Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington

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Speaker 8 I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 7 Denzel Washington, of course, is one of the great presences in American film, going back 40 plus years.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Fiola Davis starred in Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and now Danielle Deadweiler stars in the piano lesson.

Speaker 7 A couple of years ago, Dedweiler gave an amazing performance in the film Till as Emmett Till's mother, and she was profiled in The New Yorker by Doreen Sanfelique.

Speaker 8 I first saw Danielle Deadwiler perform in Station 11 on HBO. And in Danielle's latest role, she plays Bernice

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 It's a chamber drama about family, about the creation, the potential dissolution of the black family at the beginning of the 20th century.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 She's awoken by her brother, Boy Willie.

Speaker 9 It's five o'clock in the morning, and you come in here with all this noise.

Speaker 10 You can't come like normal. I just got to bring all that noise, wouldn't you?

Speaker 11 Oh, hell woman, I was glad to see Doki. I come 1,800 miles to see my sister.
I figured she might want to get up and say hi.

Speaker 8 Boy Willie has driven up from Mississippi to Pittsburgh to confront her about this piano.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Here's staff writer Doreen San Felix speaking with Danielle Dedweiler.

Speaker 8 I think about Bernice as having made a tremendous kinetic movement when the story begins, right?

Speaker 8 Having made that journey to Pittsburgh, having made that so-called great migration during the Great Depression. That's so crazy.

Speaker 12 Because you're saying it like that, the great migration, it's literal, but internally, it's not right, exactly.

Speaker 8 It's not for her. Yeah.

Speaker 8 And so when boy Willie comes busting in in the middle of the night, we go busting

Speaker 8 with this like large energy and his secret purpose of wanting to get that piano back to sell it. Yeah.

Speaker 8 Bernice, that fragile stability that she has is completely torn asunder.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 She doesn't want to play it, but she wants to keep it.

Speaker 8 And so let's listen to that scene right now.

Speaker 9 Mama Ola polished this piano with her tears for 17 years.

Speaker 9 For 17 years, she rubbed on it till her hands bled.

Speaker 9 Then she rubbed the blood in, mixed it with the rest of the blood on it.

Speaker 9 Every day God breathed life into her body.

Speaker 10 She rubbed and cleaned and polished and prayed over.

Speaker 8 Play something for me, Bernice.

Speaker 12 Play something for me, Bernice.

Speaker 10 Play something for me, Bernice.

Speaker 8 Every day

Speaker 10 I cleaned it up for you. Play something for me, Bernice.

Speaker 10 You always talking about your daddy, but you'll never stop to look at what his foolishness cost your mama.

Speaker 8 17 years worth of cold nights and an empty bed for what?

Speaker 8 For a piano?

Speaker 8 For a piece of wood?

Speaker 8 In Malcolm Washington's adaptation of this play, we have flashback.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 8 So we see a young Bernice playing the piano for her mother,

Speaker 8 which leads me to ask:

Speaker 8 how do you interpret the piano, you know, as both a symbol of history, of tradition, of ancestry? What's your relationship to the piano?

Speaker 12 The piano is a living, breathing

Speaker 8 object.

Speaker 12 It's a living, breathing

Speaker 12 altar.

Speaker 12 It's a portal. It's a door.
It takes up so much space

Speaker 12 in the design of the home.

Speaker 12 And it takes up so much space in the consciousness of everyone in the house.

Speaker 12 It's big mama-esque.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 12 It its language is just much more stealth

Speaker 12 and loud, considering, right, it's silent, or it is being forced to be silent.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 12 And that's haunting. It's dangerous for people who

Speaker 8 want to grow in any

Speaker 8 real way.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 that's why it's pushing on both of them. Like, do you really get to grow because you get money?

Speaker 12 Do you really get to grow because you're going to get some land at a time where

Speaker 12 white supremacy and Jim Crow are not interested in any kind of black American cultural growth?

Speaker 12 And are you really going to be upwardly mobile

Speaker 12 just because you have a job, just because you're not in the South, just because you align with a man of the cloth?

Speaker 12 Are you really going to grow because you present well?

Speaker 8 Is that true growth?

Speaker 12 The piano is questioning both of them. And everybody in the house, they're in gets to be questioned.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 7 Danielle Dedweiler speaking with Doreen San Felix.

Speaker 8 More in a moment.

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Speaker 8 The piano lesson to me is one of the more interesting Wilson plays because you see him confronting, I think,

Speaker 8 the ideas that he was raised with, given that he was so enamored of his mother. Right.
Wilson was obsessed with his mother and in some ways pedestalized her for that.

Speaker 8 And when she didn't give him love, he was, you know, traumatized by that.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 I was curious, when you came into this group of actors, many of them who had already either worked in the revival

Speaker 8 on Broadway that was directed by Latania Richardson in 2022,

Speaker 8 you hadn't been a part of that group. Did you have conversations with your actors about who they thought Bernice was? No, I won't talk to them about who Bernice is.

Speaker 8 They don't know who Bernice is.

Speaker 12 No, we didn't have a conversation. None of the guys.

Speaker 8 Malcolm and I did. Malcolm and I dove.

Speaker 12 Malcolm and I talked about the spiritual trajectory.

Speaker 12 We talked about Zornil Hurston. We talked about...

Speaker 8 Oh, that's really interesting. Can you say more about what about Zora?

Speaker 12 So at the time, I had been reading her letters.

Speaker 8 That thick book of letters, right?

Speaker 12 This thing that people don't really do to communicate intimacies anymore. But just how how bold she was,

Speaker 8 how

Speaker 12 playful and mysterious she was,

Speaker 8 how free.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 12 Bernice is

Speaker 12 not exactly that,

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 as a flicker, as a long form figure.

Speaker 12 She's the person who's moving back and forth in time and between the spaces that are haunting Bernice.

Speaker 12 Bernice hadn't been back to Mississippi.

Speaker 12 Zora's going back and forth all the time.

Speaker 12 Bernice is entrenched in traditional black American Christianity.

Speaker 8 Zora's leaving the country. Zora.

Speaker 12 She's going to Haiti.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 because the other end of the coin is the captain maternal that she witnessed in the form of her mother.

Speaker 12 And this is the thing that made her fearful of

Speaker 12 a true self, of her authentic experience, of acknowledging it outwardly.

Speaker 8 You know, at one point, all the adults are downstairs and they're talking and they're arguing. Maritha is alone upstairs and she feels a presence,

Speaker 8 a spectral presence.

Speaker 8 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

Speaker 8 transmission of family history.

Speaker 8 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,

Speaker 8 being

Speaker 8 the written record.

Speaker 8 How do you think history is made? How is it passed down? Just a light question.

Speaker 8 It's a light one, light work.

Speaker 12 Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 12 History is

Speaker 12 largely orally passed down in black communities.

Speaker 12 Information is spread in all kinds of ways, musically,

Speaker 8 in movement,

Speaker 8 in

Speaker 8 work,

Speaker 12 in modes of survival, in the way you practice at home,

Speaker 12 the way one cleans.

Speaker 12 That's a specific history.

Speaker 8 That's a whole bunch.

Speaker 12 But I think about those when I think about the ways that it's most immediate.

Speaker 8 Right. Yeah.
Almost subconscious. Yeah.

Speaker 12 The subconscious is major when it comes to passing on history.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 8 That's why it's important to like block out all of the books

Speaker 12 and block out all of the conversation in institutions and educational spaces so that it can't be in your subconscious, right?

Speaker 12 If I get it out of this space, then I can assuredly keep you from questioning in any other.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 History making, histories being developed have to take place in your quotidian life. Like it's imperative.

Speaker 12 You learn stuff from cats on the street corner, you know, who's just sitting there all day,

Speaker 12 as much as you learn from a teacher in the building.

Speaker 8 Absolutely. This is a film about family, about the

Speaker 8 difficulty of maintaining family.

Speaker 8 But it's also made by a family, which I find find very interesting.

Speaker 8 I

Speaker 8 think the emergence of the Washington family as a troop in and of itself

Speaker 8 is interesting,

Speaker 8 right? Because Malcolm directed.

Speaker 8 His brother John David plays Boy Willie in the film. Olivia Washington, his sister, has a cameo in the film.
Katya Washington produced.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 And so the piano lesson is the third adaptation.

Speaker 12 And Pauletta.

Speaker 8 And Pauletta.

Speaker 8 Exactly. What's your impression of the family and their relationship to art?

Speaker 12 It seems that it surrounds the way

Speaker 12 they've

Speaker 8 built themselves.

Speaker 12 And everybody didn't come to it immediately, it seems.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 12 John David wouldn't play ball, even though he knows he loved it, right?

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 8 and

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 life force for them.

Speaker 12 And when you get to a mature stage

Speaker 12 and realizing who you are,

Speaker 12 by our forces combined, we are.

Speaker 12 You know what I mean?

Speaker 12 That's what that feels like. And everybody has been doing things consistently individually or in duos like John David and Katie have been on set together already.

Speaker 8 And, you know,

Speaker 12 you just see people who are

Speaker 12 bringing everybody into the fold now.

Speaker 12 They are a collective spirit unto themselves. And then you extend beyond.
So when you say family of sorts within me, like literally this family. And then there's a family that's being made film-wise.

Speaker 12 And then there's a greater family that is being made audience-wise.

Speaker 8 That's just,

Speaker 12 that's what you do with art.

Speaker 12 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. Like, what does it mean to have been a part of these historical moments?

Speaker 12 This is how, you know, histories are past, right? Right.

Speaker 12 Histories are past by the dinner table. histories are past whilst you're making the thing

Speaker 12 histories are past on set histories are past while you're gardening you know I'm thinking about grandma like histories are past as we keep doing things together

Speaker 12 and you just continue keep doing things together through struggle through joy through lovemaking through challenge And that's what the Washingtons feel like. You keep making stuff.

Speaker 12 You keep coming back to each other. You keep

Speaker 8 forging ahead.

Speaker 12 You keep rebirthing.

Speaker 8 I think

Speaker 8 the word that keeps rolling around in my head is inheritance, right?

Speaker 8 Because it's about

Speaker 8 inheriting from the generation prior, whether that is, you know, from actual people, their lives, their histories, but also the work that they created.

Speaker 8 And with this film adaptation, which inherits prior stage reproductions, the TV adaptation.

Speaker 8 All I can think about is how interesting it will be to see in 10, 15, 20 years,

Speaker 8 an artist react to this version.

Speaker 8 There's a sense of Wilson being almost like

Speaker 8 a creator of like a folk tale that every generation is then able to bring to bear. their own experiences on.
And I welcome that.

Speaker 12 That makes it intergenerational. That makes it

Speaker 12 ripple. You get to see the wake continue.

Speaker 7 The New Yorker's Doreen San-Felique speaking with Danielle Dedweiler. The piano lesson is in theaters and streaming on Netflix later this month.
I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 7 That's our program for today, and thanks for listening. See you next time.

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Speaker 15 It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at Whitehouse Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.

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