John David Washington Plays All the Right Notes in 'The Piano Lesson'

What sustains a family? Generational wealth? Trinkets ancestors have left behind? Stories told over a fire on a snowy evening? These questions get a cathartic rumination in The Piano Lesson, the latest August Wilson stage-to-screen adaptation, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and releases in select theaters Nov. 8 before streaming on Netflix on Nov. 22.

It’s a complete family affair, with a cast led by John David Washington, direction by his brother, Malcolm Washington, and producing duties going to father, Denzel, and sister Katia Washington. Mother, Pauletta, and sister Olivia make cameo appearances.

“[Family] was a mandate, our North Star of relatability of the story,” John David Washington explains. “I think that’s what August Wilson was also getting at in the writing.”

The Piano Lesson revolves around the titular instrument, literally carved with etchings that tell the family history of Boy Willie (Washington) and his sister, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler). The siblings are torn over what to do with the piano, which had been stolen by their father from the slaver who owned their family. Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy the land where their ancestors were enslaved. Berniece wants to keep it in the family. The ghost of the aforementioned slave owner, however, may be the one who has the final word.

The eldest of Denzel’s four children, 40-year-old John David Washington has been loading a canon of great performances over the past decade, breaking out with the HBO series Ballers, garnering awards attention for his turn in Spike Lee’s 2018 biographical crime film BlacKkKlansman, appearing in Christopher Nolan’s 2020 action thriller Tenet and headlining the 2023 sci-fi saga The Creator. He’s worked with Luca Guadagnino (who wore a producer’s hat on Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s Beckett), David O. Russell, Sam Levinson and Robert Redford (who was a fellow performer on The Old Man & the Gun).

“I’ve been so lucky, so fortunate, to work with these directors that I’m a fan of,” he says, “and I think they really have something to say through film.”

Washington is especially proud of his brother’s vision on The Piano Lesson. “I didn’t look at it as working with my brother — the experience felt like working with a director,” he says. “Malcolm set the tone during the table read. He [was] in his white overalls, a white sweater underneath, and he [lit] a candle in the middle [of the room] … and we had a full-on table read with everybody sitting there. It was glorious. That was the tone. It was one of inclusion. He knew exactly what he wanted, but he came off as, ‘Let’s do this together.’ He made us feel like colleagues rather than that we were working for him.”

The Piano Lesson has garnered rave reviews as it’s toured the festival circuit, with many critics singling out Washington’s performance. The actor credits much of the film’s success to the familial atmosphere on set — not only with his blood relatives, but among the cast and crew. Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Fisher and Michael Potts starred with Washington in the 2022 Broadway revival of the play, directed by Jackson’s wife, LaTanya Richardson Jackson. Samuel L. Jackson, who plays the siblings’ uncle, Doaker, previously assumed the role of Boy Willie in the inaugural 1987 production.

“He critiqued me a couple of times,” Washington says, laughing as he recalls how Jackson watched him scarfing a snack at the table read and told him, “Boy Willie would never eat banana chips.”

Even knowing Jackson as well as he does, and having performed with him onstage, Washington still found his co-star intimidating. “In a way, [Boy Willie is] his character,” he says. “And he’s been very honest about his experience and his journey with that character and how it affected his life later on.”

Following a tough act like Jackson — as well as working with performing legends like Potts — was something Washington was well-equipped to handle, being a former professional football player who understands the need to gain the approval of the veteran players.

“If I can earn their trust, then I’ve earned the right to act,” he says, noting how working with the writing of the late August Wilson, he felt, gave him a running start. “You don’t ad lib. You say the words. You use the words.”

Washington allows that while filming the movie, he missed the feedback of playing to a packed theater. “When you do something and the audience reacts in unison and bursts out laughing, it charges you up in a way that feels so good,” he says. “There’s something about the one-to-one experience from the audience for the performer that’s just priceless.”

But when the film screened at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Washington heard a response that took him right back to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York.

“They were reacting like it was a theater crowd: They were clapping. They were laughing. They were active and vibrant.”

Washington believes the perspective of film allows for a unilateral vision. “[In theater], the audience member gets to choose what they want to look at. You’re listening to the words, but you get to choose what you want to look at. The film is suggesting, ‘Here, look at Berniece while we hear these men talk at her.’ Both the theater and film audiences are listening to her brother talk crazy to her, yet we’re feeling something different because of what we’re seeing … and that changes the entire experience,” he explains. “We get to be a little more human. We get to be a little more pragmatic. We get to exist in moments that feel lived-in, and not necessarily theatrical.”

The Piano Lesson is the third in a series of Denzel Washington-produced adaptations (including 2016’s Fences and 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) of Wilson’s 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle,” which chronicles the experiences of the African American community in each decade of the 20th century. Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990). The film adaptation of Fences, which Denzel Washington directed and starred in, opened to rave reviews and earned Viola Davis her long-awaited Academy Award; Davis scored a nomination for Ma Rainey, directed by George C. Wolfe, for which Chadwick Boseman received a posthumous Oscar nom.

But John David Washington, who earned Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for BlacKkKlansman, isn’t thinking about trophies. “I have no idea how these things work, but the fact that people feel something and react to it, that’s the win for me,” he says.

So, what sustains a family? For the Washingtons, it’s collaboration — creatively working and combining forces. And come next year, the family might just have to dust off the mantle for some shiny hardware.