Stage

...As with the other Wilson plays, it began at the Yale Repertory Theatre and, shepherded by director Lloyd Richards, it made stops around the country before it settled down on Broadway...

...Their mother kept it, polished it, had Berniece play it, but since it has come to Berniece she has not touched it...

...Another in the series of plays on black Americans in the twentieth century that Wilson has been writing since Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in 1981, The Piano Lesson is set in Pittsburgh in 1936...

...Whether Sutter is a real ghost, as he is to the characters, or a device (to the audience he is never more than a light at the head of the stairs), he reconciles the brother and sister...

...When Danitra Vance, as Missie May in "The Gilded Six-Bits," peers around the edge of the cloth that hides her and finishes the description of how beautiful she is in her bath, there is a mixture of impudence and shy self-knowledge just right for the character that makes the line funny...

...Their father finally took the piano and died shortly after in a fire set by revenging whites...

...There is a difference in tone, however, for a narrative line can be changed by the person delivering it...

...Boy Willie is a hurricane of a character, all mouth and movement, and Charles S. Dutton, who played Levee in Ma Rainey, fills the stage with comic frenzy that charms and frightens at the same time...

...Spunk is black theater of a very different kind...

...If we were to take his statement at face value, we would have to assume that the whites in Wilson's audience come to his plays like tourists, looking at the quaint and unfamiliar life, keeping a tour group's distance...

...GERALD WEALESLD WEALES...

...Real enough in this context, however, for Spunk is as much about the telling of stories as the stories told...

...The narrative is delivered by Blues Speak Woman (Ann Duquesnay) and, as usual in story theater, by the performers who will act out the tales...

...He simply creates a milieu in which his characters can live...

...Another look at Hurston, however, indicates that Wolfe is building on the quality already in her stories a voice that carries a mixture of amusement and affection toward her characters, one that proclaims that Hurston, the story-teller, is never offstage in her tales...

...Well into the piece the night I saw it, a voice behind me said suddenly, "That's not a real man...

...I am more and more concerned with pointing out the differences between blacks and whites, as opposed to pointing out the similarities," Wilson said in a New York Times interview (April 15,1990...

...Carved by the great-grandfather of Willie and Berniece, it is decorated with their own family history although it was done for a slaveowner...

...As one has come to expect from Wilson, he brings together a group of characters who convey (embody) the texture of life its adhesions, its disruptions within a family and the black community of which it is a part...

...White preachers can be as warm and as pompous as Avery, and Lymon's mixture of lust and longing for something more substantial is hardly arcane...

...Certainly a conflict between a brother and a sister is familiar ground, although the struggle between Boy Willie and Berniece over the piano is special, since it grows out of the need to sustain or to reject a family tradition that includes slavery, violence, and the precariousness of the black presence in the white world...

...The house is haunted by Sutter, the white man who wants to recover the piano, and in the end Boy Willie faces him head on, racing upstairs to rout him, and Berniece opens the piano and sings, "Oh, Lord I want you to help me," thus calling up the family to aid Willie...

...The title comes not from Hurston's story "Spunk," but from one of the composer's songs...

...This account of the theme and plot of The Piano Lesson gives no strong sense of what the play is like...

...There is invention that goes beyond the assigning of lines...

...One's first impulse is to assume that Wolfe, who wrote the outrageous The Colored Museum, is playing games with Hurston as he did with the writers and genres that he parodied in Museum...

...But he does so not by pointing at all...

...The piano which sits heavily at stage right, a prop and a symbol and a bone of contention, requires much exposition which, for the most part, is kept from smothering the play by being filtered through the apparent random talk that fills the stage...

...The rest of the cast expertly provides the necessary background and ballast for the central conflict, particularly those actors who have been with the play since Yale: Carl Gordon (Doaker), Lou Myers (Wining Boy), Rocky Carroll (Lymon), and Tommy Hollis (Avery...

...Boy Willie arrives from their old home down South, intent on selling the piano so that he can buy land, and Berniece, who holds onto it but will not use it, is determined to stop him...

...That is not the case...

...Phlegmatic uncles like Doaker and flamboyant uncles like Wining Boy are hardly strangers to white families...

...The voices and the attitudes that give Wilson's plays their richness may be as different as he says they are, but he would not have reached the wide audience he has if his characters and their concerns did not touch something personal in playgoers...

...Yet, Boy Willie needs the tight-lipped, closed-in Berniece to set him off, and the two performers complement one another with great effect...

...Boy Willie gives up the piano to Berniece on the condition that she play it, accepting that it is their family with a history that can stay alive only through becoming an active part of their present lives...

...In "Sweat," for instance, the three gossiping loafers who comment on the dissolving marriage of Delia and Sykes and the rattlesnake that divorces them are played by two performers and a very impressive lifesize puppet (designed by Barbara Pollitt...

...It is a virtuoso performance that makes it difficult for S. Epatha Merkerson to hold the stage...

...Based on three tales by Zora Neale Hurston, adapted and directed by George C. Wolfe, Spunk is story theater but played with high style and punctuated by the music of Chic Street Man, whose presence his voice and his guitar is one of the pleasures of the piece...