Wrestling with the ghosts of ‘The Piano Lesson’
AP Film Writer
The August Wilson adaptation “The Piano Lesson” is an impassioned family drama but it is also a profound ghost story. For the Charles family, wrangling over a family heirloom — a piano — is a reckoning with their family’s past, and the legacy of slavery. At its bone-rattling crescendo, it’s an exorcism. For a play about ancestors and heritage, the new film adaptation was fittingly a work of family. It’s the third in a sterling string of Wilson adaptations produced by Denzel Washington, following “Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” But it’s the first Washington mostly left to his family to make. “The Piano Lesson” debuts Friday on Netflix.
