The Piano Lesson: August Wilson adaptation adds to a rich tradition of Southern Gothic storytelling

The Pittsburgh Cycle of ten plays set in ten decades, by the African American playwright August Wilson (1945-2005), is a towering artistic record of the Black experience across the 20th century. In 2015 Denzel Washington announced that he would direct a film adaptation of Fences (1985), and co-produce films of the other nine. Fences came out in 2016, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (staged in 1984) in 2020. The Piano Lesson (1987) is the third to be filmed, the directorial debut of Denzel’s son Malcolm Washington and starring his other son, John David Washington.

Fences was a filmed play, largely focused on one static setting; The Piano Lesson embraces cinematic form more successfully, opening out the drama. This is aided by the intricate history of the Charles family, unfolded in flashbacks, and the tropes of a gothic haunting that makes the family’s Pittsburgh house creak and moan ominously, with glimpses of a spectre that build to a grand guignol confrontation in the finale.

The film maintains the core of the play’s opposition between siblings Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler, impressively intense) and Boy Willie (John David Washington, charmingly reckless). They clash over the family heirloom, an upright piano. In 1936, Boy Willie, following the path of the Great Migration north of that era, has travelled from Mississippi to Pittsburgh, where his Uncle Doaker lives with his sister Berniece and her daughter Maretha. Boy Willie is intent on selling the piano to buy the land in the South that their ancestors worked as slaves to the Sutter family, now that the last Sutter had died in suspicious circumstances. 

For Boy Willie, this will restore family and racial pride. But for Berniece, the piano, which has panels carved with the faces of the Charles family, is not just a store of memory: it is in effect a coffin for the family dead. Their great-grandfather carved the faces as a slave at the direction of his master; their grandfather was sold in exchange for the piano; their father stole it back from the Sutters in 1911 (seen in the film’s prologue) and was lynched for it. Berniece played the piano to soothe her grieving mother: it has been shut up for years since her mother’s death. Berniece is entrapped by these accumulating losses, but her brother’s plan to regain agency is also fixated on past wrongs. What can turn damaging melancholy into healthier kinds of mourning? The ghosts swirling around the piano will have to be addressed if the daughters of the house are to have any kind of future.

The film adds to a rich tradition of spectral returns from convoluted family histories, typical of the Southern gothic. It speaks to William Faulkner’s comment about the American South, that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And it also contributes to all those restless and everyday vengeful ghosts that have populated African American culture in recent decades, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). The Piano Lesson is not quite a horror film, but it can be put into useful dialogue with the current surge in treatments of this legacy through the horror genre by directors like Jordan Peele or Nia DaCosta.

The ensemble cast is a joy to watch, overlaid by the dynamics of the Washington family involvement (including cameos from sister Olivia and mother Paulette Washington). Samuel L. Jackson’s quiet turn as Uncle Doaker is more moving when you know that he played the fiery Boy Willie in its earliest run as a play in 1987 (although the part was actually written for the actor Charles S. Dutton). Now Jackson returns half a lifetime later as the uncle, looking on this generational argument with weary eyes and the longing for less strife. There’s a sense that August Wilson’s understanding of complex family histories is speaking directly to these actors.

Wilson’s work relishes the musical rhythms of African American speech, and where Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom directly addressed the role of the blues in 1920s America, The Piano Lesson has moments of shared song which in their call-and-response patterns bear the memory and trauma of slavery. Berniece’s final return to the piano keys is a kind of musical summoning which offers hints of how to shake off traumatic repetition and better carry this awful burden.

► The Piano Lesson arrives in UK cinemas 8 November and will be available to stream on Netflix UK from 22 November.