"the piano lesson"

August Wilson’s play is the fourth play in Wilson's The Pittsburgh Cycle. Those ten plays, each set in a different decade, aim to illustrate the Black experience in the 20th century America. Hirschfeld, who had drawn all three Wilson play on Broadway at this point, saw Wilson as “part of a new Broadway during this era, depicting Americans and parts of American history that didn’t quite make it to the boards during the Cole Porter highball years.” The Pulitzer Prize winning drama tells the story of a brother and sister in 1936 Pittsburgh who are at odds over selling the family heirloom, a piano with carvings of the family’s suffering.