-rooted Harris finds directorial creativity.
Harris offered, “We stop at the ‘what’ in our culture; asking ‘What did you do?’ We don’t get to the ‘why’.” Wilson, who died in 2005 at the age of 60, and is one of the most important voices in modern theater, may have been examining the same — with the ‘why’ often pointing back to society, history, ancestry and family dynamics.
Harris shared that in prep with the actors, he inspired them to “get specific” when building their characters; to understand what was going on economically, how migration affected music, behavior and culture, for example, in the 1930s. “If we are going to riff off something, we just want to be as authentic as possible. We must be in the ‘30s where the play was; not where we are today.”
By setting each play in a different decade, Wilson asks us to see that even though the times change, not much else has. Time becomes our marker, our ghost of the past that reminds us why we still have pain, why a piano might still cause so much angst. Harris agreed and noted, “so many things that were relevant then are still relevant now.” He concluded with, “That’s very sad.”
Yet, this cycle of things not changing, this demonstration of it through staged art, is our why. The cycle has made us who we all are, and is a testament to why Wilson’s plays remain poignant, and why theaters like Black Theatre Troupe, continue to produce them.
“It is a mixture of the magical, the mystical and the holy. And all of those things come together in this play. With that, I can put my spin on it; I can put some ‘Padro’city on it.” Harris added, “I love to tell stories about people of color and break up what I call ‘The Block of Black’; we’ve got to be very specific about what our culture is and how we tell stories and how we represent it. It is my honor to be here to do this.”
We’re here for it. All of it. As is our ancestor, Mr. August Wilson.
If you go:
Black Theatre Troupe
The Piano Lesson
February 2 – 18, 2024
Helen K. Mason Performing Arts Center
1333 E. Washington
Tickets: $50
www.blacktheatretroupe.org
602-258-8128
The post Ancestors Inspire Director of August Wilson’s Piano Lesson appeared first on Arizona Informant.
