Malcolm Washington was the defacto family archivist. “I’m nosy, I’m the baby. I open every drawer,” he tells me. “My mom’s like, ‘get outta there.’” The youngest child of two-time Oscar-winner Denzel Washington and Pauletta Washington, Malcolm was in the process of digitizing his family’s photos when he first came across August Wilson’s Pulitzer-prize winning play, The Piano Lesson.“When I read The Piano Lesson, it just stopped me,” Washington says. “It was a rare experience where you read a text that just aligns with where you are in your own head, like ‘I have to do something with this now. I have to engage in this text in a meaningful way.’”
Washignton did just that, adapting the The Piano Lesson for Netflix. It’s the second feature film adaptation of the play, following the 1995 made-for-TV film with Alfre Woodard and Charles S. Dutton, which aired on CBS. The Piano Lesson follows the Charles family, a Black family in post-depression era 1936 Pittsburgh, wrestling with their ancestral legacy and how to reckon with the intergenerational trauma of slavery via a rousing debate about whether to sell their most prized possession—the family’s piano.
In recent years, other plays from Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle—10 Pittsburgh plays, each set in a different decade over the course of the 20th century, that highlight the Black experience—have received Oscar nominated film adaptations, like George C. Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences, starring and directed by Washington’s father, which won Viola Davis the best actress supporting Oscar.
Now it’s Malcolm Washington’s turn. With The Piano Lesson, which will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, he makes his directorial feature debut at 33. He describes the experience of adapting Wilson’s seminal play for the screen as “chicken soup.” “It was broth for the spirits,” he say. “I just needed to dive in.” Diving in, for Washington meant communing with Wilson, who died at the age of 60 in 2005. “In that process, I started to forge a relationship with August, because obviously he’s gone,” says Washington. “It was like digging down, going down in his archives, connecting with his family, going to Pittsburgh, walking the streets he grew up on, and just really trying to connect to the spirit of him. And that led me to what you saw in The Piano Lesson.”
Ray Fisher, Writer/Director Malcolm Washington, and John David Washington on the set of The Piano Lesson.By Katia Washington/Netflix.
A self-described “Blockbuster kid,” Washington was always obsessed with movies. “I was very much influenced by what my older siblings were watching, and being Black in the 90s,” he tells me. It’s like, Spike [Lee] was the lexicon at the time, and we watched all the classics.” When he went off to the University of Pennsylvania and studied film, Washington expanded into new territory. “I was really into Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog series, and Red, White, and Blue, his three colors trilogy,” he says. “I got super into French new wave stuff, and just movies that were driven by a vision, a singular voice.”
Washington name checks LA rebellion filmmakers like Charles Burnett, and films like Killer of Sheep and To Sleep With Anger as inspiration for The Piano Lesson. But really, he drew upon himself and his own life experience to make the film. “I’ve been making this movie for 33 years, you know what I’m saying?”
Wilson’s play is set in the living room, but Washington opens it up for the screen. In the screenplay he co-wrote with Virgil Williams, the youngest Washington plays with time and history, taking audiences back to the fateful night that the titular piano is taken, showing us rather than telling us how that fateful act led to generations of trauma in the Charles family. Of all the film adaptations of Wilson’s work, Washington’s The Piano Lesson is the most cinematic in scope.