By Robert Israel

Suffice it to say that this film version of The Piano Lesson does playwright August Wilson proud. 

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. Directed by Malcolm Washington. Screenplay by Virgil Williams and Malcolm Washington. Now streaming on Netflix.

Flashback:

Anne’s Restaurant in Boston was nothing fancy; playwright August Wilson liked it that way. It boasted “Self-Service Charcoal Broiled” in neon. Located across from Symphony Hall, a few doors from the Huntington Theatre Company, that was where I found, on a frigid morning in January, 1988, August Wilson. He was there to revise The Piano Lesson for yet another tryout (the first took place at the O’Neill Center and then at Yale Rep, in Waterford and New Haven, Connecticut, respectively). The play was Broadway-bound. But Wilson told everyone who listened that the script wasn’t ready.

My appointment was prearranged; Wilson had forgotten about it. He was about to tell me to vamoose when I mentioned we had met a few years before at Penumbra, the African-American theater troupe, in St. Paul.ue He paused, considered what I said, and then claimed no memory of meeting me. Then I mentioned a boxing match I had covered as a stringer for a sports magazine in St. Paul; Wilson was seated in my row. His face lit up. “Yeah!” he exclaimed. “That was some kind of slugfest alright! Now, let me finish this and we’ll get to what you came to talk to me about.” I unbuttoned my coat but he grabbed my arm. “Not so fast — Boy Willie’s sitting there.” I did not see anyone in the seat, but I took his word for it. Then he spoke a few lines of dialogue aloud before replying with the voice of Boy Willie. He jotted down a few notes, swallowed a swig of coffee, and we were out the door, with me pulling on my coat mid-stride. Wilson chain smoked cigarettes and talked nonstop during our jaunt down Huntington Ave., then onto Gainsborough Street, rounding the corner at St. Stephen, and then back past Symphony Hall to Anne’s. We shook hands, and he went back to work.

Flash forward:

The Piano Lesson earned Wilson his second Pulitzer Prize. This is the second time it has been made into a film. Now streaming on Netflix, the adaptation was co-produced by Denzel Washington and his daughter Katia. It features the filmmaking talents of his sons Malcolm (director, writer) and John David (who plays the role of Boy Willie and co-wrote the screenplay). According to USA Today, Washington Sr. struck a deal with Wilson’s estate to produce the remaining 10 plays in Wilson’s decade-by-decade cycle into feature films. He’s got seven to go, counting previously filmed versions of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences, which Washington directed and starred in with Viola Davis, who earned an Academy Award.

A scene from The Piano Lesson. Photo: David Lee/Netflix

The play centers on the history, and quarrels over the fate, of a carved spinet piano that has gone largely unused for years. It sits in the parlor of Bernie Charles’s (Danielle Deadwyler) Pittsburgh home, circa 1930s. Boy Willie, her brother, has come to sell the valuable piano so he can afford to buy farm land down South. There are backstories aplenty in this play, and they revolve around slavery, the endurance of racism, and a Black family’s quest for the American dream.

It is a fool’s errand to compare and contrast the stage version to the film. My own preference is to see a live performance where the conflicts, and Wilson’s relaxed yet pointed dialogue, generate a distinctive magnetic force. Suffice it to say that this film version does Wilson proud. It is yet another revision of the original, and I sensed Wilson himself would approve because it draws attention to those backstories as well as the time period; the film pulls us in with its bawdy scenes of music halls and close-ups of erotic tension. Visually, our horizons are widened to include a sharecropper’s field, an old truck hauling watermelon, the crowded streets of hardscrabble Pittsburgh, and throngs of Depression-era Black folk struggling to grasp onto some kind of living. The film moves in and out of the parlor via flashbacks, pivoting seamlessly between the past and the present; the juxtaposition of past and present underlines the haunted plight of the characters — their ambitions, failures, and triumphs.

Samuel L. Jackson plays Doaker Charles in the film, and he provides a link to the various incarnations of the play. He appeared in the original cast at Yale Rep and, much later, in a 2022 reprisal of the show on Broadway that was directed by his wife, LaTanya Jackson. The actor supplies a steadying, quiet strength in the film, a merit shared by the other members of the cast, who perform with intensity and passion.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and enjoyed a brief theatrical run. It pays homage to August Wilson’s powerful vision of Black families, dramatized through the love/hate conflicts between individuals who, each in their own way, is struggling for dignity.

Robert Israel, an Arts Fuse contributor since 2013, can be reached at risrael_97@yahoo.com.