The Piano Lesson: Director Notes

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson

Jan. 8 – Feb. 16, 2026 | Hawks Mainstage Theatre

Director Notes

by Vincent Orduña, OCP Artistic Director and Director, The Piano Lesson

At its heart, The Piano Lesson is a play about listening—listening to family, to history, and to the voices that live just beneath the surface of everyday life.

August Wilson places us inside a home shaped by the Great Migration, a time when many Black families moved North seeking opportunity, safety, and dignity. But this play reminds us that while you can change where you live, you cannot leave your history behind. The past comes with you. It shows up in family arguments, in long-held grief, and in the choices we make about who we want to become.

At the center of this story stands a piano carved with the faces of ancestors. It is not simply an heirloom or a work of art—it is a vessel. It carries memory, pain, pride, and survival. For the characters in this play, the piano raises a difficult question: What do we do with our inheritance? Do we hold onto it as a sacred memory, or do we turn it into something that might help us move forward? And can honoring the past and building a future ever be the same thing?

Spirituality in The Piano Lesson is grounded and embodied. It lives in storytelling, in ritual, in music, and in the act of remembering. The ancestors are not distant figures from history; they are present—sometimes comforting, sometimes demanding to be acknowledged. Wilson suggests that healing doesn’t come from forgetting trauma, but from facing it, naming it, and allowing it to speak.

What draws me most to this play as a director is how deeply human it feels. It’s about siblings who love each other but see the world differently. It’s about generational wounds that are passed down, often unintentionally, and the hard work of deciding which burdens we continue to carry. In a culture that often encourages us to move forward at all costs, The Piano Lesson asks us to slow down and listen—to one another and to history itself.

My hope is that this production invites you to reflect on your own family stories, the people who came before you, and the legacies you carry—both chosen and inherited. The lesson, perhaps, is not about the piano at all, but about learning how to live with our history, rather than trying to outrun it.