August Wilson’s Histories of Black American Life
5 min read
The playwright August Wilson, who’s best known for his series chronicling 20th-century Black American life (colloquially known as the Century Cycle), paid forensic attention to how everyday families bear the scars—and inherit the triumphs—of collective histories. Art, especially music, was foundational to this understanding. In the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Piano Lesson, which was recently adapted into a Netflix movie, a piano is hand-carved with intricate portraits of an enslaved family—and years later, that family’s descendants wrestle with the value of this heirloom. At one point, after Berniece Charles (played by Danielle Deadwyler) plays the piano, she is visited by ghosts of those early relatives, transforming the music from an abstract symbol of her past into a literal conduit for her ancestors.
In The Piano Lesson, the titular instrument takes on greater significance because music, and the conditions under which members of the Charles family come to access it, is so central to their history. The play takes its name from a painting by the artist Romare Bearden, whose oeuvre served as a frequent inspiration for Wilson. Bearden’s slice-of-life canvases depicted their subjects with a tender gaze, but the sense of familiarity was neither overly sentimental nor limited to shared suffering. To watch Wilson’s play unfold—whether onstage or on the screen— is to feel the intensity of his respect for Bearden’s artistry, and for the musical traditions imbued in both of their works. Wilson’s work has been adapted several times since the premiere of his first Century Cycle play, and many of the newer works have stayed largely faithful to his vision, even after Wilson’s death (and that of his creative partner, the director Lloyd Richards). Netflix’s The Piano Lesson mostly keeps with this pattern, but the film infuses Wilson’s story with some more modern sensibilities than previous takes, helping introduce the story to new generations.
Beginning in the 1980s, Wilson’s productions offered actors such as Viola Davis, Angela Bassett, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Samuel L. Jackson early-career opportunities to take on complex leading characters. These kinds of roles were (and, in many cases, still are) rare for Black talent, but Wilson’s plays gave them rich terrain to showcase their range. Facilitating the growth of these actors, some of whom went on to become some of the most prominent names on Broadway, was one of the many ways Wilson transformed the institution of American theater. His influence extended to Hollywood too: Several Wilson-production veterans have since led major films and TV series, and his plays have found new life off the stage. Netflix’s The Piano Lesson is the second cinematic adaptation of the play; the first, starring Alfre Woodard, aired on CBS in 1995.
The Piano Lesson is also the third Wilson adaptation to be produced by Denzel Washington, whose own contemplation of Black American history has long been central to his cultural prominence. Decades after Washington’s star-making turns as Malcolm X and the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, he won a Tony for portraying the thorny patriarch of Fences, Wilson’s best-known play. The 2016 film adaptation of Fences, which Washington directed and co-produced, earned him an Academy Award nomination for acting opposite Viola Davis, who took home a Best Actress trophy that year. Whereas Fences was a Denzel tour de force, The Piano Lesson showcases a new generation of Washington talents: His son Malcolm directs the movie; his son John David stars as Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie; and his daughter Katia is an executive producer. In an interview with GQ, Malcolm added that their father “was so down with the conceit that the movie was working under, which is, Let’s introduce and show young people that August Wilson is a part of them, too, that they have access to it, that they’re a part of that lineage.”
Celebrity children taking up their parents’ profession is hardly a new story, but it’s easy to see why Wilson’s work would appeal to a younger generation of Black creators. At the core of most Wilson plays is a weighty conflict that feels true to everyday life. In The Piano Lesson, Berniece and Boy Willie clash because he wants to sell the piano in order to buy the land their ancestors were enslaved on—the same land where their great-grandfather carved portraits into the piano, and where their father spent his last days taking the piano back from the slaveholders who prized it. When Berniece and Boy Willie disagree over where the piano belongs 25 years later, they’re wrestling with heady questions of familial inheritance and practical considerations about their financial future.
The tensions that the siblings work through—and the terrors that haunt the entire Charles family—feel as salient today as they were in 1936 (when the play is set), in 1987 (when it was staged), and in 1995 (when it was first adapted for television). The Piano Lesson also reflects Wilson’s enduring belief in the archival power of Black music. In a 2004 interview with The Believer, Wilson described the blues as a singular window into Black American life: “If all this were to disappear off the face of the earth and some people two million unique years from now would dig out this civilization and come across some blues records, working as anthropologists, they would be able to piece together who these people were, what they thought about, what their ideas and attitudes toward pleasure and pain were, all of that.”
In the 2020 documentary Giving Voice, one of Wilson’s longtime collaborators notes that part of the playwright’s evocative power came from his choice in subjects: a garbageman who used to play in the Negro Leagues, a trumpet player who never became famous. Netflix’s adaptation faithfully renders this concern for the quotidian, albeit with a more stylish patina. Malcolm’s directorial choices diverge from his father’s old-school creative sensibilities; the pacing is faster, the music more dramatic and less deferential to the story’s era. (The track that plays into The Piano Lesson’s final credits isn’t a famed jazz number—it’s “Wither,” an elegiac Frank Ocean song about the cyclical nature of life and love.)
Deadwyler brings a quiet but palpable grief to her performance as Berniece, outshining John David, whose fast-talking Boy Willie sometimes struggles to connect with something deeper than the character’s surface-level bravado. Even so, John David’s parentage adds an intriguing layer to his character. When he recites Boy Willie’s impassioned monologues about the importance of honoring his late father’s legacy, his clear reverence brings to mind the actor’s relationship to the larger arc of Denzel’s career. In part through these associations, The Piano Lesson dramatizes the ideas at the heart of its source material. Nearly 20 years after Wilson’s death, his words are still making it possible for newer generations to remain earnestly invested in what came before them.
