Malcolm Washington and Family Bring August Wilson’s ‘The Piano Lesson’ to the Screen

“The Piano Lesson” director Malcolm Washington has never been inside the New York Public Library, but he knows what’s underneath the city landmark.

“One of the most insane literature archives in the U.S. is just below our feet,” says Washington, looking out at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building from an office window directly across Fifth Avenue. “It spans city blocks.”

Washington has an affinity for places that hold stories, and the ways in which those stories get passed down and shared. He shifts his attention from the web of stories underground, and to the reason he’s in New York: to discuss his own feature directorial debut, an adaptation of August Wilson’s play “The Piano Lesson.” In Wilson’s story, an heirloom piano serves as a physical archive of family history and lore. The piano is also the source of major conflict between two adult siblings, Boy Willie and Berneice, who have different ideas about the instrument’s physical value and fate.

“The Piano Lesson” premiered during the Telluride Film Festival in late summer, and went on to screen at the Toronto Film Festival ahead of its theatrical release this month. The film will be available to stream on Netflix on Nov. 22.

“It’s been wild,” says Washington of the weeks that have followed the film’s debut. “When you’re working on something personal like this for so long, you kind of forget that audiences are going to have it at some point — and that people might be interested in it,” he says. Audiences, and critics, have been interested — not least because the two most recent film adaptations of August Wilson’s plays, “Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” have been major awards season contenders (and winners).

But the 33-year-old director is more focused on how early audiences have connected with the film. “There’s so much in this film about family and legacy and history and grief. If it connects with you, it kind of hits you on a gut, deeper level,” says Washington. “Everybody comes from somewhere, from a people somewhere,” he adds. “It encourages you to excavate those ideas for yourself and those themes for yourself, and the people that made your life possible.”

The film is a deep family affair for Washington, both onscreen and off. “The Piano Lesson” stars Washington’s older brother, John David Washington, and their father Denzel Washington produced the film alongside the brothers’ sister Katia Washington. Denzel is the steward of the film rights for Wilson’s cannon of 10 plays known as the “Pittsburgh Cycle”; in 2016, he made his own directorial debut with “Fences.”

“You’re trying to carry a boat up a hill, and you want the people that you know and can trust to help you do it,” says Washington of the friends-and-family nature of the film, which also stars Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Deadwyler, Corey Hawkins, Ray Fisher and Michael Potts. “That feeling of family was infused in every element, every corner of the set. Our cast and crew, everybody became such a strong family and community on this.”

Washington began writing the screenplay for his vision of the film, which follows a 2023 Broadway revival of the play starring John David and Jackson, before he was officially announced as the director.

“I wanted everybody to show up excited and understanding what my vision of it was,” says Washington, who cowrote the script with Virgil Williams. “For me, the mission was upholding this great work, amplifying August Wilson and giving reverence there, and connecting audiences that don’t necessarily think that they have access to this work.”

For Washington, reaching younger audiences meant speaking to them “in a language that they speak” — music. The film was scored by Alexandre Desplat, and features music by Frank Ocean and Erykah Badu, who stars in the film as a new character.

“So much about Boy Willie’s plight is, ‘I want to build on what was left for me.’ And I felt like that in this adaptation of stage to screen,” says Washington, who aimed to keep the spirit of the stage production. “I wanted to keep the rhythm of so much of the dialogue and the ideas behind it. But I wanted to explore other things more in a way that you can’t necessarily explore onstage because it’s just a different medium.”

Washington, who majored in Film Studies at the University of Pennsylvania before moving into filmmaking, hasn’t yet announced his next project. Asked what might be ahead, he stays rooted in the present moment (“lunch”) but shares his broader approach to storytelling.

“I’m really interested in telling personal stories like this,” he says. “I like that transformative experience of the cinema, of coming in to see a ghost story and walking out thinking about your mom.”

Washington dedicates “The Piano Lesson” to his own mother, Pauletta Washington, who shares the role of Mama Ola with Malcolm’s twin sister Olivia Washington. Although not a major onscreen character, the matriarch’s presence permeates the entire story — not as a ghost, but as a beacon.

“I started writing a story that [I thought] was outside of myself,” says Washington. “When I finished the film, I was like: this is the most personal thing I’ve ever done. My family’s stories are so intricately woven into this thing, and it’s almost overwhelming,” he adds. “It’s almost too much to look at sometimes.”