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.
