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Danielle Brooks

Watch Now: Danielle Brooks on The Piano Lesson Broadway Revival

Danielle Brooks is heading back to Broadway, starring alongside Samuel L. Jackson and John David Wahington in the LaTanya Richardson Jackson-directed revival of The Piano Lesson. The Tony Award nominee and Grammy Award winner stopped by TODAY to discuss the upcoming revival, being welcomed into the Washington and Jackson family, and starring in the musical film adaptation of The Color Purple.

The Piano Lesson will be directed by Tony Award nominee LaTanya Richardson Jackson – who is making her Broadway directorial debut and will be the first woman to ever direct an August Wilson play on Broadway. The show stars Samuel L. Jackson as Doaker Charles, Danielle Brooks as Berniece, and John David Washington as Boy Willie. The cast also features Trai Byers as Avery, April Matthis as Grace, Ray Fisher as Lymon, and Michael Potts as Wining Boy.

The Piano Lesson is set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 1936. A brother and sister are locked in a war over the fate of a family heirloom: a piano carved with the faces of their ancestors. Only by revisiting history can the siblings endeavor to move forward. The Piano Lesson, wrote Frank Rich in The New York Times, “has its own spacious poetry, its own sharp angle on a nation’s history, its own metaphorical idea of drama and its own palpable ghosts that roar right through the upstairs window of the household where the action unfolds. Like other Wilson plays, The Piano Lesson seems to sing even when it is talking.”

Learn More About The Piano Lesson