'Piano Lesson' hits all the right keys

After attending Marion McClinton's 1993 production of "The Piano Lesson" at Penumbra Theatre, playwright August Wilson remarked that he had seen the work's definitive staging.

If he were alive today, he might reconsider.

Lou Bellamy's production of Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which opened Thursday in St Paul, is a finely drawn mix of metaphor and struggle, ghost story and insistent realism. Bellamy, who acted in McClinton's production, marries Wilson's vernacular poetry to a lyrical acting style to make this drama compelling and humorous, even at three hours plus.

The play's atmosphere is vividly suggested by its strong design (Ken Evans' tiered set, Michelle Habeck's tremulous, ghost-evoking lighting and Malo Adams' scratchy sound score). The project is also helped by composer Sanford Moore's bluesy, prerecorded piano numbers.

History, family legacy and dreams intertwine in "The Piano Lesson," which is set in 1930s Pittsburgh in the Charles family home. A piano with three carved faces sits at the center of the home. More than polished wood and ivory keys, it represents the guardian spirits of a family that has come through slavery, where the instrument was used as currency in exchange for ancestors.

To Berniece, who lives in the home and who has not played the instrument in years, the piano is sacred, with frightening powers that trap her in the past. To her brother Boy Willie, newly arrived from Mississippi, the piano is a liquid asset. He wants to sell the instrument so that he can buy land to farm.

The play builds around the fight between Boy Willie and Berniece. Their conflict is resolved not by paroxysms of violence but by powerful, apparently enlightening spirits.

From "Hamlet" to Ibsen's "Ghosts," ghost stories can be tricky. When you pull them off, it's gripping. But if you falter, it dooms a project.

At Penumbra, much of the credit for the strength of this "Piano Lesson" goes to Greta Oglesby. As Berniece, she's a force of nature -- earthy and powerful but with a hungry soul. If you cross her, she will cut you with a look. But Berniece is also a woman of buried longings. And those yearnings are teased out, however briefly, by aspiring pastor Avery Brown (T. Mychael Rambo in a bit of ministerial beauty) and by Lymon (Ashford Thomas as a shuffling fool), the naïve country boy who accompanies Boy Willie north.

Oglesby has a muscular match in Ansa Akyea, whose Boy Willie is incendiary and tempestuous. Even in overalls, Ansa gives Boy Willie a prizefighter's mien. Loud, rude, he is a metaphor for a restless, impatient future.

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390