Review: Samuel L. Jackson stars in a not-always-in-tune Broadway revival of ‘The Piano Lesson’

Spoiled as we’ve been with very good revivals of August Wilson performs, it’s nearly complicated to come across a high-profile Broadway manufacturing that doesn’t fairly dwell as much as expectations.

“The Piano Lesson,” which opened Thursday on the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, appeared on paper to be one of many can’t-miss choices of the autumn season.

Samuel L. Jackson leads a top-notch solid within the first Broadway revival of one of many Pulitzer Prize-winning works in Wilson’s decade-by-decade 10-play cycle chronicling Black life in twentieth century America. What might probably go fallacious?

Nothing, actually. However one thing hasn’t gone fairly proper. Ensemble chemistry is a fragile matter. The actors are all high-quality individually, however their magic fails to coalesce.

The relationships of the characters are curiously imprecise right here. The affections, resentments, money owed and loyalties of the relations and mates who’ve gathered on the residence of Doaker Charles (Jackson) are continuously being rehashed. However the ties that bind this crew in 1936 Pittsburgh appear extra reported than inhabited.

The drama revolves round a valuable heirloom, an upright piano carved with the faces of the household’s ancestors. The destiny of this vintage is being contested by two siblings: Berniece (Danielle Brooks), a widow who has moved along with her younger daughter into the house of her Uncle Doaker after her husband’s homicide, and Boy Willie (John David Washington), who has come up from the South to fetch the piano so he can promote it and purchase the land his ancestors toiled on.

Berniece is afraid of the ghosts that cling to the piano, however she has change into the guardian of its legacy, which incorporates untold household trauma. Boy Willie needs to make use of the one factor his father needed to give him in order that he doesn’t must equally spend his complete life farming on another person’s land.

Wilson sees all sides of the battle. Berniece’s reverence for the previous is each noble and imprisoning. She has settled quietly into a lifetime of mourning. Boy Willie is bold for a greater future, however he’s additionally rash, reckless and fueled by a barely containable rage.

“The Piano Lesson,” even in a in some way lackluster revival, has well timed knowledge to impart — the knowledge of unresolved questions. What ought to our relationship to historical past be? How can we stability the necessity of remembering with the crucial of letting go? If the previous have to be confronted to keep away from being repeated, the place is the road between a wholesome reckoning and a harmful haunting?

After listening to Boy Willie’s defensive rationale for promoting the piano, Doaker replies, “Ain’t no person stated nothing about who’s proper and who’s fallacious.” He doesn’t wish to insert himself in a household struggle, however he additionally appears to share his playwright’s view that such dilemmas can’t be determined with out being patiently and painfully labored by way of.

There aren’t any shortcuts in therapeutic the injuries of household or society. Wilson’s dedication to centering Black lives within the theater entails an embrace of dialectical wrestle. The evil of racism is an inescapable truth. However the battle of the characters, who’re determined to discover a path ahead for themselves, isn’t between proper and fallacious however between imperfect potentialities, every with its personal simple declare.

Sadly, the seams of the play present on this revival, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, an actress with an unflinching regard for troublesome truths, who’s married to Samuel L. Jackson. An clever sensitivity guides the manufacturing, however the plot appears cumbersome and the speak can get cumbersome with all of the exposition and thematic underlining.

Brooks, who might be reprising her Tony-nominated portrayal of Sofia within the upcoming movie model of the musical “The Shade Purple,” powerfully conveys Berniece’s sorrowful resolve. She’s sturdy regardless of all of the scars of historical past, however there’s one thing undifferentiated in her struggling.

Washington, an actor following within the footsteps of his father, Denzel Washington, accentuates Boy Willie’s youthful vehemence. He’s decided to declare himself a person, irrespective of that he doesn’t but possess the maturity.

The standoff between Brooks’ Berniece and Washington’s Boy Willie is vigorously laid out. But it surely’s not at all times obvious that these characters are grappling with the identical harrowing previous.

In an ensemble efficiency freed from grandstanding, Jackson by no means makes an attempt to show the play’s host and witness into the central protagonist. His presence is recessive at instances to an nearly shocking diploma, but it surely lends the manufacturing a gravity that doesn’t want many phrases to make itself felt.

Veteran Michael Potts appears a bit too effectively preserved for Wining Boy, Doaker’s washed-up musician brother. However Potts brings his common crisp authority to the raucous tales of this compulsive raconteur.

Ray Fisher almost steals the present as Lymon, who has traveled up from the South with Boy Willie. Slower of speech and extra deliberate of motion than his impetuous buddy, he’s seeking to begin a brand new life for himself up North, probably with Berniece, if he can reawaken the sensual longing she has put behind her — and evidently doesn’t really feel for Avery (Trai Byers), the novice preacher who’s been pursuing her for years.

It onerous to really feel romantic when your piano is a magnet for ghosts. Berniece has to banish the stressed useless earlier than she will even think about her private happiness. She has formidable work to do, however nobody ought to underestimate her soul’s energy.

The realism of the manufacturing (dimly lighted by Japhy Weideman on Beowulf Boritt’s plausible set) has bother accommodating the jarring interruptions from the supernatural realm. It’s one other occasion through which the revival simply can’t appear to tug itself collectively.

However “The Piano Lesson” is welcome even in a manufacturing that compares much less favorably to Ruben Santiago-Hudson‘s 2012 off-Broadway revival. Exterior of the Ethel Barrymore, a bunch of us stood round discussing the play after it let loose. The dialog continued at a late-night restaurant. However how might it not with a lot historical past at stake — the characters’ and our personal?