The Piano Lesson | Themes
Past and Present
Wilson’s cycle of plays concentrates on African- American experience during the twentieth century, but they are all also focused—in either direct or indirect ways—upon the experience of slavery.
The Charles family in Wilson’s play is almost a textbook example of the southern black experience in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and it is certain that Wilson intended his characters to be representative of that history. After the emancipation of the slaves in 1863, most ex-slaves remained on the land, renting from their former...
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