Charles Dutton never received an Emmy nomination for his work in "Roc." You can bet he's going to get one for his performance in Hallmark Hall of Fame's "The Piano Lesson," which will air at 9 Sunday night on WJZ (Channel 13).
Alfre Woodard and Carl Gordon will probably pick up Emmy nominations, too. That's how rich the acting is in this made-for-TV version of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a piano and an African-American family's sense of its past.
Calling "The Piano Lesson" a play about a piano is, of course, like describing "Hamlet" as a play about a depressed prince. Time magazine called Wilson's piano "the most potent symbol in American drama since Laura Wingfield's glass menagerie." I suspect that for some theatergoers, however, the piano greatly surpasses Tennessee Williams' glass menagerie in potency.
The piano stands at the center of both the play and this television adaptation, which is written by Wilson and directed by Lloyd Richards, who also directed for the stage. Dutton and Gordon were also in the Broadway production, with Dutton receiving a Tony nomination.
Literally, the upright piano stands in the home of Berniece Charles (Woodard), a widow and mother living in Pittsburgh in 1936. It's an heirloom, with the history of the Charles family depicted in ornate wood carvings on its face.
Berniece treasures the instrument and the history told in its carvings. But she no longer plays the piano, because of the ancestral ghosts it conjures.
The action starts when Berniece's high-spirited brother, Boy Willie (Dutton), arrives from Mississippi. He has big plans to sell the piano and use the money to buy land that the Charles family has worked for several generations as slaves and sharecroppers.
From the moment Dutton's Boy Willie arrives at Berniece's door, you cannot take your eyes off him. Part of it is the exuberance and hunger of the character as scripted by Wilson. But a bigger part is the performance of Dutton.
He's a whirlwind -- jumping up to dance in one scene, sitting
down at the kitchen table in another and stomping his boots as he sings a field holler titled "Berta, Berta."
On the surface, Boy Willie seems all energy, joy, smiles and promise. That's what makes you pay attention to him. But it's the rage and anger with which Dutton parboils his Boy Willie that makes the character mesmerizing.
By the time Boy Willie and Berniece come to their final showdown over the piano, you can almost feel the weight of 200 years of memories, dreams and shackled emotions about to explode.
No television version of a great play has ever measured up to the experience of seeing the original version on stage, with a community of strangers who become companions during the theatergoing experience. So it is with the CBS version of "The Piano Lesson." Television is unable to match the feeling you get sitting in the theater when Dutton and the other men at the Charles family table start stomping their boots and singing "Berta, Berta" a cappella.
That said, you should know that the television version of "The Piano Lesson" is in a league with the 1986 television adaptation of "Death of a Salesman," starring Dustin Hoffman.
It may not have the gripping immediacy of the stage version, but at least now we have "The Piano Lesson" on tape so that you -- and future generations -- can see Dutton and Woodard in their prime in a brilliant work by Wilson.