Week One

 

Setting: The key element to the success of The Piano Lesson?

In the piano lesson, August Wilson creates a story that many find to be deep and complex filled with many metaphoric and spiritual connections that the audience make while watching or reading the play.  It can be observed that the static setting of the play is used to do a lot of things and convey many messages.  Looking at it from a strictly artistic standpoint, the rooms encapsulates the 1930s settings appropriately and its inhabitants are obviously of the same mold.  August Wilsons decision to keep the entire play contained to a small area of a house allows the rest of the universe within the Piano Lesson to be a dark void, where there are loads of things happening out of view that are supposed to define the world of the play.  I see the setting of the play as a tactic that August Wilson employs in order to give the audience an endless amount of things to analyze relating to the world of the play.  The setting allows August Wilson to lose control of the story that he is trying to tell to some extent, and it leads to the audience telling their own stories based on their interpretation of the play.  This voluntary absence of space is a carefully thought-out strategy, that id used to add layers of depth to the universe that surrounds the story.  

An exception could be the concept of ghosts within the Piano Lesson.  Although the ghost of Sutter is not seen through the play, its presence shows up on the second floor of the house, off screen without revealing the ghost physically.  As the play progressed, the ghost was being spotted by various members of the casts upstairs at different instances.  These happenstances were unclear for the majority of the play, as characters such as Boy Willie expressed great doubt that a ghost was being seen within the house.  This also leads to a deeper question to why Boy Willie would acknowledge the presence of the yellow dog ghost that existed elsewhere; Boy Willie was also presumed, by some, to be responsible for the death of Sutter, rather than the actions of a ghost causing the death.  Near the end of the play, there are references to the ghost of Sutter relating to his presence being felt.   But the most important part relating to Sutter’s ghost was the authors’ canonical acknowledgement that the ghost made sound upstairs.  This could imply that the ghost was real, at that particular point of the story, though the specific sound that was made was not clearly defined within the book.  The ghost making an actual canonical sound in the play breaks down many walls, and creates a new perspective of the story once it concludes.  That being said, the small scope of the setting of The Piano Lesson effectively blindfolds the audience and gives miles worth of depth to the characters and the development of the story; But I also feel that it the result of a (voluntarily) blindfolded author who tries to keep things undefined in his story in order to cheaply extend the readers’ interest and to keep them transfixed in the plot, characters, and lore of the play.