A Complex ‘Piano Lesson’

August Wilson’s play “The Piano Lesson” is one imposing piece of work.

In 1990, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. In 1995, it played on network television. It is three hours long.

It bobs and weaves with the rich, earthy poetry of people who relish storytelling and humorous repartee. And it puts those people--the inhabitants of an African American household in mid-1930s Pittsburgh--under the weight of huge, resonant conflicts and themes.

How can families--and, by implication, cultures--best honor the legacies passed on by their forebears? Should we sanctify, enshrine and internalize our ancestors’ suffering? Or must we move beyond our past? Can we ever budge the massive rocks of tragic history that are--to evoke the Robert Johnson blues lyric that Wilson alludes to in the play--the “stones in [our] passway” to a better life?

The director and two lead actors in South Coast Repertory’s current revival of “The Piano Lesson” came to this production with their own distinctive responses to its imposingness.

Seret Scott avoided the play’s impositions by avoiding it; a veteran, in-demand director on the national circuit of regional theaters, she knew she might get the call one day to direct “The Piano Lesson.” She made a point of not seeing it.

Kim Staunton plays Berniece, who battles her brother, Boy Willie, for possession of the heirloom piano that their enslaved great-grandfather, a gifted artisan, carved with faces and images representing the family’s love and pain.

For Staunton, “The Piano Lesson” was a huge imposition. During the early 1990s, she spent more than two years touring and on Broadway as understudy while S. Epatha Merkerson (Lt. Anita Van Buren on the television crime drama “Law & Order”) played Berniece opposite Charles S. Dutton’s Boy Willie. Merkerson was a hardy trouper; Staunton got to perform just three times, at the end of the long Broadway run.

“I was in the company of brilliance. I was always learning,” Staunton said recently from her home in Studio City. “But it took its toll. I thought, ‘I don’t want to look at this play again in my life.’ ” Indeed, while rummaging through some boxes a few years ago, Staunton came upon her old script for “The Piano Lesson.”

“I just looked at it and threw it away.”

Yet Staunton said she cherishes her second chance to play Berniece, and not just because this time she actually gets to be on stage every night. It’s a return to the theater for her after pursuing TV and film roles in recent years (which is what brought the Juilliard-trained actress to Los Angeles in 1998). The mother of two sons, ages 8 and 11, celebrates turning 40 as a milestone in her ability to understand life. Staunton thinks she is a deeper Berniece than she was nearly a decade ago.

“I knew I could do it then, but there was something missing,” she said. “A weight, that’s the only way I can describe it.” The difference, she said: “life lessons.”

“Now I come to Berniece, and I understand. When I opened up this play and began to read it, I began to feel it in another way: ‘Now, I’m ready for this.’ ”

Victor Mack, another transplanted New Yorker who came to Los Angeles a year ago hoping for opportunities in film and TV, saw “The Piano Lesson” on Broadway and in its televised adaptation on CBS. The wiry, smallish actor never expected to play the role, which Wilson has said he wrote with Dutton expressly in mind.

“[Dutton] is a very big man, which is usually how they cast the Boy Willies,” Mack said. “I was even surprised to be cast in this role. But I know where Boy Willie’s heart beats.”

Boy Willie is a man-with-a-plan who repeats like a mantra his step-by-step strategy for buying and working the Mississippi farmland on which his ancestors were slaves--a plan contingent on selling the heirloom piano to raise cash. Mack, an actor-with-a-plan, saw an artistically valid way to combat the imposition of Dutton’s playwright-endorsed definition of the role.

“Charles Dutton has such an overpowering presence that it was more difficult, I think, to see the balance in the argument” between the play’s battling siblings, Mack said. A less dominating Boy Willie, he figured, would make for a closer, and arguably more thematically resonant, fight. His Boy Willie is a high-pitched, relentless and determined ball of physical and verbal energy who is more an inescapable irritant than a dominating force. If this Boy Willie were a ballplayer, he would be a pesky, base-snatching Maury Wills, not a slugging Hank Aaron.

“He just gave a dynamite audition,” director Scott said. “He’s more laid-back off stage, but he can get that frenetic energy that makes you crazy and say, ‘Sit down!’ ”

Times theater critic Michael Phillips praised Mack’s approach: “He does well with the challenge, refusing to make him a larger-than-life figure in the mode of Charles S. Dutton. . . . Mack’s is a smaller-scale but truthful attack. . . .”

Part of her challenge in directing “The Piano Lesson,” Scott said, was to referee a fair fight between Boy Willie and Berniece and make the implications of that conflict paramount.

“Like so much of August’s work, ‘The Piano Lesson’ is so colorful that you can have all the color and have the exhilarating language, and not deal with the central issue: a family right at the moment of crisis, working through it step by step,” Scott said. “Berniece and Boy Willie had to just battle it out, and I said, ‘Whoever wins wins.’ I made both of them support their positions.”

As the play came together, Scott said, she tried to help Staunton give Berniece a formidableness that would stand against Boy Willie’s onslaught: “I said to her, ‘Berniece, look around you. Aside from your child, what do you see? A roomful of men. You are a woman who must hold her own in all this maleness. There’s a clarity and consciousness about who you are that you have to maintain every day, because you could get swallowed up.’ The next day, she started putting things in place.”

Which brings us to the play’s core question: Who does have the better argument? Berniece, the traditionalist who clings to the piano, yet is so frozen by the painful legacy she sees in it that she refuses to play it or tell its history to her 11-year-old daughter; or Boy Willie, who finds no disrespect in bartering what’s been handed down for a chance to claim the prosperity and dignity that his forebears were denied?

Wilson himself apparently has had a hard time making up his mind: the SCR program notes quote him saying that “the ending was a very difficult thing, because I didn’t want to choose sides.” But in a 1995 Times interview, he threw in with Boy Willie: “If you carry your history with you in every heartbeat--which is what Boy Willie does--then you don’t need physical reminders. . . . To me, trading the piano for the self-independence that owning land gives you--that’s a sensible and worthwhile trade-off.”

Scott sits on the fence. “I don’t want the piano sold, but I don’t want it to sit there. I want somebody to play it. I guess I’m on both sides of it.”

Scott, who lives in Teaneck, N.J., said her view of the conflict is shaped partly by her own family’s handling of special heirlooms--quilts her great-grandmother, grandmother and great-aunt made some 100 years ago.

“They’re turn-of-the-century quilts, made out of bits and pieces of things. We use these quilts. They’re not bagged up. They’re not hung up. They were made for warmth and comfort, and they still give us warmth and comfort.”

In the play’s whirlwind ending, pushed to the brink by her brother’s demands and the ghosts of tragic history, Berniece literally holds the keys to a resolution that hinges on her awakening to a new meaning for a musical instrument steeped in her family’s blood.

Said Scott: “Every culture has some kind of history that is not [easy to face], and no matter how far you leave it behind, you take it with you until you resolve it, person by person. You don’t resolve it as a culture.”

Staunton said that when she was picking up her sons from a playmate’s house recently, she tried to tell the parents what “The Piano Lesson” was about.

“I was looking at their faces, and by the time I finished, five minutes later, they had these looks: ‘By golly, that’s a lot of stuff.’ It’s just August’s brilliance, in the words alone, and on top of that, all the layers of issues, layers of history. It’s a big ole play, with a lot of stuff going on.”

Playing Through Nov. 21

* “The Piano Lesson,” through Nov. 21 at South

Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 8 p.m., Sundays at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $18-$47.

(714) 708-5555.