Read The Screenplay Adapted From August Wilson Play

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay collection spotlighting the scripts behind the awards season’s buzziest motion pictures continues with Netflix‘s The Piano Lesson, the variation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning August Wilson play that was directed by Malcolm Washington in his feature-helming debut. Washington co-wrote the script with Virgil Williams, the Oscar-nominated so-screenwriter of 2017’s Mudbound.

The movie, which contains a stellar ensemble together with Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Michael Potts, Erykah Badu, Danielle Deadwyler and Corey Hawkins, had its world premiere on the Telluride Film Festival. It hit theaters in early November and started streaming on Netflix on November 22, and has since picked up a Finest First Characteristic Spirit Awards nomination for Malcolm Washington and several other supporting actress noms for Deadwyler.

Malcolm and Williams teamed to work on the script (“some days with a pickaxe, others with the tender bristles of a small brush delicately unearthing valuable gems,” Malcolm says) to get to the foundation of Wilson’s play, the newest within the playwright’s Century Cycle collection to be tailored to the display. (Earlier cycle performs included Netflix’s personal Ma Rainey’s Black Backside in 2020, and 2016’s Fences, tailored by the playwright himself earlier than his dying in 2005 and directed by Denzel Washington, incomes 4 Oscar noms together with for the screenplay, and a Finest Actress win for Viola Davis; Denzel and Todd Black produced each Fences and Piano Lesson.)

In Piano Lesson, the story is ready within the Nineteen Thirties and revolves across the Charles household’s prized heirloom piano. One brother (John David Washington) plans to construct the household fortune by promoting it, whereas one sister (Deadwyler) will go to any lengths to carry onto the sole vestige of the household’s heritage. Their uncle (Jackson) tries to mediate, however even he can’t maintain again the ghosts of the previous. 

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“Each household has a historical past, tales from the previous that inform the current; an origin story,” Malcolm Washington says. “Finally this story is far greater than me and my household — it, just like the Black American expertise, is an inter-connected net of tales that span area and time.”

Along with Mudbound, Williams, the longtime Prison Minds writer-producer, beforehand teamed with Denzel Washington, co-writing the Washington-directed 2021 drama A Journal For Jordan starring Michael B. Jordan and Chanté Adams.

Try Malcolm Washington and Williams’ A Piano Lesson script under.