Students should learn to read and interpret drama in context. We will read The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. This 1990 Pulitzer Prize winning drama tells the story of a family torn between the ghosts of their past lives on a plantation in the Yazoo Delta of Mississippi and the promise of a new life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their story dramatizes the general theme of migration to the city and they personify those who carried the Blues from the South into the cities of the North and West. We will study dramatic form, focusing on narrative technique but examining other elements of drama such as setting, characterization and dialogue. The play is in two acts; we will read act I in week 2 and read act II in week 3.
Drama, video and recordings: Drama: The Piano Lesson by August Wilson; Penguin Books; 1990Hand-outs: Biography of August Wilson; Songs and Biography of W.C. Handy
Websites:
The Piano Lessons Study Questions
PROCEDURES
- Introduce unit: Themes, material, goals, and assignments.
- Introduce focus for this week: drama, blues, migration to the city.
- Begin examination of drama: class discussion of student preferences
- Presentation: August Wilson: biography, The Piano Lesson
- Read biography select significant information. Review notetaking skills.
- Introduce research assignment for group and individual projects
Each group will seek to answer selected questions through independent research using material provided by the teacher, the library, their community, and the Internet. Primary questions for the groups will be:
- Cities: communities of migrants;
- Migrants: carriers of tradition;
- Drama: embodied storytelling;
- Rap: stories of today’s City.
- How are cities (NY, SF, LA, Miami, or your city) shaped by immigration (internal and external) in terms of neighborhoods, economics and politics?
- Who are/ were the primary immigrant groups to the selected cities and what emotional burdens and artistic gifts do/did they bring with them?
- How does drama differ from oral histories, poetry, song? What other plays tell the stories of other migrant communities ?
- What are other plays by August Wilson that continue this story of Afro-Americans’ journey from the past to the future?
- How is the city presented in rap? What are the dramatic elements used in rap? Students will present their research to the class in week 4, and in combination with their journal they will write an expository essay connecting their topic to The Piano Lesson.
- Homework: begin reading play
ASSESSMENT:
Students will demonstrate their knowledge through identifying and analyzing dramatic forms and blues vocabulary in class discussion, by presenting independent research which will be developed throughout the unit and by writing an expository/ intrepretive essay to be completed in week 4.
NOTES:
Select groups by affinity as much as possible; promote self-selection; caution students that some language in the play may offend them- ie use of ‘nigger’; discuss the importance of dramatic context including time and speaker; compare with rap usage. Ask them to consider the power of stereotyping and stigma. How does art function in this field? Wilson is speaking to a black audience, primarily. Does this matter?
