The Piano Lesson–A Cacophony

Adapted from August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Piano Lesson (2024) opens with  Mississippi slaver Robert Sutter (David Atkinson) trading two enslaved brothers for a piano to give to his wife at the onset of the Civil War.  Fast forward to 1911 and brother Charles (Stephan James) steals the piano from enslaver Sutter’s grandson James and dies as a result.  Now 1936, set  in Philadelphia,  another Charles,– Uncle Charles– and his brother, Uncle Doaker (Samuel Jackson) tolerate their niece and nephew–Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his sister Bernie (Danielle Deadwyler) -who  fight over the sale of their great-grandmother’s heirloom piano.  Boy Willie is in deep debt and wishes to sell the piano to purchase land in order to realize his dream of being a landowner in Mississippi.  His sister refuses, claiming that the piano is their heritage, a legacy embedded with the blood and tears of their ancestors, whose faces are literally carved into the piano by their great-grandfather. 

In a homage to magical realism, the piano represents the ancestors, their history and their ghostly presence in their living descendants.  The family portrait is inseparable from the piano, spanning space and time, in a collective memory of slavery, its mark on their souls, and the ominous ghost of Sutter, slaveowner and specter of their broken dreams.  Can the sacred and profane live on in this family, disrupted by ghosts of the past? The death of Berniece and Boy Willie’s father  is their history too, a history of violence and unhealed wounds.   Will they no longer be possessed by them? 

The cast is stellar, especially John David Washington who adamantly refuses  to  surrender his dream to be free, Danielle Deadwyler who will not subordinate her family to her brother and forget the family’s past, and Samuel Jackson who understands and respects both perspectives of his niece and nephew.  All are magnetic and emotionally exhausting to witness. These are not exclusively actors’ performances but a possession of the souls of the characters themselves.

The Piano Lesson is an allegory of our country’s odious original sin. Formerly enslaved Americans grappling with the past and the future remind us every day of the scars and unhealed wounds of a history that’s never been resolved.   How do we live in a world still haunted by ghosts from our past? 

Another masterpiece and testimony to August Wilson’s brilliance!

Availability:  Netflix