The Phony Intensity of The Piano Lesson

Playwright August Wilson (1945–2005) conceived The Piano Lesson as the competition over a family heirloom waged between a hustling brother, Boy Willie Charles, and his matriarchal widowed sister, Berniece, that’s meant to dramatize how black Americans regard their heritage and tribal obligation. This is exactly what undoes the film adaptation of Wilson’s stage play that was produced by Denzel Washington, stars his son, actor John David Washington, as Boy Willie, and is the directorial debut of his other son, Malcolm Washington.

Boy Willie and Berniece clash over an upright piano bequeathed by an ancestor who had carved the likenesses of various family members into the instrument’s wooden surface, creating a unique — talismanic — work of art. Boy Willie wants to sell it as an investment in his business scheme. Berniece holds on for sentimental, spiritual reasons. But the Washington family affair tries having it both ways — commercializing Wilson’s work by giving it a crass Hollywood adaptation that they mistakenly think will extend Wilson’s message to the masses.

There’s “phony intensity” (filmmaker David Gordon Green’s term to describe Denzel Washington’s facile acting style) in the film’s conflict between Boy Willie and Berniece (played by Danielle Deadwyler). Malcolm Washington chooses overemphatic close-ups and speeds up the first half, as if obviousness and rushed dialogue exchanges amounted to emotional urgency.

It is surprising to see such amateur tricks applied to Wilson’s play (a 1985 TV version starring Charles Dutton and Alfre Woodard was modest but vastly superior). The film’s second half goes in for horror-movie shock effects when the ghost of a white nemesis haunts the Charles family — bringing back the terrors of slavery — and the talisman piano becomes an instrument of exorcism.

The play’s supernatural subtext was always a cheap theatrical gimmick, unconvincing and unworthy of Wilson’s seriousness about black Americans escaping imposed Christianity and developing their own skepticism. But the scare device also contradicts the fashionable, secular ancestor-worship that replaces Christian doctrine for black progressives. (A bawdy, flashy juke joint interlude — inserted to “open up” the chamber-drama structure — showcases singer Erykah Badu but is, thematically, irrelevant.)

This Washington version of The Piano Lesson violates Wilson’s observation of black tribal cohesion. The debate between Boy Willie and Berniece pits masculine ambition against feminine nurturing. It also contrasts the family’s past in Mississippi with their transplanted life in Pittsburgh — the world versus the home, the political versus the cultural. Wilson wrote the siblings as a metaphor of black American unity and disunity, featuring sideline observers: Uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson), his con-artist friend Wining Boy (Michael Potts), preacher and Berniece’s suitor Avery (Corey Hawkins), and Boy Willie’s slow-witted, ladies’-man buddy Lymon (Ray Fisher). But changes to the original text result in a talky microcosm with uneven performance rhythms (John David Washington is boisterous, frantic, and out of sync). There’s not much dramatic action other than Berniece’s tentative romantic choices.

It’s questionable whether the Washingtons understand the play at all, but they certainly fail to preserve its value in the history of black family theatrical literature — such as Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark A Raisin in the Sun, and fine but lesser-known screen adaptations of J. E. Franklin’s Black Girl, Joseph A. Walker’s The River Niger, and Charlie L. Russell’s Five on the Black Hand Side, which have unaccountably lost stature.

Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson both emerged from the Negro Ensemble Company, once America’s foremost black theatrical institution, but its influence came from mainstream media, which shifted interest to the lone figure of August Wilson in the mid ’80s.

During the era of hip-hop and Hollywood’s new black intellectual properties (Eddie Murphy, Prince, Spike Lee, et al.), Wilson was lionized as American theater’s foremost black playwright. His grand project, writing ten plays all set in his Pittsburgh birthplace, was meant to mythologize the experiences of African Americans following the 20th century’s Great Migration from the South to the North. It was called the Pittsburgh Cycle or the Century Cycle.

It showed Wilson’s own hip-hop swagger to claim that no white director could legitimately stage his work in the black oral tradition. Essentially, Wilson was distrustful of Hollywood (relayed in his essay for Spin magazine), so Wilson’s estate gave Denzel Washington supervision over the film adaptation of the entire cycle.

As cinema, The Piano Lesson suggests that Wilson’s fears were well founded — but the stewardship of Hollywood’s Washington clan is the reason for its failure. No film version of Wilson has compensated for his arch, schematic theatricality, specifically in Fences (2016), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), and now The Piano Lesson.

The Piano Lesson is a lesser Wilson play (that it won a Pulitzer Prize was either desperation or patronization). His pageant-like presentation of handed-down ethnic language, musicality, and social memory — the virtues of Wilson at his best (Seven Guitars, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone) — has been squandered repeatedly. (Was it Denzel who approved the idea to make Viola Davis’s Ma Rainey mimic Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) The Piano Lesson cannot be taken seriously after the insight and beauty of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths.

Denzel was the wrong actor for Fences and hasn’t shown the broad sophistication to be a good film producer, but he might be well cast in Wilson’s penultimate work, King Hedley II. Maybe he’ll hire a real director to do it, say Charles Stone III, whose films Paid in Full, Mr. 3000, and Drumline preserve the spiritual and social essence of Wilson’s imagination.