In a Pittsburgh living room in 1936, a brother and sister battle over the future of an antique piano.

Two worlds collide in The Piano Lesson: the American south, entangled in the memory and heartbreak of slavery and sharecropping, and the promise of the industrial north, alive with potential opportunities. The Great Migration lies omnipresent in each scene of the play, with trains acting as both literal and figurative vehicles in Wining Boys songs. In Doaker’s words, “Whichever way you decide to go they got a railroad that will take you there.”

The Piano Lesson would be little without the piano, conceivably Wilson’s most powerful symbol in the American Century Cycle. The motivations between Berniece and Boy Willie surrounding this familial musical instrument lie at the heart of the play’s conflict and again, these viewpoints force audiences to choose sides: should the family hold tightly to the sole vessel of its ancestral past, its stories, and its evocations, or should they exhaust every opportunity for ownership of land, potential prosperity, and even arguably, retribution?