Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the awards season’s buzziest movies continues with Netflix‘s The Piano Lesson, the adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning August Wilson play that was directed by Malcolm Washington in his feature-helming debut. Washington co-wrote the script with Virgil Williams, the Oscar-nominated so-screenwriter of 2017’s Mudbound.
The film, which features a stellar ensemble including Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Michael Potts, Erykah Badu, Danielle Deadwyler and Corey Hawkins, had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. It hit theaters in early November and began streaming on Netflix on November 22, and has since picked up a Best First Feature Spirit Awards nomination for Malcolm Washington and several supporting actress noms for Deadwyler.
Malcolm and Williams teamed to work on the script (“some days with a pickaxe, others with the soft bristles of a small brush delicately unearthing precious gems,” Malcolm says) to get to the root of Wilson’s play, the latest in the playwright’s Century Cycle series to be adapted to the screen. (Previous cycle plays included Netflix’s own Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2020, and 2016’s Fences, adapted by the playwright himself before his death in 2005 and directed by Denzel Washington, earning four Oscar noms including for the screenplay, and a Best Actress win for Viola Davis; Denzel and Todd Black produced both Fences and Piano Lesson.)
In Piano Lesson, the story is set in the 1930s and revolves around the Charles family’s prized heirloom piano. One brother (John David Washington) plans to build the family fortune by selling it, while one sister (Deadwyler) will go to any lengths to hold onto the sole vestige of the family’s heritage. Their uncle (Jackson) tries to mediate, but even he can’t hold back the ghosts of the past.
DEADLINE RELATED VIDEO:
“Every family has a history, stories from the past that inform the present; an origin story,” Malcolm Washington says. “Ultimately this story is much bigger than me and my family — it, like the Black American experience, is an inter-connected web of stories that span space and time.”
In addition to Mudbound, Williams, the longtime Criminal Minds writer-producer, previously teamed with Denzel Washington, co-writing the Washington-directed 2021 drama A Journal For Jordan starring Michael B. Jordan and Chanté Adams.
Check out Malcolm Washington and Williams’ A Piano Lesson script below.
More from this Story Arc
English (US) ·