When August Wilson wrote The Piano Lesson, he placed a single object at the center of the play: a carved piano bearing the faces and stories of generations. Around that instrument, the play asks a question that echoes across Wilson’s Century Cycle. What do we inherit from the past, and what do we choose to carry forward?
This season, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright James Ijames directs Wilson’s celebrated drama for Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival. Known widely for his play Fat Ham, which received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Ijames has built a career across the American theatre as an actor, playwright, director, and teacher.
Long before the recognition, however, the foundation of his artistic life began with the work of August Wilson. “I read Seven Guitars in high school,” Ijames says. “There are three pieces of literature that radically changed my worldview: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and August Wilson’s Seven Guitars. Everything I felt from those three pieces of literature you can still see in my work to this day.”
Beginnings in the Theatre
Ijames’s first experience with theatre came far from a professional stage. It began in church, where his grandmother ran the annual Christmas pageant. “When I was about fifteen or sixteen, she said, ‘You’re going to start writing these.’ So it was something I attached to service. It felt like a thing I was doing for people, and that has never really left me.”
While studying theatre at Morehouse College and later at Temple University, Ijames focused on acting but continued writing. “Acting was the gateway drug,” he says. “But I kept writing the whole time.” Writing became a way to process his experiences. “I was a working-class kid who processed a lot of my feelings through writing,” he says. “It was how I metabolized things.”
During graduate school, he began producing his own work rather than waiting for opportunities. “I self-produced a few things while I was studying acting at Temple,” he recalls. “When I look back on it, it taught me that I could just sort of do whatever. I shouldn’t wait on people to give me opportunities. I could forge them.”
Writing the Self on the Page
Although Ijames does not write autobiography directly, his own questions and emotions often find their way into his plays. “I am always trying to put as much of myself into it as I can,” he says. “My questions, my anxieties, my desires.” Sometimes that means writing emotions he cannot easily express elsewhere. “Sometimes I’m writing the shape that I wish my anger could take,” he says. “Or the shape that I wish my grief could take.”
At the same time, he values the distance that
writing provides. “I don’t really want people to know what I look like,” he says. “I want the praise to be for the performance and not the performer. Theatre is collaborative.”
Returning to August Wilson’s Language
That collaborative spirit is one reason Ijames continues returning to August Wilson’s work. Over the years he has acted in Wilson’s plays and directed several productions from the Century Cycle. Directing Wilson, he says, requires precision and deep listening. “The language is dense,” he says. “Shakespeare is the only other playwright I can think of who has that much complexity on the line.” Wilson’s dialogue carries rhythm and emotional weight. “You’re maintaining tension in every sentence,” Ijames says. “It’s thrilling work.”
Why The Piano Lesson Now
Among Wilson’s plays, The Piano Lesson holds particular meaning for Ijames. It was the first Wilson play he ever saw performed. “It’s the first one I saw,” he says. “The PBS version with Charles Dutton and Alfre Woodard knocked my socks off. Seeing it realized took it to another level.”
Set in the 1930s, the play follows siblings Boy Willie and Berniece as they argue over whether to sell a piano carved by their enslaved ancestor. The instrument holds the family’s history, forcing them to confront how the past shapes the future.
Ijames sees the story as part of a larger historical moment. “Nobody in the play is from Pittsburgh,” he says. “They’re all from somewhere else.” For him, Wilson captures the cultural shift of the Great Migration and the ways communities reshaped themselves in new places. Compared with some of Wilson’s later works, he describes The Piano Lesson as emotionally lighter. “The characters really are hopeful,” he says.
Collaboration and Community
That sense of hope extends into the rehearsal room. Actor Akeem Davis, who appears in the production as Boy Willie, has been a longtime collaborator and friend. “Akeem is one of my oldest and dearest friends,” Ijames says. “We lived together for many, many years.” Davis has appeared in several Wilson productions alongside him. “He’s been in most of the August Wilson I’ve worked on,” Ijames says. “Part of me wants to move through these plays with him, to age through them together.”
For Ijames, that kind of artistic partnership mirrors the communities found in Wilson’s work. Artists, like Wilson’s characters, build homes together through shared experience and shared storytelling.
Teaching the Next Generation
Today, Ijames serves as head of the playwriting program at Columbia University, mentoring a new generation of writers. Looking back, he recognizes how many mentors shaped his own path. “The thing I’m realizing is that you don’t really know that somebody has mentored you until they’re done,” he says. In the classroom, he focuses on helping students discover their own voice. “I don’t want to make a bunch of little Jameses,” he says. “I want to help them become the writer they’re going to become.” The most important lesson, he tells them, is persistence. “The work is the practice,” he says. “You have to get up every day and write. That motivation has to belong to you.”
Carrying the Legacy Forward
For Ijames, directing The Piano Lesson continues a lifelong conversation with Wilson’s writing. Each return to the play reveals new layers of language, history, and human connection. “When I’m working on August Wilson,” he says, “I keep asking myself: what are you doing to me?” In The Piano Lesson, that mystery lives inside the carved piano itself, carrying generations of voices. Through Wilson’s language and Ijames’s direction, those voices continue to speak
As You Mic It: This conversation between Jason King Jones and James Ijames first appeared on the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival podcast As You Mic It and has been edited for print by podcast co-host, and PSF Associate Producer, Connie Behringer.