Ifeka is a Ph.D specializing in American and British literature. In this essay she argues that Wilson's plays are an eloquent form of social protest and public education.

August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play (his second) The Piano Lesson demonstrates that commercially successful theater can be an eloquent vehicle for social protest and public education. Wilson's early involvement in the Black Power movement and in black community theater, and his ambitious plan to write a cycle of plays about African-American life in the twentieth century, are proof of his desire to "alter the relationship between blacks and society through the arts." His representation of black suffering, coupled with his celebration of black resistance and endurance, offers his audience a new representation of African-American history.

In the late-1960s, artists involved in counterculture movements resurrected the theater as a forum for political protest and a vehicle for social...