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This article contains spoilers for “The Piano Lesson.”
In the August Wilson play “The Piano Lesson,” its characters must wrestle, metaphorically, with a ghost from their past. In the film adaptation, directed by Malcolm Washington, that confrontation becomes more literal.
In this scene, the climax, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) takes a seat at the piano that she has been avoiding playing for the entire film, a piano that has deep historical meaning in her family. She plays it in an effort to conjure up her ancestors and exorcise the ghost that her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), is fighting upstairs.
“We have all of our themes converge here,” the director Malcolm Washington said in his narration of the sequence, “the idea of shadow and light, of truth and secrets, and confronting the deepest parts of ourself to get through and transcend.”
Washington said that he had “wanted to tell a story of Black spiritual practice in America.” He used iconography from Black Southern Christian tradition and West African spiritual tradition: “The idea that you can call on your ancestors,” he said, “and that there’s a boundaryless relationship between the living and the dead.”
Read the “Piano Lesson” review.
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