The Piano Lesson First Look: How a Stage Classic Turned Into a “Haunting” Directorial Debut From Malcolm Washington

Danielle Deadwyler, John David Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson star in the adaptation of August Wilson’s seminal play about a Black Pittsburgh family reckoning with the past.

By Chris Murphy

August 19, 2024

Malcolm Washington was the de facto family archivist. “I’m nosy, I’m the baby. I open every drawer,” he tells me. “My mom’s like, ‘Get outta there.’” The youngest child of two-time Oscar-winner Denzel Washington and Pauletta Washington, Malcolm was in the process of digitizing his family’s photos when he first came across August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, The Piano Lesson. “When I read The Piano Lesson, it just stopped me,” Washington says. “It was a rare experience where you read a text that just aligns with where you are in your own head, like ‘I have to do something with this now. I have to engage in this text in a meaningful way.’”

Washington did just that, adapting the The Piano Lesson for Netflix. It’s the second feature film adaptation of the play, following the 1995 made-for-TV film with Alfre Woodard and Charles S. Dutton, which aired on CBS. The Piano Lesson follows the Charles family, a Black family in post-Depression-era 1936 Pittsburgh, wrestling with their ancestral legacy and with the intergenerational trauma of slavery via a rousing debate about whether to sell their most prized possession—the family’s piano.

In recent years, other plays from Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle—10 Pittsburgh plays, each set in a different decade over the course of the 20th century that highlight the Black experience—have received Oscar-nominated film adaptations, like George C. Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences, starring and directed by Washington’s father, which won Viola Davis the best actress supporting Oscar.

Now it’s Malcolm Washington’s turn. With The Piano Lesson, which will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, he makes his directorial feature debut at 33. He describes the experience of adapting Wilson’s seminal play for the screen as “chicken soup.” “It was broth for the spirits,” he say. “I just needed to dive in.” Diving in for Washington meant communing with Wilson, who died at the age of 60 in 2005. “In that process, I started to forge a relationship with August, because obviously he’s gone,” says Washington. “It was like digging down, going down in his archives, connecting with his family, going to Pittsburgh, walking the streets he grew up on, and just really trying to connect to the spirit of him. And that led me to what you saw in The Piano Lesson.”

A self-described “Blockbuster kid,” Washington was always obsessed with movies. “I was very much influenced by what my older siblings were watching, and being Black in the ’90s,” he tells me. It’s like, Spike [Lee] was the lexicon at the time, and we watched all the classics.” When he went off to the University of Pennsylvania and studied film, Washington expanded into new territory. “I was really into Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog series, and Red, White, and Blue, his three colors trilogy,” he says. “I got super into French New Wave stuff, and just movies that were driven by a vision, a singular voice.”

Washington name-checks LA rebellion filmmakers like Charles Burnett, and films like Killer of Sheep and To Sleep with Anger as inspiration for The Piano Lesson. But really, he drew upon himself and his own life experience to make the film. “I’ve been making this movie for 33 years, you know what I’m saying?”

Wilson’s play is set in the living room, but Washington opens it up for the screen. In the screenplay he cowrote with Virgil Williams, the youngest Washington plays with time and history, taking audiences back to the fateful night that the titular piano is taken, showing us rather than telling us how that fateful act led to generations of trauma in the Charles family. Of all the film adaptations of Wilson’s work, Washington’s The Piano Lesson is the most cinematic in scope.

“He got the haunting,” said Michael Potts, who stars as eccentric uncle Wining Boy. “He created this ghost story, which is far more difficult to manifest on stage, but the way he did it in the movie was extraordinary. It’s like, this family’s haunted. They’re haunted by their past. They’re haunted in their present.”

“Film is a completely different medium than stage,” Washington says. “And with August Wilson specifically, each line, it’s like Shakespeare. Each line of dialogue is like a poem unto itself, and you could make an entire movie just off a couple of his lines.” Knowing this, Washington employed a looser narrative structure than the tight two-act play—visually illustrating moments only discussed in the play and tapping into the supernatural, otherworldly elements that haunt the Charles house.

The family is portrayed by many actors who, at this point, really must feel like family. In the film, Potts, Malcolm’s brother John David Washington, Ray Fisher, and Samuel L. Jackson reprise the roles they played in the 2022 Tony-nominated Broadway revival of The Piano Lesson, directed by Jackson’s wife, LaTanya Richard Jackson. “It was basically just a class reunion,” said Potts. “The same camaraderie that we had on Broadway we were able to bring to the movie.”

Joining the the cast for the film were The Tragedy of Macbeth’s Corey Hawkins, who plays aspiring pastor Avery Brown, and Till’s Danielle Deadwyler, who replaced The Color Purple’s Danielle Brooks as Berniece, the matriarch of the Charles family and single mother who refuses to sell the family’s heirloom. “I treated it like a play,” Deadwyler says. “The men have done this play. I needed to know the ins and outs. I knew that was my responsibility.”

In keeping with the importance of family and legacy, Malcolm had to direct his elder brother as Boy Willie, the central agitator who is ready and willing to forsake his family’s history and sell their piano, if it means improving his station in life. “Obviously, I’m maybe top three biggest John David Washington fans in the world,” Malcolm says, with a laugh. “In any creative collaboration, you hope to find a shared language as soon as possible and you want shared trust. In this situation, I couldn’t imagine somebody that I would trust more—or completely understand their language—more than my big brother.”

For John David, taking direction from his little brother was besides the point. “It didn’t feel like working with my brother. It felt more like working with the filmmaker that I’ve been a fan of for years,” he says. He goes on to call his brother an “an extraordinary talent” who is “coming into his own” with The Piano Lesson. “We’ve been wanting him to do something for so long. And when he decided to do this one, when he felt like this is the one, it was a no-brainer. I was like, ‘Oh my God, well, here we go.’”

Now that the film is in the can, the brotherly dynamic between the Washingtons has returned. On top of that, they’re conducting these interviews separately from London, where they’re supporting their sister, Olivia Washington, who’s making her West End debut starring in Slave Play. “Now that he’s turned in his final product, I think I could support him and celebrate him more as a brother now, which is nice,” says John David. “But when we were in it, it was just me standing with the artist, not necessarily my brother.”

Over the phone, John David discusses the legacy of portraying Boy Willie, and following in the footsteps of Samuel L. Jackson, who originated the character at Yale and then understudied Boy Willie in the original Broadway production. “Having been able to do it on stage, I feel so much more connected to the actors, the many African American actors and directors, like Lloyd Richards and his early collaborators and August Wilson,” he says. “I think of Sam Jackson, I also think of Michael Potts. When I think of my father, I think of Mr. [Laurence] Fishburne. I think of Charles Dutton. Hey, Sam Jackson—he played this character first, and his history and attachment to Boy Willie was just incredible. The fact that I got a front-row seat to the man who developed this character first with August Wilson, it’s like I get to play with Joe Montana, and he’s teaching me how to play quarterback.” He pauses. “So it’s a collective. It’s Mr. Washington, it’s Fishburne, it’s Mr. Potts, it’s Mr. Jackson,” he says. “It’s all these different people that have done it, and I just get to be a part of that.”

In a particularly moving scene, Malcolm Washington taps into the bond between Black men, when Winning Boy and his brother Doaker, played by Jackson, lead a rousing rendition of a work song they used to sing as sharecroppers out in the field. On stage, the moment is almost spiritual—a respite from the action that homes in on shared history and trauma.

“When you watch that on stage, it’s so powerful,” says Malcolm. “There’s kind of this choreography that comes in. The whole audience is so into it.” He was apprehensive about how to best adapt that moment for the screen, but ultimately landed on something subtler and more internal. “I tried to make it more intimate, get really into the interior moments of each of them,” he says. “No choreography, we’re just going to be with them and their pain and their struggle. And where they got that night, that was one of the magical nights on set.”

The climactic finale of The Piano Lesson—a calling upon the ancestors and an exorcism, of sorts—is both moving and deeply haunting, with a supernatural flair and an emotional riveting and cathartic performance from Deadwyler. It also came from a place of grave significance for Washington. “I had a fear of death for a long time, not of myself, but of my loved ones,” he says. “It started when my grandfather passed away when I was eight, and I was so scared of the funeral. I was so afraid to go to the cemetery where they were burying him. And then I remember it was around 2017–18, I was in a tough spot in my life, and I was doing the thing of opening all the cabinets in my house. I went to my childhood home to just get some of that feeling.”

While at home, Washington opened up a cabinet and found a sweater that belonged to his grandfather. “I just wept,” he says. “I just was overwhelmed. I felt such a strong connection to him—to this man who was, in a lot of ways, my beacon of what being a man is, what masculinity is. It was tenderness. It was strength. It was all of these things. In that moment, my feelings and thoughts on death completely reversed, and I found this really strong connection to somebody who was on the other side now.”

Washington tried to evoke that feeling with The Piano Lesson—to connect us with those who may no longer be with us, but are still present. “It ends in this beautiful poetry of all of these feelings,” he says. “Crafting the end of that, that was always the rough spiritual structure that I wanted to follow.”

“So much of our history is lost in time,” Washington adds, of the Black experience. It’s what inspired him to digitize his family’s photos, as well as what inspired him to direct The Piano Lesson and preserve Wilson’s legacy. “The legacy is long on this one.… The spirits were just aligned.”

The Piano Lesson will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival before being released by Netflix later this fall. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.