David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Denzel Washington, of course, is one of the great presences in American film going back 40-plus years, but he's also made his mark as a producer. Specifically, Washington has set out to adapt for film 10 plays by the late August Wilson, the 10 plays known as the Century Cycle. Viola Davis starred in Fences, in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Now Danielle Deadwyler stars in The Piano Lesson. A couple of years ago, Deadwyler gave an amazing performance in the film Till as Emmett Till's mother, and she was profiled in The New Yorker by Doreen St. Felix.

Doreen St. Felix: I first saw Danielle Deadwyler perform in Station Eleven on HBO. In Danielle's latest role, she plays Bernice in the film The Piano Lesson, a period piece set in 1936. We have the backdrop of The Great Depression and The Great Migration. It's a chamber drama about family, about the creation, the potential dissolution of the Black family at the beginning of the 20th century.

In The Piano Lesson, the Charles family is rent asunder by this object, this talisman, which is a piano, on which are carved the likenesses of their ancestors. Bernice is the sister of the Charles family. She is a widow. She has lost her husband. She is a mother to young Maritha. We meet Bernice in the middle of the night. She's awoken by her brother, Boy Willie.

Bernice: It's 5:00 in the morning and you coming here with all this noise. You can't come like normal. You got to bring all that noise with you.

Boy Willie: Oh, hell, woman, I was glad to see Dokie. I come 1,800 miles to see my sister. I figure she might want to get up and say hi.

Doreen St. Felix: Boy Willie has driven up from Mississippi to Pittsburgh to confront her about this piano. He wants to sell it and he wants to use the money that he can make from the sale to buy the farm that his family worked on as sharecroppers. Bernice can't fathom that and she feels that the piano is the representation of the Charles family, of her mother's grief, and that to let it go would be to lose identity.

David Remnick: The brother, Boy Willie, is played by John David Washington, who's, of course, Denzel's son. Malcolm Washington, Denzel's other son, directed the film. Here's staff writer Doreen St. Felix speaking with Danielle Deadwyler.

Doreen St. Felix: I think about Bernice as having made a tremendous kinetic movement when the story begins, right? Having made that journey to Pittsburgh, having made that so-called Great Migration during The Great Depression.

Danielle Deadwyler: That's so crazy, beause you saying it like that. The Great Migration, it's literal, but internally, it's not for her.

Doreen St. Felix: Right? Exactly. It's not for her. When Boy Willie comes bussing in, in the middle of the night.

Danielle Deadwyler: We go bussing again.

[laughter]

Doreen St. Felix: With this large energy and his secret purpose of wanting to get that piano back, to sell it.

Danielle Deadwyler: Yes.

Doreen St. Felix: Bernice, that fragile stability that she has, is completely torn asunder. There's this wonderful scene that I want to play right now where you talk to Boy Willie about this piano that Bernice typically doesn't want to talk about. She doesn't want to play it, but she wants to keep it. Let's listen to that scene right now.

Bernice: Mama Ola polished this piano with her tears for 17 years. For 17 years, she rubbed on it till her hands bled. Then she rubbed the blood in, mixed it with the rest of the blood on it. Every day God breathed life into her body, she rubbed and cleaned and polished and prayed over. Play something for me, Bernice. Play something for me, Bernice. Play something for me, Bernice. Every day, I cleaned it up for you. Play something for me, Bernice. You always talking about your daddy, but you'll never stop to look at what his foolishness cost your mama. 17 years' worth of cold nights and an empty bed. For what? For a piano. For a piece of wood.

Doreen St. Felix: In Malcolm Washington's adaptation of this play, we have flashback. We see a young Bernice playing the piano for her mother. Which leads me to ask, how do you interpret the piano as both symbol of history, of tradition, of ancestry? What's your relationship to the piano?

Danielle Deadwyler: The piano is a living, breathing object. It's a living, breathing altar. It's a portal. It's a door. It takes up so much space in the design of the home, and it takes up so much space in the consciousness of everyone in the house. It's Big Mama-esque. Its language is just much more stealth and loud considering it's silent or it is being forced to be silent. That's haunting. It's dangerous for people who want to grow in any real way.

That's why it's pushing on both of them. Do you really get to grow because you get money? Do you really get to grow because you're going to get some land at a time where white supremacy and Jim Crow are not interested in any kind of Black American cultural growth? Are you really going to be upwardly mobile just because you have a job? Just because you're not in the South. Just because you align with a man of the cloth. Are you really going to grow because you present well? Is that true growth? The piano is questioning both of them, and everybody in the house therein gets to be questioned. It's pulling both of them in to really assess who they think they are and who they really want to be, and who they think they are, with or without each other.

Doreen St. Felix: The Piano Lesson, to me, is one of the more interesting Wilson plays because you see him confronting, I think, the ideas that he was raised with, given that he was so enamored of his mother. Wilson was obsessed with his mother and, in some ways, pedestalized her for that. When she didn't give him love, he was traumatized by that.

I think Bernice is such a prismatic character because we see him looking at the Black woman who is sometimes made into the Black matriarch from so many different perspectives. I was curious, when you came into this group of actors, many of them who had already either worked in the revival on Broadway that was directed by Latanya Richardson in 2022. You hadn't been a part of that group. Did you have conversations with your actors about who they thought Bernice was?

Danielle Deadwyler: No, I won't talk to them about who Bernice is. They don't know who Bernice is. No, we didn't have a conversation. None of the guys. Malcolm and I did. Malcolm and I dove. Malcolm and I talked about the spiritual trajectory. We talked about Zora Neale Hurston. We talked about--

Doreen St. Felix: Oh, that's really interesting. Can you say more? What about Zora?

Danielle Deadwyler: At the time, I had been reading her letters, that thick book of letters, this thing that people don't really do to communicate intimacies anymore. Just how bold she was, how playful and mysterious she was, how free. Bernice is not exactly that, or perhaps is working to get to that in the best way she can. She felt like an inspiration, like Zora's an inspiration for someone she could have witnessed and seen as a flicker, as a long-form figure. She's the person who's moving back and forth in time and between the spaces that are haunting Bernice. Bernice hadn't been back to Mississippi. Zora's going back and forth all the time. Bernice is entrenched in traditional Black American Christianity.

Doreen St. Felix: Zora's leaving the country. She's going to Haiti.

Danielle Deadwyler: Zora's leaving the country. She's going to Haiti. She's chilling in the south, learning about hoodoo. She's doing all of the things. That contrast just felt significant to hold onto, because the other end of the coin is the captain maternal that she witnessed in the form of her mother. This is the thing that made her fearful of a true self, of her authentic experience, of acknowledging it outwardly.

Doreen St. Felix: At one point, all the adults are downstairs and they're talking and they're arguing, and Maritha is alone upstairs. She feels a presence, a spectral presence. It is scary for her because a ghost is a ghost, but it's also scary because her mother, Bernice, has not actually given her the knowledge, has not done that transmission of family history. I wanted to hear you talk about the different kinds of histories that you have a relationship to as an artist, but also that this character has a relationship to being the oral, being the written record. How do you think history is made? How is it passed down? Just a light question.

Danielle Deadwyler: It's a light one. Light work. Oh, my goodness. History is largely orally passed down in Black communities. The information is spread in all kinds of ways, musically, in movement, in work, in modes of survival, in the way you practice at home, the way one cleans. That's a specific history. That's a whole bunch. I think about those when I think about the ways that it's most immediate.

Doreen St. Felix: Right.

Danielle Deadwyler: Yes.

Doreen St. Felix: Almost subconscious.

Danielle Deadwyler: Yes, the subconscious is major when it comes to passing on history.

Doreen St. Felix: Absolutely.

Danielle Deadwyler: That's why it's important to block out all of the books and block out all of the conversation in institutions, in educational spaces so that it can't be in your subconscious. If I get it out of this space, then I can assuredly keep you from questioning in any other. It won't be on your mind all the time. You won't be able to think negatively of others or question society or question your place in the world. History-making histories being developed have to take place in your quotidian life. It's imperative. You learn stuff from cats on the street corner who's just sitting there all day as much as you learn from a teacher in the building.

Doreen St. Felix: Absolutely. This is a film about family, about the difficulty of maintaining family, but it's also made by a family, which I find very interesting. I think the emergence of the Washington family as a troop in and of itself is interesting, because Malcolm directed, his brother John David plays boy Willie in the film, Olivia Washington, his sister, has a cameo in the film, Katia Washington produced. Of course, Denzel is the one who had said, "I'm going to commit to adapting every single one of the plays in August Wilson's American Century Cycle to film." The Piano Lesson is the third adaptation.

Danielle Deadwyler: Pauletta cameos as well.

Doreen St. Felix: Exactly. What's your impression of the family and their relationship to art?

Danielle Deadwyler: It seems that it surrounds the way they've built themselves. Everybody didn't come to it immediately, it seems. John David wouldn't play ball even though he knows he loved it. Malcolm was a big basketball player and thought to do a certain thing in a certain way at one time, but it's just been life force for them. When you get to a mature stage and realizing who you are by our forces combined, we are. You know what I mean? That's what that feels like.

Everybody has been doing things consistently, individually or in duos, like John David and Katia have been on set together already. You just see people who are bringing everybody into the fold now. They are a collective spirit unto themselves. Then you extend beyond. When you say family of sorts within me, literally this family, and then there's a family that's being made film-wise, and then there's a greater family that is being made audience-wise. That's what you do with art. I mean, that's what the stories are when we're on set, or the stories are when we have dinner, or the stories are as we tour. What does it mean to have been a part of these historical moments?

This is how histories are passed. Histories are passed by the dinner table. Histories are passed whilst you're making the thing. Histories are passed on set. Histories are passed while you're gardening. I'm thinking about Grandma. Histories are passed as we keep doing things together. You just continue, keep doing things together through struggle, through joy, through love making, through challenge. That's what the Washingtons feel like. You keep making stuff. You keep coming back to each other. You keep forging ahead, you keep rebirthing.

Doreen St. Felix: I think the word that keeps rolling around in my head is inheritance, because it's about inheriting from the generation prior, whether that is from actual people, their lives, their histories, but also the work that they created. With this film adaptation, which inherits prior stage reproductions, the TV adaptation, all I can think about is how interesting it will be to see in 10, 15, 20 years an artist react to this version. There's a sense of Wilson being almost like a creator of a folktale that every generation is then able to bring to bear their own experiences on.

Danielle Deadwyler: I welcome that. That makes it intergenerational. That makes it ripple. You get to see the wake continue.

David Remnick: The New Yorker's Doreen St. Felix speaking with Danielle Deadwyler. The Piano Lesson is in theaters and streaming on Netflix later this month.

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