The fourth play (and second Pulitzer Prize winner) in Wilson's cycle on twentieth-century black American experience is set in Pittsburgh in the 1930s. Boy Willie Charles is up from Mississippi to sell a truckload of watermelons to earn part of the price of a just-dead white man's farm. He thinks he'll get the rest by selling the family piano, into the wood of which is carved a good deal of the Charleses' history. His sister Berniece refuses to part with it. The struggle over the piano crystalizes the conflict between the siblings' (and many other twentieth-century blacks') choices in life--his to repudiate the past and fight for the future on home ground, hers to cling to her heritage but find a new life in a new place. The other dramatis personae in Wilson's characteristically large cast each provides another slant on the central dialog, not through ideological rhetoric but by means of his or her particular experiences reported in the symphonically rich language that is Wilson's hallmark. ~--Ray Olson