Listener supported, WNYC Studios.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Denzel Washington, of course, is one of the great presences in American film, going back 40-plus years.

But he's also made his mark as a producer.

Specifically, Washington has set out to adapt for film 10 plays by the late August Wilson, the 10 plays known as the century cycle.

Viola Davis starred in Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and now Danielle Deadweiler stars in the piano lesson.

A couple of years ago, Deadweiler gave an amazing performance in the film Till as Emmett Till's mother,

and she was profiled in The New Yorker by Doreen San Felix.

I first saw Danielle Deadweiler perform in Station 11 on HBO.

And in Danielle's latest role, she plays Bernice in the film The Piano Lesson, a period

piece set in 1936, so we have the backdrop of the Great Depression and the Great Migration.

It's a chamber drama about family, about the creation, the potential dissolution of the Black family at the beginning of the 20th century.

In the piano lesson, the Charles family is rent-asunder by this object, this talisman, which is a piano,

on which are carved the likenesses of their ancestors.

Bernice is the sister of the Charles family. She is a widow. She has lost her husband.

She is a mother to young Maritha. We meet Bernice in the middle of the night.

She's awoken by her brother, Boy Willie.

It's five o'clock in the morning,

then you come in here with all this noise.

You can't come like normal.

She's got to bring all that noise with you.

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