‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: The Washington Family Comes Together Around August Wilson’s Legacy-Themed Masterwork
In August Wilson’s play “The Piano Lesson” — revived on Broadway in 2022, adapted with care and much the same cast for the screen by Malcolm Washington — Berniece hasn’t played the piano since her mother died. It just sits in her living room, reminding her of everything her parents, and their parents before them, endured so that subsequent generations could be free. In literary terms, the piano is a powerful and none-too-subtle symbol, the thing that represents her family’s achievement and sacrifice. Carved into the precious heirloom’s polished wood surface are the faces of her ancestors.
Berniece has a brother called Boy Willie, who comes bursting into her house at the top of the play with a plan. Boy Willie believes he can get enough money selling that piano (plus a truck full of watermelons he has parked outside) to buy a piece of the land his family once worked as slaves. He reckons the piano is as much his as Berniece’s, and this is what their parents would have wanted. But the past is present in “The Piano Lesson,” which is set in 1936, but haunted by history. Upstairs lurks a ghost of the white man whose family “owned” theirs, and from whom their father stole back the all-important piano.
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Starring Danielle Deadwyler and John David Washington as the two siblings, “The Piano Lesson” poses one hell of a dilemma: One sibling wants to move forward; the other refuses to let go of what came before. While most of the cast is the same that appeared on Broadway, the movie is undeniably Deadwyler’s show. With “The Piano Lesson,” Wilson wrote one of the great female roles of his career, and in Deadwyler, we get a leading lady who smolders even when silent, finding layers even the author couldn’t have anticipated — which helps, since there’s a stage-stilted sound to much of the dialogue.
When Boy Willie and his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) pop by, looking like they’ve figured it all out, Berniece is upstairs in bed. Their uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson, who gives one of his best, and least bombastic, screen performances) sizes them up and laughs, “Berniece ain’t gonna sell that piano.” Every time she looks at the instrument, Berniece sees the tears her mother shed over it. Her father died for the piano, pursued by a white mob and burned alive after he and two accomplices “recovered” it three decades earlier. The heist, if you want to call it that, opens the film, illuminated by the light of red, white and blue fireworks. That choice renders the movie instantly cinematic, while traumatic flashbacks later in the film serve to open up Wilson’s one-room play.
Seeing as how “The Piano Lesson” deals with themes of family legacy, it’s fitting that another family came together to make it. As you may have guessed, Malcolm Washington — making his feature directing debut — is the son of acting legend Denzel Washington, who found one of his great roles starring in another Wilson adaptation, “Fences.” John David Washington, who played Boy Willie in the Broadway version as well, is seven years older than his brother Malcolm, whose sister Katia joins Denzel among the film’s producers.
One could speculate about how the film’s themes resonate with the Washingtons, though “The Piano Lesson” possesses a universality unique among Wilson’s 10 Pittsburgh-set plays — the “Century Cycle,” in which the writer captured the full range of African American success and struggle, with one play per decade. While all 10 are performed regularly on stages around America, Pulitzer-winning “The Piano Lesson” encompasses the greatest span of time, drawing the spirits of previous generations into the picture — not just Sutter’s ghost, lurking upstairs, but the family members whose faces appear on the heirloom.
Though set in the ’30s, it speaks to decades of progress, contrasting those who stayed behind in Mississippi and other Southern states (represented here by the Boy Willie character) with those who participated in the Great Migration to the North, as Berniece and her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith) did. It critiques a racist system of incarceration, which Boy Willie experienced, and the even darker legacy of vigilante justice, which claimed not just their father, but also Berniece’s husband, Crawley (whose backstory is less clearly explained).
More significant still, “The Piano Lesson” personifies the white men who owned or otherwise oppressed their family in the form of Sutter, who haunts them still. We’re told the old bigot fell down a well, but Berniece suspects that her brother must have pushed him. Boy Willie insists it was the “Ghosts of the Yellow Dog,” introducing yet another supernatural dimension to the plot. Malcolm Washington gives us Sutter’s ghost, but leaves any other avenging forces to our imagination. Instead, he sticks mostly to the living room, where Doaker and old friend Wining Boy (a terrific Michael Potts) trade stories. The two also sing, bringing fresh life into a film so preoccupied with the past.
In the end, “The Piano Lesson” feels talkier than necessary, considering all the visual elements Wilson gave Washington to work with: There’s the ghost upstairs, but also the spirits watching over the family via the piano. The film comes alive as Lymon buys a new silk suit, following the young men out on the town to the Hill District’s legendary Crawford Grill. Boy Willie has his ideas for the future, but Berniece has options too, as embodied by the ambitious preacher (Corey Hawkins) who reluctantly agrees to bless her house. It will take more than that to rid the ghost. If Sutter represents the psychological trauma that still possesses their family, then ancestral music is the force that can set them free.
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