An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.” Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington’s footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it’s second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson’s own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It’s not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with “Mudbound” screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson’s text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that’s central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family’s home. Another fleshes out Doaker’s monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher’s Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes narration shine as well.
Wilson purists will certainly have opinions on these artistic choices; But they let the film breathe a bit, offering some respite from the living room with the looming piano. And most of the film stays right there, in 1936. Boy Willie and Lymon descend early one morning, uninvited, on the Pittsburgh home of Berniece and her uncle Doaker. It’s a family reunion with an agenda: They’ve driven a truck full of watermelons up north from Mississippi, and Willie, Berniece’s younger brother, wants to sell the watermelons and then the piano. The dusty old instrument represents to him a chance to let the past go and start a future. With the money, he wants to buy the land that his enslaved ancestors worked. Berniece has other ideas about the piano, namely keeping it. It’s a connection to the past, not an anchor. Besides, it might be haunted.
