August Wilson’s
The Piano Lesson

Wilson authored Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Running, Jitney, King Hedley II, and Radio Golf. These works explore the heritage and experience of African-Americans, decade by decade, over the course of the twentieth century. His plays have been professional stage debut in his one-man show, How I Learned What I Learned. Mr. Wilson’s works garnered many awards including Pulitzer Prizes for Fences (1987); and for The Piano Lesson (1990); a Tony Award for Fences; Great Britain’s Olivier Award for Jitney; as well as eight New York Drama Critics Awards for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars, Jitney, and Radio Golf. Additionally, the cast recording of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom received a 1985 Grammy Award, and Mr. Wilson received a 1995 Emmy Award nomination for his screenplay adaptation of The Piano Lesson. Mr. Wilson’s early works include the one-acts The Janitor, Recycle, The Coldest Day of the Year, Malcolm X, The Homecoming, and the musical satire Black Bard and the Sacred Hills. Mr. Wilson Received many fellowships and awards, including Rockefeller and Guggenheim Fellowships in Playwriting, the Whiting Writers Award, the 2003 Heinz Award, was awarded a 1999 National Humanities Medal by the President of the United States, and received numerous honorary degrees from colleges and universities, as well as the only high school diploma ever issued by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. He was an alumnus of New Dramatists, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a 1995 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and on October 16, 2005, Broadway renamed the theater located at 245 West 52nd Street – The August Wilson Theatre. Additionally, Mr. Wilson was posthumously inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2007. Mr. Wilson was born and raised in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lived in Seattle, Washington at the time of death. He is immediately survived by his two daughters, Sakina Ansari and Azula Carmen Wilson, and his wife, costume designer Constanza Romero.

Edwards is excited to be back at Shakespeare & Company. He is the Artistic Director of Actors’ Shakespeare Project (ASP) in Boston. Recent directing credits include: How I Learned What I Learned at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival; ART at Shakespeare & Company; Let the Right One In, The Bomb-itty of Errors, Pride & Prejudice, Equivocation, Much Ado About Nothing at ASP in Boston; How to Break at the National Theatre of Norway; Hamlet at Gloucester Stage in MA; Fences, A Raisin in the Sun, Othello at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company; Venus in Fur, Water by the Spoonful, As You Like It at Nevada Conservatory Theatre in Las Vegas; Othello, The Three Musketeers, Romeo and Juliet at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in NY. Chris has performed in London’s West End, Off-Broadway, in Regional Theatres and Internationally. He is a Senior Lecturer at the BU School of Theatre and has been a distinguished artist and consultant with The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, and a consultant with the Madison Park Development Corporation in Boston. He lives in Jamaica Plain with his wife and daughter, Jennifer and Anya.