Carving out a lead role

Alex Coolman

He carved an image of birth into the piano, and he carved an image of

death. He went on carving the tragic stories of a family of slaves, not

stopping until the entire piano was covered in pictures of their history.

The labor must have taken years.

Well, not quite.

“It’s all done in foam,” said Christian Johnson, the artisan for South

Coast Repertory who did the carving. Johnson created the elaborately

detailed etchings in the piano for August Wilson’s play “The Piano

Lesson,” which opened yesterday and runs through Nov. 21.

All told, the carving took only about a week and a half, but the stories

that are told in the artfully disguised slabs of foam are central to the

play. They depict the breakup of a slave family whose descendants, many

years later, argue over the value of the instrument as a historical

object and as a commodity.

The upright piano that will be used in the play was created from scratch

by the theater’s technicians and artisans. It has keys that can be

played, but it cannot create any sound. Technicians mounted a speaker

inside the instrument so that it can produce music when necessary, and it

also has a few lights inside it for those scenes in the play when it is

supposed to take on an eerie glow.

That glow expresses both the tragic history depicted in the carving and

the strange grip the past has on the brother and sister who quarrel over

the instrument.

“The story is that the piano belonged to a slave owner, and the slave

owner sold the slaves, which were very dear to the slave owner’s wife,”

Johnson said. “She had the images of the slaves carved into the piano by

the father of the son and the wife that were sold.”

But the father didn’t stop with a pair of portraits.

“The father, he went a little crazy,” Johnson said. “He went a little

overboard. He carved the entire story of the family.”

Years later, in the 1930s, members of the same family must decide what to

do with the piano. Boy Willie (Victor Mack) wants to sell the valuable

instrument, while his sister Berniece (Kim Staunton) argues that the

carvings are too important to sell because they capture the history of

their ancestors.

The pillars that support the keyboard are carved into images of the

grandmother and grandfather of the family -- figures with eyes without

pupils and impassive mouths. The side panels of the instrument depict

chapters from the family’s life -- weddings, births and funerals. In the

center panel, a man in a horse-drawn cart carries away the mother and son

from their home.

As Johnson noted, the piano appears on the stage “100% of the time,” -- a

fact that, in dramatic terms, makes it virtually the star of the play.

Director Seret Scott said the presence of the instrument, with all its

symbolism of memory and sorrow, speaks to the inability of the family

either to dispense with the past or to make it a living part of their own

lives.

“The piano becomes a metaphor for the whole family’s perception of its

own past and of its future,” she said. “They just have to get through the

present. They’re kind of stuck.”

A preoccupation with history is characteristic of the work of Wilson, who

wrote “The Piano Lesson” as part of a 10-part series of plays exploring

the African-American experience of this decade.

“He has a largeness to him with his stories and the issues he grapples

with,” Scott said of Wilson. “He has the weight of a novelist, of a

Faulkner. Or Baldwin for that matter.”

‘THE PIANO LESSON’

WHERE: South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

WHEN: Today through Nov. 21.; show times are Tuesday through Saturday at

8 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 p.m., with weekend matinees at 2:30 p.m.

HOW MUCH: Tickets are $28 to $47

TELEPHONE: (714) 708-5500