The Surprising Artwork That Inspired Netflix’s ‘The Piano Lesson,’ a New Movie Based on August Wilson’s Award-Winning Play

November 12

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Reflecting on Romare Bearden’s art, playwright August Wilson wrote, “What I saw was Black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness.”
David Lee / Netflix

The Piano Lesson was the play that confirmed August Wilson’s genius. First staged in 1987, the production earned the renowned Black playwright his second Pulitzer Prize, cementing his status “in the pantheon of American masters,” says filmmaker Virgil Williams.

Like much of Wilson’s oeuvre, The Piano Lesson explores questions of family, race and ambition in a powerful but relatable fashion. Set in Pittsburgh in 1936, the play primarily unfolds in the home of Doaker Charles, a former railroad worker turned cook. Doaker’s nephew, Boy Willie, travels up to the city from Mississippi, intent on seizing and selling the prized family piano. He wants to use the proceeds to purchase the land where his ancestors were enslaved. But Boy Willie’s sister, Berniece, won’t let him take the instrument, which has been in the family for generations and features the faces of long-dead relatives carved into the wood.

“How is the brutal burden of slavery to be at once remembered and overcome?” asked the New York Times in its 1987 review of the play. “For Berniece, the piano must be preserved untouched, as a sentimental shrine to a family’s suffering. For Boy Willie, the piano is its cold cash value—the stake for a free man’s future.”

The Piano Lesson | Official Trailer | Netflix

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Wilson’s play has seen a range of productions and adaptations, from a 1995 Hallmark movie to a 2022 Broadway revival starring Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington and Danielle Brooks as Doaker, Boy Willie and Berniece, respectively. Now, a new take on The Piano Lesson is headed to the silver screen, with Jackson and John David (the elder son of actor Denzel Washington) reprising their roles from the stage production and Danielle Deadwyler joining the cast as Berniece. Co-produced by Denzel and directed by his younger son, Malcolm Washington, the film is currently playing in select theaters and will start streaming on Netflix on November 22.

“There’s no right or wrong in the play,” says Williams, who co-wrote the movie’s screenplay with Malcolm. “Both Boy Willie and Berniece are right. We wanted future generations of Americans to see the story.”

Romare Bearden and The Piano Lesson

Born in Pittsburgh in 1945, Wilson was the son of an absentee German immigrant father and a Black cleaning woman. He began his career as a poet, then moved to Minnesota, where he shifted focus to playwriting. Though Wilson initially struggled to establish a name for himself, he soon found favor with his authentic, hopeful and dignified portrayals of the African American experience. Jitney, the first installment in his ten-work Pittsburgh Cycle, a chronicle of life in the Pennsylvania city during the 20th century, debuted in 1982. Just two years later, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was a critical and financial triumph on Broadway. Then, in 1987, Fences landed Wilson his first Pulitzer Prize.

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The Piano Lesson (Homage to Mary Lou), Romare Bearden, 1983

Wilson’s next Pulitzer-winning play drew on an unexpected source of inspiration: a 1983 print by American artist Romare Bearden. The artwork, called The Piano Lesson (Homage to Mary Lou), depicts a music teacher standing over her student in a Southern parlor. It was inspired, in turn, by French Modernist Henri Matisse, who in 1916 and 1917 created two paintings with similar titles. Throughout his career, Bearden mixed a variety of styles, including Cubism and Dada, while drawing on his own unique collage technique and his personal experiences as a Black man from the South. Bearden, who was born in North Carolina but grew up in New York and Pittsburgh after the Great Migration brought his family north, was also a songwriter and author.

The Piano Lesson didn’t mark the first time that Wilson was directly inspired by Bearden’s work. His 1984 play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was originally named Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket, mirroring the title of a 1978 Bearden collage. Claude Purdy, the co-founder of St. Paul’s Penumbra Theater, where a number of Wilson’s plays premiered, introduced the playwright to Bearden’s work in the fall of 1977.

Wilson was instantly enthralled by what he saw in a book of Bearden’s art, says theater critic Patti Hartigan, author of August Wilson: A Life and a friend of the late writer. In 1990, Wilson even wrote the foreword to a biography of the artist, in which he broke down how much he was inspired by Bearden’s art.

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Artist Romare Bearden

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

“What for me had been so difficult, Bearden made seem so simple, so easy,” Wilson recalled. “What I saw was Black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value and exalted its presence. It was the art of a large and generous spirit that defined not only the character of Black American life but also its conscience.” The playwright added, “My response was visceral. I was looking at myself in ways I hadn’t thought of before and have never ceased to think of since.”

Diedra Harris-Kelley, co-director of the nonprofit Romare Bearden Foundation, says that Bearden was so fascinated by the moment captured in The Piano Lesson that he worked on multiple versions of the scene. “A lot of work he did over and over again,” says Harris-Kelley. “Sometimes it was about the composition; sometimes it was about a character.”

Harris-Kelley believes that Bearden was particularly interested in the young person at the piano in his composition. The full name of the piece references Mary Lou Williams, a jazz pianist, writer and composer who, like Wilson and Bearden, was from a family that moved from the American South to Pittsburgh.

“For Bearden, The Piano Lesson is about the legacy and impact of jazz music, and the legacy of an older person passing down something at the piano,” says Harris-Kelley. While the teacher standing over her student is the work’s central image, other elements suggest a larger story. “Bearden is a narrative storyteller,” Harris-Kelley explains. The lamp, the mirror on the wall, the armoire in the background and the fact that the lesson is unfolding in a parlor all evoke the “trappings of a middle-class family or at least a family that has aspirations for the middle class.”

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Mary Lou Williams, circa 1946

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Romare Bearden and August Wilson

Hartigan thinks that Wilson asked himself numerous question after seeing the lithograph, the answers to which then inspired his own story. This was a tactic that the critic saw her friend use on many occasions. “Sometimes he would do this while you were talking to him, and you didn’t know if he was in character or if he was August Wilson talking to you,” Hartigan recalls. “There are times when I looked really stupid because I thought he was talking to me, then [I figured] out he’s in character.”

When it comes to The Piano Lesson, Hartigan theorizes that Wilson would have asked himself questions like, “Who are these people?” “Where do they live?” “Where did they get this piano?”

In Wilson’s version of events, the central conflict dates back to 1911, when brothers Doaker, Wining Boy and Boy Charles stole the titular instrument from Sutter, a man who’d enslaved their family before the Civil War. In retaliation, a lynch mob killed Boy Charles. Twenty-five years later, when Boy Charles’ son, Boy Willie, attempts to take the piano from Pittsburgh, he discovers that his sister, Berniece, hasn’t yet told her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha, about its storied history. Neither Berniece nor Maretha has played the piano in years, but the former still refuses to give it up because it’s a family heirloom. When Sutter’s ghost repeatedly haunts Doaker’s home, Boy Willie wants to scream at and confront it, while Berniece realizes that playing the piano and invoking the aid of her ancestors is a more effective way to calm the restless spirit.

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Playwright August Wilson

The Huntington via Flickr under CC BY 2.0

Williams says that he and Malcolm “loved and really connected to the ghost story of it all, especially how the genre and the story allowed us to explore haunted trauma.” He adds that the co-authors’ ambition was to stay as true as possible to the play, especially as certain set pieces were already so ripe for a cinematic experience.

Hartigan says that one of The Piano Lesson’s main themes is legacy. That especially comes through with the play’s ending. “There’s something so beautiful when Boy Willie tells Berniece to keep the piano, keep playing it, and tell the story to Maretha so that she can repeat history,” the critic adds. With The Piano Lesson and Berniece, Wilson sought to depict a strong, empowered female character. In the middle of the play, Berniece delivers a powerful speech in which she criticizes how people tell her to get married to avoid being alone, pointing out that they’d never do the same to a man. “She’s a little depressed. But that speech is a victory for her,” Hartigan says. “She’s standing up for herself. It’s so beautiful.”

Wilson was candid about Bearden’s influence on him, and Bearden was aware of Wilson’s work, too, once joking, “He could have at least sent me tickets to [his] show.” But the pair never actually met. Bearden died at age 76 on March 12, 1988, two years before The Piano Lesson premiered on Broadway on April 16, 1990. Wilson died of liver cancer at age 60 in 2005.

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Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington reprise their roles from the 2022 Broadway revival of The Piano Lesson.

David Lee / Netflix

What makes the missed connection all the more tantalizing is the fact that Wilson knew where Bearden lived on Canal Street and repeatedly walked past his apartment. The playwright never “had the guts to go up and knock on the door,” says Hartigan. “He said that if he had, he would have tipped his hat to [Bearden].”

Wilson’s admission that his writing was inspired by Bearden’s art means the two will always be connected. “Their work reflected life back to us in a way that we would never have put it together,” says Harris-Kelley. “They tapped into African American life, culture and history, and used legacy to help move people forward. But their works are still stories about the everyman. They wanted to use specific instances from their own lives to say something larger about humanity. That’s why their work resonated with a lot of people, not just African Americans. They brought the world together with their art.”