Newsday from New York, New York • 111

ITHEATERIREVIEW August Wilsons Haunting Piano Lesson MOVIES THE PIANO LESSON. Tragi-comedy by August Wilson, directed by Lloyd Richards. With Charles S. Dutton, S. Epatha Merkerson, Carl Gordon, Rocky Carrol, Lou Myers, Tommy Hoflis, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Apryf R.

Foster. Set by E. David Cosier costumes by Constanza Romero, lights by Christopher Akertind, music by Dwight D. Andrews. Walter Kerr Theater, 48th Street west of Broadway, Manhattan.

By Linda Winer OY WILLIE is a great big baby of a man, an exuberant and angry force that bounces off the walls like a runaway balloon. You can understand why his family is tom over whether to embrace him, nail down the furniture or throw him out of the house. You understand all that and more about him, because August Wilson made him up. Wilson, whose The Piano Lesson won him his second Pulitzer Prize last week, dreams up these marvelously rich and complicated people, plops them into select decades of 20th-Century black American history and Bets them loose to tell unforgettable stories of their people. Sometimes the stories add up to something other than a neatly structured play as is the case here but the vision is very special.

Wilson, who has given Broadway four rruyor works in the last six years, is a poet, a phenomenon and a treasure. The latest in the cycle opened at the refurbished and renamed Walter Kerr Theater last night with the Pulitzer already in its pocket and a ghost in the attic. The play is set in 1936 Pittsburgh, where Boy Willie (the magnificent Charles S. Dutton) has come to reclaim his legacy a piano for which his greatgrandmother and grandfather had been sold. His great-grandfather had carved the faces of the family on that piano and his own father had died trying to steal it from the descendants of the Sutter family that had owned them.

Trouble is, Sutter's ghost just flew in the upstairs window and sister Bemiece wont sell. Piano Lesson is a lovely tragi-comedy, haunting as well as haunted, and staged to aching perfection by Wilsons constant S. Epatha Merkerson and Chari as S. Dutton in Piano Lasaon Even aster-egg hunts couldn't deter kids from getting out to see "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The terrapin teens shelled the competition for a third weekend and set a record for the biggest North American box-office take by an independently produced movie.

(Previous record: Vestron's 1987 Dirty Dancing, at $63 million.) Here are the top movie ticket sales for Friday through Sunday, with weekend gross, theater screens, total gross and weeks in release. 1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, New Line, $14.1 miHion. 2,377 screens, $72.9 million, three weeks. 2.

Pretty Woman, Disney. $10.1 million. 1,707 screens. $59.3 million, four weeks. 3.

The Hunt for Red October, Paramount $4.26 million, 1,702 screens, $89.8 million, seven weeks. 4. Ernest Goes to Jan, Disney. $4.25 million. 1,956 screens, $12.6 million, two weeks.

5. The First Power, Orion, $3.8 milScn, 1,338 screens, $11.7 miHion, two weeks. 6. Crazy Poo pie, Paramount $3.4 million, 1.389 screens. $4.2 million, one week.

7. 1 Lave Ton to Death, Tri-Star. $2.7 million. 1,095 screens. $8 million, two week.

8. Driving Miss Daisy, Warner $2.2 million, 1.387 screens, $90.4 million, 18 weeks. 9. Cry-Baby, Universal. $1.6 million, 1.236 screens, $5.5 million, two weeks.

10. The Gods Must Bo Crazy II, Weintraub, $1.2 million, 321 screens. $1.2 million, one week. collaborator, Lloyd Richards. Unfortunately, though hardly a timid play, it is a lesser and more conventional one than Wilsons deepest work, Joe Turners Come and Gone.

Where Joe Turner was about mystery and spirits, this one is about a ghost literally complete with an exorcism device, a deus ex machina that whips up a theatrical finale without answering the questions Wilson has so eloquently been asking. The central question is a provocative one. What is a legacy? Is it best used as a symbol or as the means for material advancement? Bey Willie may seem irresponsible at first, but he is no fool, and he makes a good case for the piano as the only thing his Rough Waters for Kalikows New Dock INSIDE Ann Landers 10 Books 4 Bridge 10 Calendar 27 Comics 14 Crossword 15 Dear Ably 12 Entertainment 5 Horoscope 14 Kidsdqy 17 Movie times 22 Radio 25 Television 7, 25-27 TS A classic battle of the needs of the rich vs. the needs of the environment. In one corner is New York Post publisher Peter Kalikow.

He has just finished a new mansion on very private Star Island, just off Montauk, and wants to build a 420-foot-long dock to moor his fleet of boats, reports the East Hampton Star. Kalikow needs docks space for his 137-foot yacht, which is under construction. The main problem is that the dock, which would cut through 45 acres of underwater land that Kalikow owns, could possibly damage the surrounding marine environment. The only conceivable residential use for underwater land is a private dock, said Kalikows lawyer, George Biondo, at an East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals. Board members voiced concern over chemical discharges from the boats into Lake Montauk and disruption of nearby scallop beds.

Kalikows private fleet already includes a 47-foot yacht, a 48-foot sailboat and a high-powered speedboat. The case will be decided next month, and if Kalikow doesnt get his dock, he may have to take his boats and play somewhere else. contents of his column to stock traders, writes about his days in Allenwood in A Club Fed Vacation. Some poignant stuff. Winans tells about when fellow inmate Andy Capasso picked up a copy of the Daily News, headlining his girlfriend Bess Myeraons arrest for shoplifting cosmetics at a store near the prison.

Capasso stared at the headline for a moment, bug-eyed, his forehead forming a deeply furrowed accordion of despair, the color draining from his face. He came out of the stupor, glanced around furtively to see if anyone had caught wind yet of this personal disaster. Then he wheeled without a word and marched up the concrete path to his dormitory. He stayed in bed all weekend. Remember Keith Artist Keith Haring will be remembered in a two-hour memorial service at 2 p.m.

May 4 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Some 400 invitations were sent out by the Haring Foundation, but the service is open to the public. There will be the whole gamut of European collectors, close friends, museum people and people who just happen to be celebrities, said Julia Gruen, the foundations executive director. Speakers will include actor Dennis Hopper, actress Anne Magnuson, art critic Jeffrey Deitch, art dealer Tony Shafrazi, former Parks Commissioner Henry Stem and artist Kenny Scharf There will be a surprise female singer, but the foundation doesnt want to name her for fear of overcrowding and curiosity-seekers.

Haring died of AIDS on Feb. 16 at 31. Billys Video et I i tf I h.lb rj i( h-J 1 JJ. if i The wind-swept beach of Amagansett was. the setting last-r 2PART II MY NEWSDAY, TUESDAY.

APRIL 17. 1990 PART III DISCOVERY Researchers say about 23 million Americans suffer a mjor loss of the sense of smell. On Edge Theres a terrific story by former Wall Street Journal writer R. Foster Winans in the first issue of The Edge magazine, the latest in a string of hip new publications. Winans, who served time in connection with leaking the PuH out after paga.