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| Director Malcolm Washington |
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| Malcolm with Danielle Deadwyler and brother John David |
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| The director with his father, Denzel Washington |
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| August Wilson with Lloyd Richards |
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| playwright August Wilson |
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| painter Romare Bearden |
THE PIANO LESSON A USA (125 mi) 2024 d: Malcolm Washington
The real issue is the piano, the legacy. How are you going to use it? —August Wilson, from an essay by Hilary DeVries, January 1987, August Wilson Criticism: A Song in Search of Itself
If there’s any August Wilson play to start with, this would be it, as it has everything, from the rich, deeply humanizing dialogue, the references to the slavery past, distinct spirituality that borders on the supernatural, a love of music and the shared bond it accentuates, yet also its universal connection to an all-embracing humanity. An extension of what Denzel Washington started with Fences (2016), the first of his ambitious plans to bring all ten of August Wilson’s Century Cycle plays to the screen, one written for each decade of the 20th century, which was followed by Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020), where he will be the executive producer for all of them. Fences was originally a 1983 play, the first of two Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the author, while the other is The Piano Lesson in 1990, which was turned into a made-for-TV movie in 1995 directed by Lloyd Richards, the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, where the period of the 1980’s and ’90’s was considered a renaissance of African American cultural production, as many black writers took their place among the most important writers in American history. Keeping things in the family, dedicated “for mama,” the director’s mother, Pauletta, who plays Mama Ola, the deceased mother of the two siblings in the film, while twin sister Olivia plays that same character at a younger age, while the director and lead actor are Denzel Washington’s two sons, and daughter Katia is an executive producer, yet this is no nepotism at work, as they earn the audience’s respect and admiration, as this rivals any theatrical stage performance, and may actually exceed all expectations, as it’s uniquely cinematic, specifically adapted by Malcolm Washington and Virgil Williams from the 2022 Broadway revival of the play, with music by Alexandre Desplat and cinematography by Mike Gioulakis, becoming a transforming work that may leave viewers drained and emotionally shattered by the intensity of the human experience. August Wilson never formally studied theater, but his work is distinctive for his exquisite use of language, connecting it in such complex ways to the black experiences and its deeply unsettling history, where there are demons that plague his characters, some real and some imagined, yet the beauty of his plays is the poetry of the language, filled with detailed characterizations and gentle humor, where it’s hard not to appreciate the complexities, subtleties, contradictions, conflicts, and depth of emotion he elicits from his characters. Inspired by a 1984 lithograph The Piano Lesson (Homage to Mary Lou) by Romare Bearden, a work dedicated to Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981), a jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, while Bearden was himself inspired by two Matisse paintings, The Piano Lesson, 1916 by Henri Matisse and Barnes Collection Online — Henri Matisse: The Music Lesson. All of this fits into the artistry of August Wilson, a unique chronicler of black history which is integrated into all his works, recognized as one of the great explorers of the human condition, bringing to life unique struggles that are critical components of American history, creating a deeply affecting humanistic work. Right from the outset, it’s important to understand that blacks view history differently, as the principles fought for in the Civil War, like the emancipation from slavery, and the unfulfilled promise of the nation to live up to those human rights ideals of freedom and equality, simply hold a different meaning to the excluded than those who are empowered.
What was surprising in this particular theatrical screening was the use of open captions in an English-speaking American film, a rare and perhaps unprecedented occasion, something normally associated with the works of British film directors like Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, or Danny Boyle, but this is a Netflix-produced film, a distributor that typically allows subtitles as an option, but not only are the words infused directly onto the screen, but the captions also clearly identify the multiple choices of music, which are a staple in August Wilson plays. This film not only places an emphasis on word pronunciation, accentuating various syllables in the stream of words that flood the screen, but also the provocative musical selections, where a Mississippi Parchman Farm prison chant “Oh Berta” is one of the most dramatic focal points of the film. An eruptive call and response incantation is sung in unison by the men in the family, conjuring up memories of the past with this emotionally powerful, deeply personalized, percussive hymn, as all the male characters have spent time in the penitentiary, yet none have committed any real crimes to speak of deserving of incarceration, where blackness is their real crime in the American South, subject to Jim Crow laws, forced labor, Klan violence, civil rights violations, and mass incarceration, where the men’s personal grief is transferred to a traumatic history they all share. A replication of an antebellum plantation, the convict labor camp was designed to not only control and profit from black labor, but also to restrict freedom, which is clearly an extension of slavery times and a metaphor for modern-day bondage, where the relationship between prison and slavery is made explicit. Like all of Wilson’s works, the ensemble cast is the driving force of the production, and the superlative cast does not disappoint, where this is a master class of the American theater brought to the screen, yet there are no signs of its stagey roots, exuding a force all of its own, finding its own identity with a fresh perspective that literally lives and breathes on the screen. This is a film that deals with the Great Migration (The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration), as blacks fled the Jim Crow American South in droves, a region where 90% of American blacks resided up until 1910, making up the majority of the population in three Southern states, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. By the end of the migration, however, with an estimated 6 million blacks leaving their homes, that number was reduced to less than 50%, as families sought work in other parts of the country, establishing urban communities in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Pittsburgh, including the Hill District where Wilson grew up. In 1936, when this film is set, unemployment was at 17% nationwide, which translated to a much higher percentage of 50 to 75% in black communities, so when blacks moved and settled in northern industrial areas, they still struggled with discrimination and poverty, as they were forced to live in overcrowded, segregated neighborhoods, disconnected from their past, and filled with hopelessness as a consequence of years of unfulfilled hopes and ambitions. Wilson himself called this his best play, a meditation on trauma, with Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison penning the forward to the boxed set edition of the play, the only one dedicated to all of Wilson’s siblings, and the only one to receive a movie version in Wilson’s lifetime.
The film opens with an introductory prelude sequence on Independence Day in Mississippi in 1911 when a group of black men are seen stealing a piano from the house of Sutter, a notorious white slave owner that still owns the land, who exacts his revenge by leading a mob that burns down the homes of the alleged offenders, causing them to flee to the north, picking up in Pittsburgh twenty-five years later as two men, Boy Willie (John David Washington) and Lyman (Ray Fisher), drive a broken-down truck filled with watermelons into town, arriving in the middle of the night to the home of Boy Willie’s sister Berniece (a transcendent Danielle Deadwyler), who is the real star of the show, paralleling Troy in the earlier Fences, as it’s her fiery character that develops and evolves, bringing nuance and care to every layer, and their uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson, who played Boy Willie in the 1987 theatrical premiere at the Yale Repertory Theatre). Needless to say, they are surprised by the unexpected visit, where Doaker is welcoming, but Berniece seems to be holding a grudge against her brother. At the center of their dispute is the family piano sitting in the salon, an antique, 135-year-old piano that their great-grandfather carved in defiance of the white owner, which is distinctive by its unique carvings that reflect several generations of the family history and has now been inherited by the siblings. Boy Willie is eager to sell the piano to buy land in Mississippi where his family was formerly enslaved, viewing it as his ticket to economic freedom, wanting to be free of the past, while Berniece stubbornly resists all offers to sell the piano, acting as the guardian of the family’s legacy, which she views as a mythical symbol of their heritage, a repository of her family’s pain and anguish that she refuses to let go, still imprisoned by the past, believing it is a family memorial containing the dead spirits of their ancestors, something that holds meaning to their family alone and no one else, an heirloom that is quite simply priceless, claiming “Money can’t buy what that piano cost. You can’t sell your soul for money.” The Parchman prison chant serves as a prelude for Doaker’s family history lesson, as that history and its connection to early family members is revealed in a lengthy soliloquy by Doaker, who inherits the role of African griots, oral historians charged with narrating family chronicles in one of the more dramatically inspiring sequences, as that oral history tells its own story about black life in America, a deeply unsettling experience that provides the foundational structure of the film. No one provides the riveting eloquence of a story like Samuel L. Jackson, who is in a league of his own with a voice that is completely familiar to viewers, yet is still stunning in its execution, describing the piano as a work of art that conjures up the ghosts of the past, adding a supernatural component to an otherwise realist aesthetic. The idea of vanquishing the past is illusory, but this communal experience bears witness to the family’s pain, where Wilson’s Century Cycle provides ample evidence of a century’s worth of collective grief. As a nation, we are still haunted by a racial history that casts a long shadow over the current state of American life. Washington, Fisher, Jackson, and Michael Potts as Wining Boy (Doaker’s older brother) reprise their roles from the 2022 Broadway revival production of the play.
With overt references to slavery, ownership was a key aspect, where human beings were bought and sold like commodities, yet it’s the ghost of Sutter that becomes a destabilizing presence in the home, as his terrorizing force continues to haunt the family, starting with visions by Berniece, her young daughter Maretha, and then the entire family, where what takes place before our eyes is a literal exorcism, led by Preacher Avery Brown (Corey Hawkins), who’s been trying to win the hand of Berniece for years as he attempts to establish his own church, yet the very foundation of the home comes under attack from unseen spirits that seem to be wrestling with the forces of good and evil. In the play, you never see Sutter’s ghost, which has a suffocating hold on this family, but in the cinematic version you can, where it actually wrestles with Boy Willie, much like the Biblical reference of Jacob wrestling all night with an Angel (Jacob wrestling with the angel), an allegory for the continuing relationship between the powerful and the subjugated, adding an extra dimension to the theatrical experience. The piano has a secret ability to keep the spirits of the dead alive, and has come to symbolize the concept of ownership, as it literally came into the Sutter family’s possession through the transfer of slaves from this family. As long as Sutter had the piano, he controlled the destiny of the family, where the ancestral faces carved into the wood were once owned as slaves, with flashback sequences depicting portraits of various family members as children and adults, including scenes of family marriages, family births, a funeral, and a heartfelt scene depicting two family members being taken away to Georgia, becoming an homage to the family, where the idea of setting them free comes with a price, and that heavy burden is the existential mystery each character must reckon with. The fiercest bone of contention is the battle between Boy Willie and Berniece, as each one views their future differently and is willing to fight for what they believe, refusing to allow anyone else to stand in their way. But as they argue over the fate of the piano, viewers get a profound sense of sorrow, recognizing how the family struggled trying to take that piano into their possession and claim it as their own, causing some to lose their lives in Sutter’s murderous rage to exact revenge, including their father, while forcing others to be exiled elsewhere to avoid a similar fate. It’s quite apparent how the piano has literally consumed this family for three generations, showing how we are all still extremely impacted by the legacy of slavery, and breaking free of its hold is a terrifying prospect, yet it’s something this family must make peace with if they are to survive, as Berniece sits at the piano singing a call and response prayer ritual, literally pleading with their ancestors to come to the aid of her ensnared brother, as the spirits help the siblings reconcile at the end, allowing a healing redemption. The poetry on display is astonishing in its force, as escaping from the past is a uniquely compelling aspect of the human condition, where bridging the world of the living and the dead is a universal instinct, as we all must find a way to balance the past with the present. With this play, Wilson investigates the bedrock of racial memory, where comprehending one’s history is essential in the formation of identity, stressing the need for black Americans to define their culture for themselves and not be swayed by the negative white judgments imposed upon them.
