“The Piano Lesson” has always been a family affair. The story it tells is of the legacy of pain and pride in generations of one Black family. But August Wilson’s 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winning play has been turned into a film, which is a family affair in a second sense – an effort by the Washington family: The film, which began streaming this weekend on Netflix, is directed and co-written by Malcolm Washington, produced by his father Denzel and his sister Katia, co-starring his brother John David, and even featuring cameos by his twin sister Olivia and his mother Pauletta.
As I was watching the film, I was wondering what its effect would be on a group of viewers who (at the risk of overextending the theme) can be considered a family of a different sort: theatergoers. This led me to a more general question, which might have some application to some other new movies. In appreciating a film adaptation of a beloved/powerful work of theater, can it be a liability to have seen and read and loved the play?
A revival of “The Piano Lesson” ran on Broadway just two years ago, a production I found brilliantly acted and deeply haunting. It had a starry cast, including Samuel Jackson, which I suppose should have clued me into the possibility that a film would be forthcoming.
Indeed, four of the six principal cast members from that production (including Jackson) are reprising their roles in the film, each to great effect. But it is nothing close to a reproduction on film of the production on stage. There’s not just a different director (The play’s director was LaTanya Richardson Jackson.) Malcolm Washington and Virgil Williams (who wrote “Mudbound”) share writer credit with August Wilson.
Much of Wilson’s dialogue remains in the film, and the story is much the same. As in the play, on the surface, “The Piano Lesson” is about a fight between a brother and a sister over a piano. The play is set in 1936 in the Pittsburgh home of Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), a young widow who has recently moved from Mississippi with her daughter to live with her Uncle Doaker (Samuel Jackson.) Boy Willie (John David Washington) arrives at his sister’s house, having traveled from his hometown in Mississippi with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) with a truckful of watermelons to sell. His main aim is to retrieve the family piano. He wants to sell the piano in order to help him afford to buy a farm back home. But Berniece refuses to sell it. It represents to her the legacy of their family, a history steeped in blood and death — how that piano was bought by the slave owner Robert Sutter for his wife Miss Ophelia, how in order to afford the piano Sutter sold two of Miss Ophelia’s slaves; how those slaves were Berniece and Boy Willie’s father and grandmother; how another enslaved family member of Berniece and Boy Willie’s, a woodworker, carved the faces of the family into the wood of the piano. Their father eventually stole the piano, and was killed as a result. The farm that Boy Willie wants to buy with the money from the sale of the piano was owned by the Sutter family; the latest of whom, probably his father’s killer, has just died in an accident.
On stage, this grim story is parceled out mostly in monologues by the various characters. The film, by contrast, visualizes these events, presented with cinematic pyrotechnics — sometimes literally: It begins with a fireworks display on the Fourth of July 1911, the day that Boy Willie’s father stole the piano from Sutter; we see a young Boy Willie watching the display.
The flashbacks come fast and furious. It seems that nearly everything any character says is accompanied by some kind of visualization. We hear a character say Sutter fell down a well; we get a few seconds of Sutter falling down a well. Little is left to our imagination. We see the ghost of Sutter in Berniece’s home, albeit in a blur. We’re no longer able to speculate this supernatural occurrence away – as a group hallucination, say, or as just a metaphor. But even seeing an actor (Jay Peterson) playing Sutter alive makes seem less horrible than just hearing him described. There are scenes inserted (including a final one) that make more explicit what Wilson kept ambiguous.
It’s hard to know whether a viewer who has no experience with August Wilson’s play will appreciate this film more than I did. The cinematography is at times stunning. When we are allowed an uninterrupted scene of Wilson’s dialogue, the close-ups enhance our involvement, especially in the devastating expressions of anger and despair by Danielle Deadwyler’s Berniece (giving a performance that’s as much a standout as Danielle Brooks’ Berniece on Broadway.)
But the director seems so intent on communicating that “this is not a play” that I wonder whether August Wilson’s language will make it through to those who don’t already know it?
“The Piano Lesson” is one of the ten plays in Wilson’s American Century Cycle, about the Black experience in America; each set in a different decade of the twentieth century. It is a landmark theatrical achievement. Each deserves a film – and each will be getting one, as part of a production deal between Denzel Washington and Netflix to film all ten. Let’s hope the remaining seven will be as effective as the first two, “Fences” (in 2016) and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2020)
