The Piano Lesson

Doaker is 47 years old, and the play is set in his living space, the downstairs of the house that he shares with his niece Berniece and her daughter Maretha. He had a wife named Coreen, but she left him and went to New York. Like the other men in the play, Doaker once served a sentence at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi state prison. For the last 27 years, Doaker has worked for the railroad, first as a laborer building the tracks and now as a cook. However, as August Wilson describes, he has “for all intents and purposes retired from the world” (7). As such, Doaker isn’t interested in relationships with women (although he’s reportedly very popular with the women in Mississippi) or having more for himself. He wishes that people would stop traveling so much, as he has seen from his perspective working on the railroad that most people who get on the train are disappointed when they arrive at their destination.

Doaker takes a neutral position in the play’s central conflict over selling the piano. Although he admits that he would rather Berniece get rid of it, he won’t allow Boy Willie to take it without her permission, taking a stand only for the sake of fairness between the siblings.