August Wilson--the Piano Lesson.ppt

1、Piano lesson,August Wilson 奥古斯特威尔逊,August Wilson is the most influential and successful African American playwright writing today. He is the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences, The Piano Lesson, King Hedley II, Ma Rainys Black Bottom, Joe Turners Come and Gone, Seven Guitars, Two Train

2、s Running, Jitney and Radio Golf. His plays have been produced all over the world.,威尔逊用了二十余年的时间创作了十部戏剧，每部剧均以上一世纪中的一个十年为背景，反映那个十年中美国黑人最普遍的问题，堪称美国黑人的世纪史诗。这十部剧依次为（按照剧中所描述的时间排序）：海洋之珍（2003）、乔特纳来了又走了（1986）、莱妮大妈的黑臀舞（1984）、钢琴课（1987）、七把吉他（1995）、篱笆（1985）、两列火车跑（1990）、吉特尼（1982）、赫德列王二世（1999）、无线电高尔夫（2005）。威尔逊的十部剧

3、中已有八部在百老汇上演 ，且1988年他有两部剧篱笆和乔特纳来了又走了在百老汇同时演出，颇为轰动。,August Wilson is believed to be the fourth greatest playwright after Eugene ONeil, Tennessee,Williams and Arthur Miller（尤金奥尼尔、田纳西威廉斯和阿瑟米勒）. He learned by himself all the way from a dropout to the most successful African-American playwright. Wilson cl

4、aimed himself to be a cultural nationalist（文化民族主义）. His epic 10-play cycle, rooted in black culture, ennobles the black experience and affirms the long neglected value in the American blacks.,The Piano Lesson,Drama in two acts by August Wilson, produced in 1987 and published in 1990. The play, which

5、 was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1990, is part of Wilsons cycle about African-American life in the 20th century.,Set in 1936 Pittsburgh during the aftermath of the Great Depression, The Piano Lesson follows the lives of the Charles family in the Doaker Charles household and an heirloom, the infamous

6、 piano. The play focuses on the arguments between a brother and a sister who have different ideas on what to do with the piano they own. The brother, Boy Willie, is a sharecropper who wants to sell the piano to buy the land (Sutters land) that his ancestors had toiled on as slaves while the sister,

7、Berniece, remains emphatic about keeping it. The piano shows the carved faces of their great-grandfathers wife and son during the days of their enslavement.,In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson , Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play

8、stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles familys prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charless Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Bernieces exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that h

9、is family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real piano lesson, reminding us that blacks are often

10、 deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.,my comment,I believe that the key question in the drama is about self-worth. What The Piano Lesson finally seems to ask is: What do you do with your legacy, and how do you best put it to use?,威尔逊称自己是文化民族主义者，认为种族是个人身份和个性最重要的组成部分，它最直接影响着你对你自己的看法以及别人对你的反应。他曾多次强调黑人自踏上美洲大陆以来，一直进行的斗争就是争取对黑人自身价值