Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington and Danielle Brooks are set to star in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.
Tony Award nominee LaTanya Richardson Jackson is attached to direct the staging, making her Broadway directorial debut. She will also become the first woman to direct a Wilson play on Broadway. Arriving more than 30 years after its Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 1990, The Piano Lesson will begin performances at the St. James Theater this fall on Sept. 19. The show will run for 16 weeks.
The production marks Washington’s Broadway debut in the same role Samuel L. Jackson originated at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1987, later serving as understudy in the role during The Piano Lesson’s Broadway run. Jackson last appeared on Broadway in the 2011 production of The Mountaintop, starring opposite Angela Bassett. Brooks co-starred with Cynthia Erivo and Jennifer Hudson in 2015’s Tony-winning revival of The Color Purple.
“August Wilson dedicated his life and devoted his talent to dramatizing our stories and our experience,” Richardson said in a statement. “In doing so, he forever changed what it means to be Black in America. His plays built empathy, created community and showed us the power of representation. The Piano Lesson is one of his most enduring, profound and consequential masterpieces, and I am reveling in this opportunity to present it to Broadway audiences for the first time since its premiere.”
The fourth play in Wilson’s celebrated and groundbreaking American Century Cycle, The Piano Lesson follows a brother and sister pitted against one another in Pittsburgh’s Hill District during 1936 over the fate of a family heirloom — a piano carved with the faces of their ancestors. Washington will star as Boy Willie opposite Brooks as Berniece, the feuding sibling-duo who must revisit their past to move forward into the future. Jackson will star as their uncle Doaker Charles, in whose home the story takes place.
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SOURCE: The Hollywood Reporter, Abbey White
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