Tony Award nominee Danielle Brooks is back on Broadway, starring in The Piano Lesson at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Brooks stopped by The View to discuss the August Wilson play, reprising her Tony-nominated performance in the upcoming The Color Purple musical film adaptation, and more.
The Broadway revival of The Piano Lesson is directed by Tony Award nominee LaTanya Richardson Jackson – who is making her Broadway directorial debut and is 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.”