A strong cast lifts 'The Piano Lesson'

  Members of the Washington family -- as in Denzel, Malcolm, and John David -- are playing a major role in preserving the literary legacy of the late August Wilson, at least on screen. It has been eight years since Denzel Washington directed and starred in Fences, but the deep connection between Wilson's material and the Washingtons continues.

    For the latest entry, The Piano Lesson, Denzel Washington serves as one of the film's producers. His son -- director Malcom Washington -- offers a screen version of The Piano Lesson, one of 10 pieces in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle. 

  Ma Rainy's Black Bottom (2020), another play in the cycle, was directed by George C. Wolfe with Denzel Washington as one of the film's producers.

   Marked by inspired acting and richly colored cinematography, The Piano Lesson features John David Washington, the oldest of Denzel's four children, as Boy Willie, a young man who arrives in Pittsburgh during the 1930s with hopes of selling an elaborately carved piano that has become a prized family possession. 

   When Boy Willie's sister Bernice (Danielle Deadwyler) refuses to sell, a drama about memory, family history, and heritage begins to take shape.

 A strong supporting cast adds to the movie's richness. Samuel L. Jackson portrays Doaker, a family uncle who presides over the house where Bernice and her 11-year-old daughter (Skylar Aleece Smith) also live. They've become the northern branch of the family.

 Corey Hawkins plays Avery, a Pittsburgh man who wants to marry Bernice and establish himself as a local preacher. Michael Potts appears as Doaker's older brother, a former piano player and heavy drinker who adds jolts of live wire energy whenever he's on screen. 

  Adapted from Wilson's play by Malcom Washington and Virgil Williams, the movie uses a ghostly reminder of the Old South to symbolize the lingering oppression that the family tried to escape by moving north. It struck me as a bit too literal.

  This part of the play, complete with an exorcism, rattles the screen but doesn't go down easily. Attempts to open the confinement of an essentially  one-room drama are semi-successful.

   But Wilson’s strength, his ability to find characters who encapsulate and enrich depictions of Black American life remains and his themes (family tensions, crushed dreams) have broad reach.

   Malcom Washington's debut directorial effort gives a strong ensemble cast an opportunity to bring memorable life to Wilson's richly drawn characters. They take full advantage of it. So should we.*

*The Piano Lesson currently is available for streaming on Netflix.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

      Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a big-screen adaptation of August Wilson's 1982 play, may make you sorrowful. It did me. Not only does the material contain a fair measure of heartbreak but it also marks the last performance by Chadwick Boseman, the actor who died of colon cancer last August at the age of 43. 

    Best known for playing T'Challa in Black Panther, Boseman also portrayed a variety of signature historical figures -- Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, and James Brown.  

     Ma Rainey offered Boseman a different kind of opportunity. He plays Levee, a mercurial trumpet player with a fiery temper and a big talent. Levee plays trumpet in a band assembled by Ma Rainey (Viola Davis), a woman known as Mother of the Blues.  Levee's talent may be too big for Ma, who keeps tight control over the music she performs.

     Director George C. Wolfe's playing with an A-team. In addition to Boseman and Davis, he's helped in his efforts by Glynn Turman, who plays Toledo, and Colman Domingo who portrays Cutler, two other members of Ma's musical ensemble.

     Although Wolfe attempts to open the play for the screen, there's no mistaking Ma Rainey’s origins as a powerhouse piece of theater, even as performances from Boseman and Davis ignite the sparks of conflict.

     Much of the movie takes place in a Chicago basement room where the band members await Ma's arrival. They're getting ready for a recording session, having just blown in from one of Ma's gangbuster tours of the Black south. The year: 1927.

     As portrayed by Davis, Ma is a woman of tornadic force. She wants things her way -- and if that means holding up the session while someone runs to the store to get her a bottle of Coca Cola then that's how things will be. 

    Ma has her eye on Levee for other than musical reasons. Her lover (Taylour Paige) has caught Levee's attention. He has no qualms about moving in on the highly territorial Ma, a woman so strong-willed she insists that her stuttering nephew (Dusan Brown) deliver a spoken introduction to one of her signature tunes. 

     A complex character, Levee wants to start his own band. He has a taste for independence: Wilson gives him a monologue that allows us to understand the raging forces that incite his mood shifts, as well as his refusal to kowtow to the older members of Ma's band.

     Wilson's play includes plenty of emotive fireworks and the supporting cast sets them off with old-pro precision that does justice to each character and to the movie's larger themes, among them, the way whites exploit black talent. 

     A fine cast makes us feel every bit of humor and sting in Wilson's writing, but Ma Rainey's Black Bottom has an effect Wilson couldn't have anticipated: It leaves us wondering at the cruel fate that ended Boseman's life too soon.

 

Theatrical power drives 'Fences'

Denzel Washington directs August Wilson's powerful family drama.

Anger and irony always have informed Denzel Washington's best work, and in his adaptation of August Wilson's play Fences, Washington finds a character that's equal to his taunting, incisive intelligence and his unwavering commitment to finding the dramatic truth of every character he plays.

Washington played the role of illiterate garbage man Troy Maxson in a 2010 Broadway revival of Wilson's 1983 play that also teamed him with Viola Davis, who again joins Washington to play Troy's long-suffering and sometimes indulgent wife. Davis's Rose has lived with Troy long enough be wise to his wiles: A former baseball player, ex-convict and a deeply opinionated man, Troy's a definite handful.

Set in Pittsburgh in 1957, the movie provides a context for understanding Troy. He was a good baseball player whose career peaked before Jackie Robinson broke the Major League color line. He says he played with men so good, Robinson couldn't even have made the same team as them. He's an embittered man who can serve up a sharp, piercing grin -- the kind of smile that cuts as much as it warms.

Fair to say that Fences, which Washington also directed and which takes place mostly in the backyard of the Maxson family home, survives as a play on film, but that doesn't mean that its great theatrical moments are in any way muted.

Both Washington and Davis scale their performances somewhere between stage and screen, and in his role a director, Washington clearly keeps allegiance with the rapid-fire exchanges in Wilson's text.

The movie's economical opening shows Troy riding the back of a garbage truck with his co-worker and pal Bono (Stephen Henderson). Troy and Bono empty garbage cans along the route. We get a quick glimpse of the white man who's driving the truck. That's pretty much all we need to know about the racial hierarchy of the Pittsburgh sanitation department in the 1950s, although the subject does come up later.

Visual flourishes aside, Washington allows the power of the performances to carry the day, obtaining fine work from a supporting cast that includes Russell Hornsby as Troy's musician son from a previous marriage, and Mykeleti Williamson as a World War II veteran who suffered brain damage as a result of his war wounds. Williamson's Gabriel wanders the neighborhood, a trumpet tied around his neck with a frayed piece of rope. He's the movie's holy fool.

But the film's key male relationship involves 53-year-old Troy and his younger son Cory (Jovan Adepo). Cory is a high school football star with college potential. Troy holds the young man back, insisting that he step into a dutiful but limited role as a worker. Learn a trade, Tory insists.

Put another way, Troy wants his son to become him, a desire that's partly selfish but also fueled by Troy's certainty, honed by experience, that sooner or later, the white world will betray an ambitious black man.

Fences fits into the best tradition of American family drama, a story about characters who carry the burden of their personalities as well as of their times and who sometimes suffer from a potent merger of the two.

For all of Troy's cruelty, the movie gives him the integrity of his convictions, and what I carried from the theater was a sense of the indelible rage that Washington breathed into Troy and the ability of his beleaguered wife to match it and go beyond it to a place of acceptance.

Despite some cinematic stiffness, Fences emerges as a movie with a love of the characters who populate it and a deep understanding of what they all must do to survive. Both in front of the camera and behind it, Washington has made a powerful piece of work.