BROADWAY FOR KIDS

BOY WILLIE:  Now I want to get Sutter’s land with that piano.  I get Sutter’s land and I can go down and get my seed.  Cause that land give back to you.  I can make me another crop and cash it in.  I still got the land and the seed.  But that piano don’t put out nothing else.

 

BERNIECE:  Look at this piano.  Look at it.  Mama Ola polished this piano with her tears for seventeen years,  For seventeen years she rubbed on it till her hands bled.  Then she rubbed the blood in … mixed it up with the rest of the blood on it.  Every day that God breathed life into her body she rubbed and cleaned and polished and prayed over it.

 

 

Unlike the play, the movie starts with a flashback, Independence Day 1911, Mississippi.  While the town celebrates, Boy Willie’s father steals the piano from the Sutter House.   The Sutter family were the one-time owners of Doaker’s family.  The piano came to the Sutter household when some slaves were traded to its original owner, as a present for Sutter’s new wife.  But the new wife (Ofelia) missed the slaves, who took care of her and “fetched things” for her.  One of the slaves traded away was a young boy with a marvelous talent for woodworking.  Bit by bit, year by year, he carved into that piano images of the traded slaves so Ofelia would still “see” their presence.  But he also carved other images of their family, images of their story.  The piano itself became a work of art.

 

But there were consequences.  Although the piano escaped north, the thief did not.  The Sutter posse caught up with him hiding in a box car (on the “Yellow Dog” line) with a group of hobos also heading north and all were burned alive, becoming the legendary “Ghosts of the Yellow Dog 

 

 

BOY WILLIE:   Doaker, where your bottle?  Me and Lymon celebrating.  The Ghosts of the Yellow Dog got Sutter.

 

 

So, the current scion of the Sutter family has died, found at the bottom of his well, supposedly the victim of the “Ghosts of the Yellow Dog.”  It’s just a coincidence that Boy Willie is foaming at the mouth to purchase his land, that Sutter’s ghost seems to have followed him to Pittsburgh.

 

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BOY WILLIE:   If I was you, I’d get rid of it.  That’s the way to get rid of Sutter’s ghost.  Get rid of that piano.

 

 

I should probably leave the synopsis at that before I give away too much.   We also get to meet Wining Boy, Doaker’s brother, a run-down musician with a penchant for gambling away any money he has.  There’s Lyman, a shy friend of Boy Willie – it’s Lyman’s wreck of a truck that’s filled to the brim with watermelons.  There’s Grace, a young “Sweet Mama” whom Boy Willie brings home for a bit of jolly up romp    There’s Maretha, the young daughter of Berniece and her late husband Crawley.  There’s Reverend Avery, who is courting a disinterested (ish) Berniece, who is still mourning Crawley, whose death she lays blame completely with Boy Willie.

 

 

BERNIECE:  Boy Willie … you gonna play around with me one too many times.  And the God’s gonna bless you and West is gonna dress you. … Crawley’s dead and in the ground and you still walking around here eating.  That’s all I know.  He went off to load some wood with you and ain’t never come back.

 

 

On stage, the action was limited to the common room of Doaker’s house, but here, director Malcolm Washington opens things up a bit, taking us onto Pittsburgh streets to see the successful selling of the watermelons, a celebratory dance and party, flashbacks to fill in the blanks with actions that (almost) match the family stories shared by the cast, and adding a nice little coda that’s evokes an ending a bit gentler than that seen in the script and on stage.

 

Of course the true joy of this film is that most of August Wilson’s elegant dialect-drenched slang-colored dialogue remains intact.  Every page of the original script is filled with monologues and stories, with trenchant insults, with conflicts and ideas.  On stage, this is a riveting experience, and I was fortunate enough to have seen the Original Broadway Touring Company back in the early ‘90’s.  The experience of watching this film is every bit as compelling.  And the Scene Two a capella “slave/prison song” by the men, feverishly pounding out its rhythm on every wooden surface, is especially welcome, especially effective

 

 

WINING BOY:  That was the best thing that ever happened to me, getting rid of that piano.  That piano got so big and I’m carrying it around on my back.  I don’t wish that on no body. … Only so many road wide enough for you and that piano…. Sometime it seem like the only thing to do is shoot the piano player cause he the cause of all the trouble I’m having.  … They say every dog gonna have his day and time it go around it sure come back to you.

 

 

Staged with a plethora of spooky effects, the play left the “reality” of the ghosts to the audience’s imagination, while keeping them very real for the characters, a seeming artifact of slave culture and family trauma.  Here, Washington has chosen to bring Sutter’s ghost to visual life, a choice that pays off when more benevolent spirits of the family form a protective wall around Berniece and the Piano.  The climax is indeed one intense moment after another, as Boy Willie and Berniece fail to come to terms, as Reverend Avery makes a feeble attempt at exorcism, as Sutter’s ghost goes into full throttle mode, as the piano plays its deeply etched role in bringing the family together.

 

The Washingtons have gathered a dream cast that brings this family to vivid life.   Atlanta’s Danielle Deadwyler follows up on her heart-breaking performance in Till with a Berniece who is every bit as strong and stubborn as Mamie Till, every bit as memorable.  Samuel L. Jackson (Boy Willie in the original 1987 Yale Reper4tory Production) brings to Doaker a mature wisdom and calm, a mediator who sees the value in both his nephew and niece, becomes a perfect sounding board for his brother, Wining Boy, displays an always-unconditional love for his family, a love that plays out like a perfectly syncopated jazz solo.  

 

But it is John Davis Washington as Boy Willie who carries this film.  He first came to attention in BlacKKKlansman and Tenet and proves here that his Nepo-Baby status was the least of his qualifications for being cast.  He shows a true facility for Wilson’s dialogue and gives us a Boy Willie whose charm is inescapable and whose ambition is totally at odds with the historical inevitability of a less-than-ideal future.  (A black landowner in Mississippi in 1936 will inevitably fall afoul of Jim Crow.  Seeing how an older Boy Willie navigates the fifties would make for a very engrossing “sequel.”)

 

Others in the cast include Ray Fischer as good-natured Lyman who wants nothing more than to disappear, Corey Hawkins (Harpo in the recent Color Purple movie, 24: Legacy) as Reverend Avery, who is a product of his time in his attitude towards women, completely oblivious that Berniece wants nothing to do with that attitude.  Michael Potts (who had roles in Rustin and the Danai Guria Richard III) gives us a Wining Boy who transcends that character’s essentially jaded nature to pay homage to his family’s struggles and successes, successes that always eluded him.

 

 

AVERY:  I ain’t got much in the way of comforts.  I got a hole in my pockets near about as far as money is concerned.  I ain’t never found no way through life to a woman I care about like I care about you.  I need that.  I need somebody on my bond side.  I need a woman that fits in my hand

 

BERNIECE:  You trying to tell me a woman can’t be nothing without a man.  But you alright, huh?  You can just walk out of here without me – without a woman – and still be a man.

 

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is an adaptation that hits every note right, and that, if you’ll forgive me, will haunt you long after the end credits roll.

 

     -- Brad Rudy (BK Rudy@aol.com     #PianoLesson   #AugustWilsonCenturyPlays)

 

Note:  This is not the first video adaptation of this piece – PBS Great Performance broadcast it in 1995 with Charles S. Dutton as Boy Willie, Alfre Woodard as Berniece, and Courtney B. Vance as Lymon, with the script by August Wilson.  I daresay it may be available to stream on PBS Passport. 

 

And for the record, much of this movie’s cast highlighted the 2022 Broadway revival, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson (Samuel’s wife), which won that year’s Tony for best revival.  

 

For the record, Denzel Washington has announced that the next of the “Century Plays” to go before the cameras will be Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1910’s), though no cast or release date have been announced.

 

Read my Review of Fences (2016) Here

 

Read my Review of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) Here.

 

 

Bonus Feature, here are some speeches from the play that struck me as especially evocative, but which I was unable to “fit” into this essay:

 

WINING BOY:  Ain’t nothing wrong with being a preacher.  You got the preacher on one hand and the gambler on the other.  Sometimes there ain’t too much difference in them.

 

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BOY WILLIE:  Why I got to come up here and learn to do something I don’t know how to do when I already know how to farm?

 

 

DOAKER:  Say it was the story of our whole family and as long as Sutter had it … he had us.  Say we was still in slavery.

 

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BERNIECE:   I used to think them pictures are alive and walked through the house.  Sometime late at night I could hear my mama talking to them.  I said that wasn’t gonna happen to me.  I don’t play that piano cause I don’t want to wake them spirits.

 

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AVERY:  Everybody got stones in their passway.  You gotta step over them or walk around them.  You picking them up and carrying them with you.  All you got to do is set them down by the side of the road  You ain’t got to carry them with you.

 

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MARETHA:  Anybody ever see the ghosts?

BOY WILLIE:  I told you they like wind.  Can you see the wind?

 

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BOY WILLIE:  Hell, I ain’t scared of dying.  I look around and see people dying every day.  You got to die to make room for somebody else.  I had a dog that died.  Wasn’t nothing but a puppy.  …    I got the power of death too.  I can command him.  I can call him up.  The white man don’t like to see that.