By Globe Staff
Omar Robinson is nothing short of sensational in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s staging of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” at Hibernian Hall — an outstanding production that reminds us, once again, how Wilson expanded opportunities for Black theater artists whose talents and craftsmanship had previously gone untapped.
Set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in the mid-1930s, “The Piano Lesson” revolves around a fierce contest of wills between two siblings — Boy Willie (Robinson) and Berniece (Jade Guerra, excellent) — over the family’s antique piano, and what it represents.
Boy Willie is determined to sell the piano and use the money to buy the Mississippi plantation land on which his family’s ancestors had been enslaved by the Sutter clan. But Berniece is implacably opposed. Symbols don’t get much weightier than that piano, on which an ancestor had carved the likenesses of enslaved family members. “Money can’t buy what that piano cost,” Berniece says grimly.