First Look at ‘The Piano Lesson’: A Classic Play Becomes Director Malcolm Washington’s ‘Haunting’ Directorial Debut

News7f August 19, 2024

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Malcolm Washington was the de facto family archivist. “I was curious, I was a kid. I opened every drawer,” he told me. “My mom was like, ‘Get out of there.“The youngest son of a two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington And Pauletta Washington, Malcolm was in the process of digitizing his family photos when he first stumbled upon August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Piano lessons. “When I read Piano Lessons, “It just stopped me,” Washington said. “It’s a rare experience when you read a text that fits where you are in your head, like, ‘I have to do something with this right now. I have to engage with this text in a meaningful way.’”

Washington did so, by adjusting Piano Lessons for Netflix. This is the second feature film adaptation of the play, following the 1995 television series Alfre Woodard And Charles S. Dutton, aired on CBS. Piano Lessons follows the Charles family, a black family in post-Great Depression Pittsburgh in 1936, as they grapple with the ancestral legacy and intergenerational trauma of slavery through a heated debate over whether to sell their most prized possession – the family piano.

In recent years, other plays from Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle—10 Pittsburgh plays, each set in a different decade throughout the 20th century, highlighting the black experience—have been adapted into Oscar-nominated films, such as George C. Wolfe‘S Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom And Fence, Starring and directed by Washington’s father, the film won Viola Davis Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Now it’s Malcolm Washington’s turn. With Piano Lessons, will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, making his feature film debut at the age of 33. He describes the experience of adapting Wilson’s seminal play to the screen as “chicken soup.” “It was broth for the soul,” he says. “I just had to dive in.” For Washington, diving in meant engaging with Wilson, who died at age 60 in 2005. “In that process, I started to build a relationship with August, because obviously he was gone,” Washington says. “It was like digging deep, looking into his archives, connecting with his family, going to Pittsburgh, walking the streets that he grew up on, and really trying to connect with his spirit. And that led me to what you see in Piano lessons.“

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A self-described “blockbuster kid,” Washington has always been obsessed with movies. “I was very influenced by what my siblings watched and being black in the ’90s,” he told me. Like, Point [Lee] was the dictionary at the time, and we watched all the classics.” When he went to the University of Pennsylvania and studied film, Washington branched out into a new field. “I really liked Krzysztof Kieślowski Dekalog series, and Red, White and Blue, “his trilogy,” he said. “I’m a huge fan of the French New Wave stuff, and just films that are driven by a single vision, a single voice.”

Washington name-checks LA’s rebel filmmakers like Charles Burnett, and movies like Sheep Killer And To sleep with anger as inspiration for Piano lessons. But in fact, he relied on himself and his life experiences to make the film. “I’ve been making this film for 33 years, you know what I mean?”

Wilson’s play was staged in a drawing room, but Washington opened it for the screen. In the script, he co-wrote with Virgil Williams, The youngest Washington plays with time and history, taking the audience back to the fateful night the master piano was taken, showing rather than telling us how that fateful act led to generations of trauma in Charles’ family. Of all the film adaptations of Wilson’s work, Washington Piano Lessons has the most cinematic range.