Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. 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, he was a great actor.

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 and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and now Danielle Deadweiler stars in The Piano Lesson. A couple of years ago, Deadweiler gave an amazing performance in the film Till as Emmett Till's mother, and she was profiled in The New Yorker by Doreen Sanfelix.

I first saw Danielle Deadweiler perform in Station Eleven on HBO. And in Danielle's latest role, she plays Bernice in the film The Piano Lesson, a period piece set in 1936. So 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. It's 5 o'clock in the morning and you come in here with all this noise. You can't come like normal. I just got to bring all that noise with you. Oh, hell, woman, I was glad to see Dokey. I come 1,800 miles to see my sister. I figured she might want to get up and say hi. 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. The brother, Boy Willie, is played by John David Washington, who's, of course, Denzel's son.

And Malcolm Washington, Denzel's other son, directed the film. Here's staff writer Doreen Sanfelix speaking with Danielle Deadweiler. I think about Bernice as having made a tremendous contribution

kinetic movement when the story begins, right? Having made that journey to Pittsburgh, having made that so-called great migration during the Great Depression. That's so crazy. Because you said it like that, the great migration, it's literal, but internally, it's not. Right, exactly. It's not for her. And so when boy Willie comes busting in in the middle of the night... We go busting again. Laughter

With this like large energy and his secret purpose of wanting to get that piano back to sell it. Bernice, that fragile stability that she has is completely torn asunder. And 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. And so let's listen to that scene right now.

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 in an empty bed for what? For Pete Allen? In Malcolm Washington's adaptation of this play, we have flashback. So we see a young Bernice playing the piano for her mother, which leads me to ask,

How do you interpret the piano, you know, as both symbol of history, of tradition, of ancestry? What's your relationship to the piano? 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

in the consciousness of everyone in the house. It's Big Mama-esque. Mm-hmm. Its language is just much more stealth and loud, considering, right, it's silent, or it is being forced to be silent. Right. And that's haunting. It's dangerous for people who... who want to grow in any real way. And...

And that's why it's pushing on both of them. Like, 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? And 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? Yeah.

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. Danielle Deadweiler speaking with Doreen Sanfelix. More in a moment.

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Visit store.newyorker.com and enjoy 15% off with the code NEWYORKERPOD at checkout. That's store.newyorker.com. 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. And when she didn't give him love, he was, you know, traumatized by that. I think Bernice is such a prismatic character, because we see him looking at...

The Black woman who was 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 that?

Who they thought Bernice was? No, I don't want to talk to them about who Bernice is. They don't know who Bernice is. No, we didn't have a conversation. None of that 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. Oh, that's really interesting. Can you say more about, what about Zora? So at the time I had been reading her letters. That thick book of letters, right? This thing that people don't really do to communicate intimacies anymore. But just how bold she was. Playful and mysterious she was. How free and kind.

Bernice is not exactly that, or perhaps is working to get to that in the best way she can. So 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. Zora's leaving the country. She's going to Haiti. She's going to Haiti. She's chilling in the South learning about hoodoo. She's doing all of the things. So that contrast just felt significant to hold on to.

Because the other end of the coin is the Captain Maternal that she witnessed in the form of her mother. And this is the thing that made her fearful of a true self, of her authentic experience, of acknowledging it outwardly. You know, at one point, all the adults are downstairs and they're talking and they're arguing. And Maritha is alone upstairs and she feels a presence. A spectral presence. Yes.

And 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, you know, the written record artist.

How do you think history is made? How is it passed down? Just a light question. It's a light one. Light work. Oh, my goodness. History is largely orally passed down in Black communities. Information is spread in all kinds of ways. Musically, in movement, in work, in modes of survival, in the way you practice at home. Mm-hmm.

The way one cleans, that's a specific history. There's a whole bunch. But I think about those when I think about the ways that it's most immediate. Right. Yeah. Almost subconscious. Yeah. The subconscious is major when it comes to passing on history. Absolutely. That's why it's important to block out all of the books and block out all of the conversation in institutions and educational spaces. Yeah.

so that it can't be in your subconscious, right? 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. Like, it's imperative to...

You learn stuff from cats on the street corner, you know, who's just sitting there all day as much as you learn from a teacher in the building. 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. Mm-hmm.

I think the emergence of the Washington family as a troop in and of itself is interesting, right? Because Malcolm directed, his brother John David plays boy Willie in the film.

Olivia Washington, his sister, has a cameo in the film. Katya Washington produced. And 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. And so The Piano Lesson is the third adaptation. And Pauletta. And Pauletta. Exactly. What's your impression of the family and their relationship to art? It seems that it surrounds the way...

They've built themselves. And everybody didn't come to it immediately, it seems. John David wouldn't play ball, even though he knows he loved it. And 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. And 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. And everybody has been doing things consistently, individually, or in duos, like John David and Katya 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, and then you extend beyond.

So when you say family, it starts with 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 just, that's what you do with art. I mean, that's what the stories are when we all sit. Or the stories are when we have dinner. Or the stories are as we tour. Like, what does it mean to have been a part of art?

These historical moments. This is how, you know, histories are passed, right? 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. You know, I'm thinking about my grandma. Like, histories are passed as we keep doing things together. And you just continue. Keep doing things together through struggle, through joy, through lovemaking, through...

And 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. I think the word that keeps rolling around in my head is inheritance, right? Because it's about inheriting from the generation prior. Yeah.

Whether that is, you know, from actual people, their lives, their histories, but also the work that they created. And with this film adaptation, which inherits her stage reproductions, the TV adaptation, all I can think about is how interesting it will be to see in 10, 15, 20 years.

and artists react to this version. There's a sense of Wilson being almost like a creative, like a folk tale that every generation is then able to bring to bear their own experiences on. And I welcome that. That makes it intergenerational. That makes it ripple. You get to see the wake continue. ♪

The New Yorker's Doreen Sanfelix speaking with Danielle Deadweiler. The Piano Lesson is in theaters and streaming on Netflix later this month. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today, and thanks for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of TuneArts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.

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