August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won...

In 1950s Pittsburgh, a Black garbage collector named Troy Maxson--bitter that baseball's color barrier was only broken after his own heyday in the Negro Leagues--is prone to taking out his frustrations on his loved ones