August Wilson’s great play The Piano Lesson, perhaps his defining work, has returned to Broadway (at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre through January 29) for the first time since its 1990 triumph there, shortly after it won the Pulitzer Prize. The revival has a few rough edges, but it’s still one of the most important offerings of the season. It’s also an implicit rebuttal to the party-line propaganda on race that has overwhelmed the stage in recent years.
The revival has a pleasing symmetry: Samuel L. Jackson, then an unknown, originated the part of the young Southern hothead Boy Willie when the play debuted at the Yale Rep in 1987. Now Jackson has returned to portray Willie’s sensible uncle Doaker Charles and is appearing for the first time onstage under the direction of his wife, LaTanya Richardson Jackson. The younger man is played by John David Washington, whose father Denzel is one of the foremost interpreters of Wilson’s work. Washington père has done much to keep Wilson in the public eye since the playwright’s 2005 death, having starred in the stage and screen versions of Fences and produced an incendiary film iteration of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for Netflix a couple of years ago.
Ma Raineystarred a volcanic Chadwick Boseman in the lead role, a character very similar to the one John David Washington is taking on now. Both plays develop Wilson’s great theme: that though massive historic injustices have been visited upon black folks, these
