Trai Byers, Ray Fisher, April Matthis and Michael Potts have joined the cast of the highly-anticipated revival of August Wilson’s seminal, Pulitzer Prize®-winning drama The Piano Lesson, the first Broadway revival in more than 30 years since the play’s Main Stem premiere in 1990.

Wilson is known for writing revered plays such as Fences, Jitney and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The production of The Piano Lesson will be directed by Tony Award nominee LaTanya Richardson Jackson, who is making her Broadway directorial debut and will be the first woman to ever direct an August Wilson play on Broadway. 

Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and John David Washington, The Piano Lesson is set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 1936 and revolves around brother and sister who are locked in a war over the fate of a family heirloom: a piano carved with the faces of their ancestors. Only by revisiting history can the siblings endeavor to move forward.

The Piano Lesson, wrote Frank Rich in The New York Times, “has its own spacious poetry, its own sharp angle on a nation’s history, its own metaphorical idea of drama and its own palpable ghosts that roar right through the upstairs window of the household where the action unfolds. 

The play will feature Byers as Avery, Fisher as Lymon, Matthis as Grace, and Potts as Wining Boy, Jackson as Doaker Charles, Brooks as Berniece, and Washington as Boy Willie.

Produced by Brian Anthony Moreland, Sonia Friedman and Tom Kirdahy, The Piano Lesson will begin performances on September 19 at the St. James Theatre.