IN The Piano Lesson, the fourth play in legendary playwright August Wilson's acclaimed Pittsburgh Cycle, two siblings grapple with the shadow of their father's history. Wilson's seminal tales have long been layups for film adaptations, but the new silver screen take on The Piano Lesson, due this November from Netflix, offers a delicious meta-textual spin: John David Washington stars as one of the siblings-Boy Willie, the boisterous schemer with no time for family sentiment-in one of his most arresting roles yet. The director? His younger brother, Malcolm, making his feature-film debut.
The irony isn't lost on the Washingtons, the eldest (John David) and youngest (Malcolm) children of Denzel, a man with a foregone claim to the Greatest Actor of All Time title, who's not too shabby of a director himself. It's a beautiful September morning in the waning days of summer, and the brothers are meeting for breakfast at the Bowery Hotel in New York. The family resemblance, as well as their distinctiveness, is almost immediately evident. Malcolm, 33, pulls up in a vintage France soccer jersey and pants-casual, chic, ready to wax poetic about art, his influences. He's still new to all of this, especially compared with John David, 40, who's been working steadily in the business for nearly a decade. He's already seated, wearing a Drake tee (he's bipartisan, he stresses, having worn a Kendrick Lamar tee the day prior) and shorts-relaxed but ready for action at a moment's notice. He speaks with the poise of an athlete at a postgame presser, but he's not above bursting into an earned fit of laughter or, as was more often the case, shifting the spotlight to praise his brother.
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