Years after August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” was first produced on Broadway in 1990, Black playwrights have continued to grapple with this enduring question which defines the struggle between Bernice (an indomitable and passionate Danielle Brooks) and her brother Boy Willie (a broken but resilient John David Washington) in Wilson’s epic drama: “Is it possible to build one’s future without establishing one’s existential and cultural relationship with one’s past?” The powerful trope for this ageless conundrum is the intricately carved piano that sits in the parlor of the house Bernice and her eleven-year-old daughter Maretha (Nadia Daniel/Jurnee Swan) share with her Uncle Doaker Charles (a sage like and temperate Samuel L. Jackson) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1936.

How and why the piano ended up in that parlor is complicated and convoluted. Near the end of Act One of “The Piano Lesson,” currently playing at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Doaker shares the history of the piano to Boy Willie and Wining Boy (Michael Potts). “To understand about that piano,” Doaker explains, “you got to go back to slavery time.” To share the rich history of the piano here would require denying the reader the opportunity to experience firsthand the richness of August Wilson’s storytelling. It is enough to know that the piano’s journey involves the worst of systemic racism and the redemptive act of thievery.

Boy Willie has come up from Mississippi to convince Berniece to let him sell the piano so he can “get me some money so I can buy Sutter’s land.” Boy Willie sees that land purchase as his means to achieve agency and extricate himself from pervasive racism and white supremacy. He cares little about the past and just wants to move forward. Bernice does not want to sell the piano because of its rich history and link to her family’s past. For Bernice, her existential and cultural relationship to her past trumps her brother’s struggles for parity and future security.

In a conversation with Doaker, Boy Willie says, “Hey, Doaker . . . Berniece say the colored folks is living at the bottom of life. I tried to tell her if she think that . . . that’s where she gonna be. You think you living at the bottom of life? Is that how you see yourself?” Doaker replies, “I’m just living the best way I know how. I ain’t thinking about no top or no bottom.” Boy Willie counters, “That’s what I tried to tell Berniece. I don’t know where she got that from. That sound like something Avery would say. Avery think cause the white man give him a turkey for Thanksgiving that makes him better than everybody else. That’s gonna raise him out of the bottom of life. I don’t need nobody to give me a turkey. I can get my own turkey. All you have to do is get out my way. I’ll get me two or three turkeys.”

LaTanya Richardson Jackson directs her exceptional cast with powerful sensitivity. The expansive scenic design by Beowulf Boritt, lighting design by Japhy Weideman, costume design by Toni-Leslie James, sound design by Scott Lehrer, and projection design by Jeff Sugg surround the piano and its story with both mystery and romance.

The work of Jeremy O. Harris (“Daddy” and “Slave Play”), John Ridley (“Black No More), Michael R. Jackson (“A Strange Loop”), Marcus Gardley (“The House That Will Not Stand”), Mfoniso Udofia (“Sojourners” and “Her Portmanteau” and “runboyrun” and “In Old Age”), Lorraine Hansberry (“ A Raisin in the Sun”) and Suzan-Lori Parks (“The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World AKA The Negro Book of the Dead”) and other Black playwrights counterpoint the ontological tension between Bernice and Boy Willie.

Specifically, the characters in Ms. Parks’s play subtitled “AKA The Negro Book of the Dead” powerfully reframe the funerary of Black Man With Watermelon (played with a transformative melancholy by Daniel J. Watts) and establishe the importance of both telling and preserving the history of this allegorical black man who refuses to die just once and be forgotten.

Yes and Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread (played with the gentle spirit of aggression by Nike Kadri) utters the mandate repeatedly, “You should write it down because if you dont write it down then they will come along and tell the future that we did not exist. You should write it down and you should hide it under a rock. You should write down the past and you should write down the present and in what in the future you should write it down.”

Black Man With Watermelon and Black Woman With Fried Drumstick admonish one another with, “Miss me” and Re-member me.” Black Woman tearfully entreats her husband to “Re-member me. Call on me sometime. Call on me sometime. Hear? Hear?” Let the re-membering of history begin here and now.”

And playwright Donja R. Love writes in his “Fireflies,” “The existence of Queer people of color, particularly of African descent, has repeatedly been washed over, or forgotten altogether.” Olivia is not about to be forgotten: neither will the bombs that killed people of color be forgotten.”

All these themes coexist in the body of one carved piano with an unforgettable past and in the characters who are willing to learn its ever-abiding lessons.