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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘THE PIANO LESSON’ REVIEW: GHOSTS IN THE INSTRUMENT  
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Alissa Wilkinson
November 21, 2024
The New York Times
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_ In 1990, “The Piano Lesson” won the eminent playwright August
Wilson his second of two Pulitzers for drama. It’s part of his
Pittsburgh Cycle (sometimes called his Century Cycle), a set of 10
decade-spanning plays about Black American life. _

'The Piano Lesson', Netflix

 

​​​​Riddle me this: When is a piano not merely a piano?
Answer: In “The Piano Lesson,” where one piano contains a whole
world.

A whole family’s world, anyhow. The piano in question is an old
upright, carved all over with the faces and figures of departed
ancestors and stolen from the white Mississippi man who once enslaved
members of this family. For Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), that means
it’s sacred, a link to past trauma and resilience that must be
preserved.

For her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), the piano
represents something else: money. More precisely, when he looks at the
piano he sees the cash he needs to buy a piece of land back home in
Mississippi and set up his own farm. That’s why he’s traveled up
here to Pittsburgh, where Berniece lives with her daughter, Maretha
(Skylar Aleece Smith), and an uncle, Doaker Charles (Samuel L.
Jackson). Ostensibly Boy Willie has come to sell watermelons to locals
with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher). But it’s the piano he’s after.

To others, the piano means other things. For Avery (Corey Hawkins), an
elevator operator who dreams of starting a church and marrying
Berniece, the piano offers the possibility of a stable future. But for
Doaker Charles’s brother Wining Boy (Michael Potts), the instrument
is a reminder of the exhilarating, unrelenting life he once lived on
the road as a successful pianist, before he became washed up and
broke.

 
In 1990, “The Piano Lesson” won the eminent playwright August
Wilson his second of two Pulitzers for drama. It’s part of his
Pittsburgh Cycle (sometimes called his Century Cycle), a set of 10
decade-spanning plays about Black American life, all but one set in
Pittsburgh. It’s been staged repeatedly since then; the 2022
Broadway revival
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Washington, Jackson and Fisher in the same roles they play in this
film.

There was a previous movie adaptation of “The Piano Lesson” in
1995, made for television and starring much of the original Broadway
cast. This one is the third installment in a pledge made by Denzel
Washington — the father of both John David Washington and the
film’s director, Malcolm Washington, who wrote the screenplay with
Virgil Williams — to produce the whole Pittsburgh Cycle as movies.
(The previous two installments were “Fences,” from 2016, in which
the elder Washington starred and directed, and “Ma Rainey’s Black
Bottom,” which was released in 2020.)

Set in 1936, “The Piano Lesson” is, like all of Wilson’s work,
dependent on well-chosen symbols while simultaneously loaded with the
lived-in dialogue and banter that makes it feel as if we’ve just
stumbled into an ongoing story. And indeed, we have. The point of
“The Piano Lesson” is not this one family, but its place in many
generations of history. The faces and figures on the piano were carved
by Berniece and Willie’s great-grandfather, whose own wife and son
were sold by Sutter, their enslaver, to buy the piano for his wife.
Later, Willie and Berniece’s father stole the piano from the
Sutters, and paid for it with his life. This is a history of violence
and wounds.

In the play, this history is discussed by the characters, but not
depicted, the result being that those in the audience create the scene
in their heads. In that way, the audience members take on those
memories as if they’re their own, fashioning them from images and
imaginations and perhaps their own history.

The more literal medium of cinema offers ways to create those scenes
for the audience, and so the director elects to do so. In Malcolm
Washington’s film, full-scene flashbacks appear as well as more
impressionistic slices, as if recalled collectively from some
inherited memory. Other events left offstage in the play — such as
when Willie and Lymon go out to woo some local women — are shot here
as well. And while the play takes place entirely inside Doaker
Charles’s house, the film begins and ends in Mississippi, showing us
what happened before these events and what will happen next.

The result is not entirely satisfactory. Leaving less to the
imagination sets the Charles family story at more of a distance from
the audience, as if their story is their story, and not ours too.
These characters are people, with cadences and quirks and desires, but
they’re also stand-ins for the myriad ways that Wilson saw formerly
enslaved Americans grappling with the past and the future: Berniece
with her painful reverence, Doaker Charles with his measured
ambivalence, Wining Boy with his dissipation, Willie with his
full-steam headlong drive to prove himself equal to the white men
around him down South. They’re types and real people all at once,
and the text asks us to connect on both levels; the movie doesn’t
quite let the metaphors surface.

That’s nowhere more evident than near the end of the film, which,
like the 2022 Broadway revival, turns the lurking idea of ghosts
haunting the piano from the more figurative — ghosts lurk in
America, especially in Black families — into something quite
literal. This is Washington’s debut feature, and his directorial eye
is not quite up to the raucous staging this requires; it turns choppy
and the rhythm is off.

What’s great about the movie is its performances. John David
Washington brings fire to his role, matched by Deadwyler’s coolly
furious resolve. Jackson’s role has him mostly observing, but he’s
a magnetic presence. And Fisher is phenomenal, embodying a character
who seems oblivious and a little dense but, it turns out, is more than
meets the eye.

Still, as a film, “The Piano Lesson” is the weakest of the Denzel
Washington-produced Pittsburgh Cycle. But when you’re working with
Wilson’s material, there’s an inherent richness, and the questions
this film raises have never been more potent. What do we do with our
past? What does it mean to face the future? And when every ordinary
day in a nation is littered with reminders of a history that’s never
been resolved, how do we live? “The Piano Lesson” presents a
ghost-haunted world with few answers to these questions. To grapple
with them, we first have to listen.

THE PIANO LESSON
Rated PG-13 for scenes of trauma and violence, some language, and some
ghosts. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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* Film
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* Film Review
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* 'The Piano Lesson'
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* August Wilson
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* John David Washington
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* Malcom Washington
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* Denzel Washington
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* Samuel Jackson
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* Danielle Deadwyler
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* Black Migration
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