The Piano Lesson

Part family drama, part ghost story, "The Piano Lesson" is a powerful fable of slavery’s indelible stain and devastating legacy into the 20th century and beyond.

In the gripping prologue to “The Piano Lesson,” the new Netflix adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, we find the stark contrast of White and Black America illuminated by a July 4 fireworks display in 1911. While an enormous white man gleefully watches his country celebrated in lights to the tune of a Sousa-playing band, three Black men creep into his nearby house. As the colors of the fireworks spill through the windows of the darkened house, the men take only one thing: a beautifully carved upright piano. Soon, the sky is again illuminated not by the fires of celebration but of death as an all-white posse tries to burn one of these Black men (Stephan James) out of his home, assuming he is in it. He escapes for now, but it won’t be for long.

These two themes of reclamation and escape dominate “The Piano Lesson,” and the haunting opening sets the tone for Malcolm Washington’s boldly directed and searingly staged interpretation of one of August Wilson’s most celebrated plays. The carefully woven story is part family drama, part ghost story, and a powerful fable of slavery’s indelible stain and devastating legacy. It debuts today on Netflix after a limited theatrical release that should — I hope — enable “The Piano Lesson” to be a contender during the upcoming awards season for film.

The main story of “The Piano Lesson” unfolds 25 years after the heist depicted in the prologue, when most of the Charles family lives in Pittsburgh in the home of Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson), a patriarch of sorts and keeper of family lore. We discover that the titular piano now resides in this house with the family, and soon becomes the object of intense rivalry when Doaker’s restless nephew Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his good-natured friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) arrive from Mississippi.

Boy Willie and Lymon have just been released from the infamous Parchman Prison Farm, where they have just served a brutal term — part of which entailed being “leased” to local farms in a Jim Crow-era form of legalized slavery — merely for petty theft of some lumber. Lymon wants to remain in the North in hopes of better treatment, but Willie Boy hopes to return south to buy the land that once belonged to the Sutter family who enslaved the Charles family’s ancestors. Sutter, the morbidly obese man glimpsed in the prologue, has just mysteriously died by falling down his own well, leaving his land open for sale. Was he pushed? Was Boy Willie the one who did it? It’s unclear. What is clear is that Sutter isn’t done with the Charles family, regardless of the fact that he’s dead. More on that in a moment.

Boy Willie hopes to raise the last part of the cash needed to buy Sutter’s farm by selling the family’s piano — something his sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) refuses to allow. Berniece’s husband was killed in the incident that sent Boy Willie and Lymon to prison, leaving her to care for her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith) alone, for which she has not forgiven Boy Willie. More importantly, the piano has a hold on her and her family that can’t easily be broken.

The piano itself literally embodies the family’s past, as it bears the images of their family history carved into it by their great-grandfather, who was enslaved by the Sutter family. His wife and daughter were wrenched away from him, sold to purchase that very piano, and the carvings are his tribute to them. It bears both the marks of his love and the scars of their family’s deep generational trauma, and the man who stole it back from the Sutters was his grandson — Boy Willie’s father and Doaker’s brother. For his transgression in reclaiming the piano from his family’s enslavers, he was eventually found and murdered.

So the two siblings, the great-grandchildren of the master artist who created this cursed heirloom and children of its liberator, represent the opposing forces that drive the story — should Boy Willie be able to sell the piano and cut its ties with the painful past, to build a new future on the very spot where they were once held in bondage? Or do they hold onto the piano as the tangible legacy of a family torn apart?

As if the piano weren’t haunting enough by itself, the family finds itself haunted as well by the ghost of the drowned Sutter, who turns up to menace Berniece, her daughter Maretha, and eventually Boy Willie. This malevolent presence adds urgency to the need to make a decision, as the ghost sightings keep getting more frightening and violent, and will drive the story to its explosive ending.

A perennial problem of adapting plays to film is how to open up a stage-bound story into a wider world, and Malcolm Washington accomplishes this with style and grace, bringing life and color to the Pittsburgh of the Great Depression and the older world of the family’s Southern origins. Even in the film’s many interior scenes, the camera glides and roams around the room (enabled by cinematographer Michael Gioulakis), scrutinizing each character’s hidden thoughts while the others tell their stories and wrestle with the fate of the piano. “The Piano Lesson” is more than a filmed play, it is a film in its own right that honors and transforms its stage origins.

But plays are also about words — the cliché is that theatre is a writer’s medium, though I know a few playwrights who might dispute that — and August Wilson writes some of the most beautiful words in the dramatic canon of the last half-century. Armed with such words, this film version of “The Piano Lesson” is also an actor’s playground, and the acting is flawless across the board. In the capable delivery of this stellar cast, most of whom came directly from “The Piano Lesson’s” most recent Broadway revival in 2022, Wilson’s dialogue sings.

Samuel L. Jackson, who has a much wider range than the cool movie-star persona he’s usually associated with, gets a glorious moment to shine as he tells the story of the piano’s origin. Jackson is known for making profanity sound like poetry, and it’s wonderful to hear him speak something much more like real poetry here. (Could this finally get Jackson an Oscar?) John David Washington and Danielle Deadwyler unleash passionate pain as they clash over the past, present, and future of the piano and the family.

Two further cast members also make their mark, Michael Potts as Wining Boy, the flamboyant musician brother of Doaker (who gets a doozy of a monologue of his own); and Corey Hawkins as Avery, a man of the Lord who’s hoping to start his own church and tries to help the Charles family exorcise the ghost of Sutter. Every character, as written by Wilson, has rich dimension and depth, and the cast draws out as many layers as possible of their personalities.

There’s so much more to be written about the thematic depth and cultural weight of a work like “The Piano Lesson” that I just don’t have the time or ability to delve into here, though I would dearly love to. It’s an unflinching exploration of institutional racism and the pain of America’s original sin that haunts us to this day, shaped and driven by Black artists fearlessly exploring this darkness. I will certainly be thinking about it for a long time.