Playwright August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” boils down to this: A sister and brother, haunted by the violent disruption of their Mississippi childhood, reunite in 1936 in Pittsburgh.
A tense reunion, where the fate of the family legacy hangs in the balance. The piano of the title either remains in the living room, where sister Berniece’s daughter practices her scales even though her mother never touches the keys herself, or he is sold to help pay for his brother Boy Willie’s farmland back home. The faces of the family’s ancestors, sculpted by their grandfather, give the piano a metaphysical weight beyond anything measured by a hardware store scale.
Wilson’s 1990 drama, the second of his Pulitzer Prize winners (“Fences” came first), is now a movie. It’s also a family affair. Malcolm Washington makes his directorial debut with “The Piano Lesson.” His brother John David Washington (“Black KkKlansman,” “Tenet”) takes the male lead as Boy Willie. They are two of four children of Pauletta and Denzel Washington. The latter – in addition to everything you know him for as a movie star – is a determined and powerful champion of August Wilson, who has expressed a more than vain interest in supporting film versions of roughly everything the poet-turned-playwright ever wrote.
To that end: Denzel Washington directed and starred in the 2016 film version of “Fences” with Viola Davis, the two having headlined the play’s 2010 Broadway revival. “The Piano Lesson” traveled a similar path. Resurrected Broadway in 2022 starring John David Washington in his professional stage debut, it starred headlining Samuel L. Jackson as Doaker, uncle of Boy Willie and Berniece. LaTanya Richardson Jackson, married to Samuel L. Jackson for 44 years now, directed this revival, and Jackson returns as Doaker for the film version.
“The connectivity of it all is pretty amazing,” John David told me the other day. “The piano lesson,” he says, “is very personal for Sam. For all of us, really. And what Mr. Wilson means to my father means there’s something at stake here. (Denzel Washington co-produced the film; John David’s sister, Katia Washington, served as executive producer.)
Hours before “The Piano Lesson” opened at the Chicago International Film Festival on October 16, I sat down with John David Washington, joined by Malcolm Washington. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: Let’s talk about the Broadway production of “The Piano Lesson” that preceded the film. It wasn’t just your Broadway debut, but your professional stage debut, right?
John David Washington: That’s right. This is the first time I was paid to perform on stage. I had done a few things before. I performed the play “Dutchman” by Amiri Baraka at HB Studio with Lisa Hickman. And at Pace University (also in New York), I remember shooting scenes from “The Taming of the Shrew” not for theater students but for literature students. It was more distressing than anything else.
Q: So what was it like attending some 120 performances of “The Piano Lesson”?
JDW: Being able to do a show over and over again – honestly, that was the fun. A major advantage. Discovery, every evening, sometimes twice a day. I loved the repetition; I am an athlete. (After playing football for Morehouse College, Washington signed with the St. Louis Rams, then joined the Sacramento Mountain Lions of the United Football League as a running back.) Every time I see the same defense again and again, I end up going. to diagnose it and find my path of attack. That’s what playing Boy Willie in “The Piano Lesson” felt like.
Q: In every Wilson play, each tells stories within stories, in this case, stories about an entire family legacy, from slavery to Reconstruction to the present day in 1936. In visual terms, much of of this material feels like flashbacks waiting to happen on a screen. . Malcolm, you clearly felt the same way?
Malcolm Washington: As you point out, “The Piano Lesson” is a story about telling and reclaiming your own history. Everything is in the text, and we wanted to play a little with the structure, push the boundaries. We pushed the (supernatural) genre elements more, when we thought it made sense. But with more realistic flashbacks, the key element was the story behind the piano. This is the backbone of the piece. It tells you the history of the family and the inciting incident that was so important to the Charles family. One thing we added: we put Boy Willie in the prologue. That’s part of what ripples through the rest of the film, this story of how Boy Willie and Berniece lost their father. And in the context of 1936 (setting), it tells you why this man won’t stop until he gets this piano.
This is a departure from the approach taken by the two other recent adaptations of Mr. Wilson’s plays, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” directed by George C. Wolfe and “Fences” directed by my father. (An abbreviated adaptation of “The Piano Lesson” was filmed for television in 1995, starring Charles S. Dutton and Alfre Woodard, directed by Lloyd Richards, Wilson’s longtime mentor, who eventually separated.) With Mr. Wolfe, you see the one of the most experienced theater directors of all. working time, and this nourishes the material. With my father and “Fences”, we see his eye as a filmmaker and also as an actor. With me, I was raised in a different type of cinema. My voice is different.
Q: What was it like working in those family situations on set? You are brothers; Jackson and Richardson Jackson are married, and Jackson’s early life in “The Piano Lesson” was complicated.
JDW: That’s right, it’s a very complicated situation there. Mr. Jackson has been open about his relationship with the play as it relates to his career and life. (At the time, struggling with cocaine and alcohol addictions, the actor left the role of Boy Willie at the play’s Broadway premiere in 1990, although Jackson understudied his replacement , Charles S. Dutton.) So it’s very personal for him. Sam told me stories about August rewriting the final monologue of Boy Willie every other night at Yale, which meant he was constantly memorizing new pages. I can’t imagine what that was like.
Q: Malcolm, can you give us an example of finding the visual language that you wanted, in some cases, while you were on set, filming?
MW: We had 35 days to shoot, in Atlanta (for the interior scenes) and in different parts of Georgia (for the exteriors). This meant a high number of pages that we had to go through each day, five, six, sometimes seven pages a day. About halfway through the fight we were doing the second big fight between Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) and Boy Willie. At this point, they’re almost like fighters, haymakers, and it was a day with a lot of pressure on everyone to get it right.
But somehow that day, everyone kind of threw off the pressure. They’re doing the scene, and my cinematographer (or cinematographer, cinematographer Mike Gioulakis) and I looked at each other. We had already made the conscious decision not to film handheld; we wanted a more formal visual language. But that day we said, “Let’s do it today.” Today, let’s play. And we found something. Wilson’s language is so exalted, he writes in these wonderful poems, almost. And when we tried that scene with a handheld camera, it grounded it in a way we didn’t expect. It was like, “Let’s make a movie about Cassavetes today.” »
Q: Every director/actor relationship changes from film to film and from colleague to colleague. John David, can you give us a sense of how Malcolm worked with you here?
JDW: That’s not a sexy answer, but that’s a lot of what he didn’t say. He would come back and stand next to me after a take, and his presence sort of signaled: I got you. I agree. Sometimes it was a hug after a long day of filming. Sometimes it was just a “calm down” because I was a little nervous the first day, I remember. This was very helpful.
I have had directors who had a plot say, and this can block the progress of the process. But Malcolm understands what an actor goes through and his momentum. He’ll watch and listen, then he might set up a new camera angle or try some subtle changes for the next take. And I really enjoyed that.
When I did that on Broadway, every time I felt like I was pushing something or trying to really nail a certain moment, I wasn’t very happy with the outcome. With August Wilson, it’s only in the moments when you let yourself go and the words carry everything you do – that you feel good.
“The Piano Lesson” will premiere in limited release in theaters on November 8 and streaming on Netflix on November 22.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
