Joe Skinner: I recently visited Midtown Manhattan historic Ethel Barrymore Theatre – a Broadway stage that first opened its doors in 1928. You can feel the hundreds of productions that have gone through this stage. And in an era of 4K television and streaming and remote work, that live theater experience feels more palpable than ever. In my seat, the cover of the playbill featured three larger than life faces: Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and John David Washington. They’re the stars of Broadway’s first revival of August Wilson’s 1987 play, “The Piano Lesson.” And it’s John David Washington’s first time on the Broadway stage.
John David Washington: In theater, there seem to be more ownership in the moments that are present, that are had between the actors. There’s no editing, you know, so in the film, you know, you might have a great day, a great scene with your partner. You are both listening, responding organically, and they cut it up with music and they get angles that don’t make sense, and the tonality of it is foreign to you when you see it. It’s not our medium, not necessarily. But in theater, it’s all on the actors and you’ve got to deliver it to the people watching you live.
Joe Skinner: “The Piano Lesson” has a simple stage design: a modestly furnished working class living room. The focal point in this room is an old family piano. But on this stage, it’s really the actors who command the most attention. And John David Washington has been preparing for this moment for a long time. He was around six years old when he saw his father, Denzel Washington, perform on stage at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
John David Washington: “Richard the Third.” When I saw my father on stage for the first time. I was a kid. It was like a magic trick, you know, because he didn’t talk like that at the house. And then he just got on stage and it transformed into this other being with these words. I remember he would walk me around, you know, the city when he was doing it and recite the lines. I always used to giggle when he said I used to love the lines, “Now is the winter of our discontent.” I never knew what that meant, but I just knew those words and I thought it was so cool. I just thought it was magical.
Joe Skinner: I’m Joe Skinner and this is American Masters Creative Spark. In each episode we bring you the story of how artists bring their creative work to life. Today, John David Washington takes us on a journey through his personal history and his unique career paths through athletics and acting and how it’s contributed to his creative process.
John David Washington: My pops told me it’s a full-contact sport this theater is and I agree. I tend to agree with that statement.
Joe Skinner: Theater wasn’t exactly the only full-contact sport for John David Washington. You might have seen him in several films like “BlacKkKlansman,” “Tenet” or “Amsterdam,” but it’s actually his second career. His first path was in athletics. As a senior at Morehouse College, Washington led in rushing with 1198 yards – a school record. He briefly signed with the St. Louis Rams as an undrafted free agent and went on to play four years of professional football in the United Football League, an alternative to the NFL. This work on the field has built him into the actor he is today and it informs his process.
John David Washington: It’s quite the correlation. In football there’s pre-season so previews served as pre-season. Before pre-season there’s training camp and I felt like rehearsals were like training camp. For the first month and a half, I actually physically train at 6 a.m., then get a one and a half to two-hour work session and then rehearsals from, you know, it would have been like 9:30 to 6:00 or something like that. PM. That was basically Monday through Saturday. Those are my days. So it was a lot like learning a playbook, learning your teammates, learning the language and developing a way of thinking and a way of being for this play.
Joe Skinner: Football instilled in Washington not only a strong sense of discipline, but also the perseverance needed for the theater.
John David Washington: I worked extremely hard to get to this point and it took a lot of effort and falling down on my face and experimenting and getting broken down and built back up again. You get introduced to yourself when you’re uncomfortable. I remember lining up in the backfield, I’m having a great game, but I have broken ribs and I have ten or 15 yards to get to the touchdown. I’m having a great game. I’m not coming out, but I’m in pain like a mother lover. You know, I got these broken ribs, but you keep going and you realize, “I can do it.” In theater, I didn’t know if I could do it, but I wanted to jump in. Now, if I fail, I fail big. This is a big test for me. This, to me, was like one of my favorite hip hop artists saying I can put together an album, but can you rap? Do you have lyrics? And to me, that’s what an August Wilson play can help you realize. Do you have lyrics? Can you say these words and know what they mean? And that’s what the challenge was about. I’ve been wanting to do this since I was a kid, and I felt like if I can if I can take this on, if I can accomplish this, I will feel even more comfortable and confident moving forward.
Joe Skinner: “The Piano Lesson” takes place in a 1930s Pittsburgh household. In this two-act play, we follow the lives of the Charles family and their disagreements around what to do with the family’s 137-year-old piano, a piano that has been handed down generation to generation and bears the faces of their enslaved ancestors carved into the instrument. Jumping into a Broadway debut with this particular play is a really big challenge. Its writer, August Wilson, was a giant in the world of theater, known for his layered portrayals of the Black experience in America. Wilson himself first approached writing “The Piano Lesson” with a complicated question: can you acquire a sense of self-worth by denying one’s past? August Wilson has also been likened to Shakespeare for his colloquial style of dialogue, usually filled with complex rhythms and patterns. But for John David, the musicality of this language is a helpful entry point.
John David Washington: What August wrote, I mean, it’s brilliant. Thinking about hip hop. I’m thinking about some of my favorite lyricists. You know, when I think about Kendrick Lamar, I think about André and Big Boi from OutKast. I think of it in those terms. When there’s a rhythm to it. I think about my family members. There’s a rhythm to how they speak. I think that’s how I can connect to it. I mean, August Wilson got bars, basically. He’s a poet. He started out as a poet. So I look at it in that way, and that helps me at least… relieves the anxiety of my entry point into his attempting to say his words. If I think of it as one of my favorite lyricists, then I feel like, alright, there’s a way in then. I can handle that.
Boy Willie: I ain’t got no advantages to offer nobody. Many is the time, I looked at my dad and see him staring off at his hands. I got a little older. I know what he was thinking.
Joe Skinner: Here’s a scene from “The Piano Lesson,” with John David as Boy Willie, his character in the play.
Boy Willie: He was sitting there saying, “I’ve got these big old hands. But what I’m going to do with them? Best I could do was make a 50-acre crop for Mr. Stovall. Got these big old hands, capable of anything. I could take and build something with these hands. But where’s the tools? All I got is these hands, and let’s not go out there and kill me somebody who take what they got. It’s a long road to hoe for me to make something for myself, well what am I supposed to do with these big old hands?” What would you do? See now, if he had his own land, he wouldn’t have felt that way. If he had something under his feet that belonged to him, he could stand up taller. That’s what I’m talking about.
Joe Skinner: How do you define Boy Willie, the character?
John David Washington: Extremely ambitious, ahead of his time. Forward thinking. There’s hints of Malcolm X from a philosophical standpoint. He’s extremely confident and that confidence stems from who he is. He knows who he is. He knows what he wants. He wants the best for his family. And he’s forward thinking. He doesn’t want to just get drafted to the NFL by an NFL team. He wants to own an NFL team. And in 1936, those lofty ideas, those ambitions aren’t necessarily celebrated or are talked about a lot.
Joe Skinner: The central conflict in “The Piano Lesson is a disagreement between Boy Willie and his sister, Berniece. Boy Willie wants to sell the family piano in order to buy the land where his ancestors were once enslaved. But Berniece wants to keep the family heirloom, which bears carved faces of their great grandfather’s wife and son during their enslavement.
John David Washington: And what August Wilson constructed here, how he wrote that, broke this character down. It’s inspiring. And what he did to me was make a generational point that this way of thinking is not lost upon our community. And it’s still relevant, unfortunately, today. You know, it’s got a contemporary feel to it, even though it was written in the eighties and took place in the thirties.
Boy Willie: Here, the land is there for everybody. All you got to do is figure out a way to get you a piece. Ain’t no mystery to life. You just go out and meet it square on. If you have a piece of land, you’ll find everything else full right in place. You could stand right up next to the white man and talk to him about the price of cotton, the weather. Anything else you wanna talk about. If you teach that girl that she living at the bottom of life, she gonna grow up to hate you.
Berniece: I’m going to teach her the truth. That’s just where she living only she ain’t got to stay there.
Boy Willie: Well, that might be your bottom, but it ain’t mine.
John David Washington: This character, Boy Willie, has a story to tell. He always has something, something reminds him of something else, even if he might be pontificating a little bit. Maybe influencing the story, a little bit. You know what I mean? But he he’s just a brilliant storyteller. All of them are in their own way.
Joe Skinner: John David Washington isn’t just musing about what he thinks is great about Boy Willie. His understanding of character motivation can have a big impact on every step in his process. Even on something as straightforward as memorization.
John David Washington: There’s the actual memorization, just trying to, you know, just cold, just know the words, which I was doing even before we started rehearsal, I was trying to do anyway. But I realize it almost doesn’t matter because when rehearsal starts and you start informing the character, why you’re saying this stuff, you lose the words, you start to gain more of the interior motivations. And understanding what being a farmer in 1936 is, what Jim Crow South is, understanding all those dynamics, and then you lose the words again. Then you’ve got to pick the words back up. So you’re trying to balance, find the right tuning levels of balancing what the motivations are with the words. And once the words start to catch up to your motivations, oh, it’s a beautiful thing. That’s when it starts to feel good. So it’s like, it’s a balancing act for the first month and a half of I think I got the words, I don’t have them because I’m realizing what I’m actually saying. Then I realized what I’m actually saying and here come the words. And you realize, “oh, you did have them. I’m glad you did that prep work.” But this is just how the process goes and you can’t cheat it. It’s kind of magical how it comes together. You just got to trust the process.
Joe Skinner: To cultivate an even deeper understanding of his character. John David went out into the real world, and he met up with a farmer.
John David Washington: Farmer Jeremy. He talks about, you know, harvest season. He talks about how he’s up in Iowa and talks about how he provides a lot of corn for a lot of people. And he feels like he does good in the world. I imagine that’s what Boy Willie feels too, that, that he’s doing something in the world, that he’s doing something good for humanity, that he’s making an impact on society through his craft. We’ve been on the phone. You know, we talk almost every week for months now. It’s funny because, you know, he’s from Iowa and he’s fifth generation. And what he was telling me was fascinating about the pressure of keeping it going. Like if his kids don’t want to farm, it stops, the farming stops. And that’s a lot of what Boy Willie’s talking about. He’s trying to grow the family, trying to get land in 1936 in the rural south, in Mississippi. So this piano is not just a family heirloom. It’s not just a touchstone. It’s something that we can grow the family and it expand it. Generationally set up our family for centuries. That’s what he’s trying to do. Farmers, you know, a lot of ways in that culture, they it’s like that. His great-great-grandfather, Jeremy’s great-great-grandfather started – got a plot of land in 1935, I think he said, and I got to talk to his grandfather a little bit, and he showed me the deed that was signed in 1940-something, I think ‘41. It was incredible. And this is what Boy Willie’s trying, this is like, he will die to get this, you know? And it was just great to be able to see that that he still kept it in his family. Just getting more clarity and understanding of what the motivations are always helps, to me, as an actor.
Joe Skinner: Washington connected with the personal story of a modern day farmer, but his process wouldn’t be complete until he turned the lens around to his own personal connection to Boy Willie.
John David Washington: Thinking about my life and its parallels to this character, I’ve reexamined the word inheritance. In my dressing room, I have my grandmother’s and my grandfather’s picture. I got my baby pictures. I got a lot of family pictures.
Joe Skinner: In “The Piano Lesson,” Boy Willie confronts a dramatic question: how do you honor your family’s legacy? He can either preserve the family heirloom and stay in Pittsburgh, or he can sell it and return to Mississippi to start a farm and generate his own wealth. To better understand Boy Willie’s given circumstance, John David Washington looked inward.
John David Washington: I went to North Carolina actually two weeks before we started rehearsals. I spent a lot of time there in my youth, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been there, been like four years, and visited my grandparent’s gravesite and my uncle’s gravesite. The smell of North Carolina just puts me in a place. It’s very lush and green and there’s like old train tracks. My mother’s school is still there. I mean, it’s rundown. It’s not active anymore, But there’s so much deep history in the neighborhood that she grew up in, the house that I remember going to as a kid at my grandparents and seeing the fish that I caught, the only time I’ve caught a fish, actually. I was maybe five or six years old with my grandparents, and they mounted it on the wall and it’s still there. Seeing my uncle’s backyard, which seemed like a 100-yard football field, but really it’s just a small space. We played backyard football and a lot of my skills I developed when I got to the league, were started in that backyard. All these things they just helped inform me, helped remind me of who I am. The way I see the world is through the lens of a lot of my experiences there.
Joe Skinner: That must have been really formative, going to North Carolina.
John David Washington: Oh, my goodness. I stood at the same spot the first time I got called an N-word. I might have been eight or nine years old, maybe even younger. And what was scary, thinking about being on that spot again at 30-something years old was how regular it was. The person didn’t say it to try to hurt my feelings. He said it as if it’s a formal greeting. Like this is just a part of the vernacular, which to me speaks to this racism in a way, and that it’s normalized. And I thought about that. And Boy Willie, the fact that he wants to go back to Mississippi, that he doesn’t want to stay in Pittsburgh with his sister, that he wants to go there and make his own way, because that’s what he knows. That’s where he’s from. There’s a lot of pride in my family being there and people being there in North Carolina. So, you know, I just all those kinds of things, those touchstones and those sites and again, being with family, something that I can actually use, something that’s real, that I can infuse into the folklore and the brilliance and the poetic fluidity and the musicality of August Wilson’s words to sort of make it real in tandem with how brilliant these words are.
Joe Skinner: “The Piano Lesson” is about legacy. An important part of that dialogue involves Boy Willie’s conversations with his Uncle Doaker and Uncle Wining Boy, the elders of their household, played by Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Potts. To better understand Boy Willie’s relationships to Uncle Doaker and Uncle Wining Boy, John David related these characters to his own family to deepen this connection to the material and ultimately bring more truth to his performance.
John David Washington: My grandfather was a principal, a Black principal in, you know, in the forties, fifties, in rural North Carolina. So the weight and the pressure he had on him and what he dealt with… there was a Ku Klux Klan presence there. And he stood his ground and he was living and teaching amongst all that culture there. My Uncle Doaker in the play, played by Sam Jackson, I imagine he had to also live with these things before he moved to Pittsburgh and the relationship Boy Willie has with his Uncle Wining Boy and Uncle Doaker, he looks up to his elders, but yet he challenges his elders as well because this is the new way of him thinking, of him trying to break out of this cycle of oppression and slavery in a way. Jim Crow South. And my grandfather was ahead of his time in a lot of ways too, just being a principal and my mom being a classically trained pianist. He believed in the arts. He would drive my mom to get lessons as a kid, as a child. And those weren’t just casual drives to the big city of Charlotte. They had to be very careful in those times, but he had the wherewithal, he had the foresight to know that this is something, this craft is something special. And he believed in my mom enough and believed in it enough to drive them there. So I believe Doaker and Wining believe Boy Willie’s passion. But they don’t necessarily agree with his tactics. But there’s a relationship there and there’s a loyalty there that I admire in these characters, that I relate to in my own family.
Joe Skinner: This all sounds like really important character work that you’re doing. Do you share this with Sam or with other actors in your rehearsal process?
John David Washington: Not really. I can’t believe them, as I’m like, listening to this. I can’t believe I’m talking to you, Joe, about this stuff, man. Just… I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s this room, I feel like I’m giving it all up. But no, it’s. It’s. You know, here I am saying it and, yeah, I like to keep that stuff close to the chest, you know, because, you know, it’s personal and it helps me motivate all my decisions when I’m making choices as an actor out there and something that I can relate to, something that I know.
Joe Skinner: In another story of inheritance and cosmic circumstance, Samuel L. Jackson was actually the first actor to play Washington’s character Boy Willie in the show’s 1987 first production at the Yale Repertory Theatre. So today, at the show’s first Broadway revival, John David Washington is certainly in good company opposite Jackson.
John David Washington: When you’re really listening, that’s also when you lose the words because, oh, now I’m listening or I’m getting caught up in Sam’s crazy monologue or like, sometimes I’m like, “I can’t believe I’m on stage with Sam Jackson. Oh, focus, Boy Willie.” But yeah, when you’re listening, to me, it can inform how you respond. So you’re not programing your response, you’re not practicing how are you going to say the line when he asked you a question or when he says something to you. I know what I’m there to do. I know who I’m talking to. But the way Sam may say it or the way Michael Potts may say it, I might respond in a different way. Same words, but I might respond differently because I’m present. And that’s when I think the fun stuff and the magical stuff happens. The stuff that you can’t plan for, that instinctual thing kicks in, which is what I rely heavily on – my instincts. And when you’re connected to your partners like that and you’re with them, that’s when the beauty comes out.
Joe Skinner: It’s important to remember that this is Washington’s first time on the Broadway stage. So for him, another key player for him to listen to in this learning process is the show’s director, LaTanya Richardson Jackson.
John David Washington: This is her play. So she says yay or nay to it. Thumbs up, thumbs down. She lets us all experiment and feel it out, and then she starts to carve and she never tell you how to deliver necessarily, but this is a better place to deliver something. This feels better when you’re over here, when as opposed to when you did it, you know? Stage right. She gives us different power spots on where to deliver.
Joe Skinner: What is a power spot?
John David Washington: I don’t know if that’s actually a theater term. I think of it as a place where it feels good at a certain section of the play to deliver something. Like I found when Boy Willie is at the kitchen sink, just now he sees the whole house. I imagine this is where he used to hang out when he was [young], because he’s been going there since his father died and the house got burnt down when they moved up there. So he’d been going there since he might have been ten years old. So that’s a spot that probably just reminds him of a kid of being comfortable in his own home or in that home. So different power spots like that, that inform history of the character or inform an emotion that you’re not necessarily planning for, that just comes out. You find that during rehearsals, you find that in previews, I’m finding it now. Every night I’ve been sitting, leaning on the sink here. I’ve stood up tonight. Why did I do that? It felt good, though. I didn’t plan it. It just happened when I was delivering it. So those power spots to me indicate some historical context or back story, if you will.
Joe Skinner: I love that idea of, like, physical memory.
John David Washington: Well, that’s like sports. I mean, I think that’s really important to the instinctual factor in this thing. So, for example, if the play design is you’re supposed to run to the right side, the lead blocker, you follow him, be patient. Then he burst through the hole. Sometimes there’s a defender that you got to adjust. You’ve got to put your foot in the ground and cut the opposite way. So in theater, it’s blocked a certain way. There’s some things that happen, but things happen. And if I heard Sam a different way, I might put my foot in the ground and go another way.
Joe Skinner: I love thinking about this comparison of acting to John David’s experience in athletics. People don’t often compare the two, and I’m fascinated by that kind of unlikely intermingling of disciplines. An important final collaborator that we shouldn’t forget, and one that can be just as impactful in sports as it is in theater, is the audience.
John David Washington: It’s been great. It’s been great. It’s funny, like sometimes I think, is it a home game or an away game? Because sometimes I’m thinking if they’re not, you know, you can’t, you’ve got to be careful with the audience, because Tuesday’s audience might be laughing at something different from a Thursday night audience. And you can’t rely on the funny or this gets them every time, because when it goes crickets, it might throw you off. And what I’ve learned is, the responses, they’re listening. They’re leaning in like, if it’s dead quiet, it’s not because you lost them, it’s because they’re really listening to you. And that indication is based off of the applause afterwards. There’s some nights I’ve talk to my mom, like, “I think I lost them or I don’t think… I must have done something wrong I don’t feel like they were with me.” And, you know, she’ll say, “no, they leaned in. So and so told me this or a response I get from after the show…” I’m like, “Oh God, I didn’t know I touched them in that way.” So you never know. So you just you have to tell the truth every night on stage. It’s my job to uphold the truth and keep it consistent.
Joe Skinner: So to ask a really broad question, what is the goal of art for you?
John David Washington: What is the goal of art? Man…
Joe Skinner: Huge question. I like to start to end on the bigger ones, it’s important to think about.
John David Washington: Okay Joe. (Laughs) It changes all the time, like for this mission. This was a selfish mission. I got to be honest. I knew this was for me. I needed to do this… Going into it I mean. Like when I get with the company, I’m working for my cast mates, I work, I’m doing it, you know, I’m with them. I just want to support them as best I can. But going into it, I wanted to do this to know I can do this. Ultimately, I guess one of my early goals was I hope I can bring a feeling to people that see my work, a feeling of joy, this escapism and optimism. A great performance in a great movie or a play just makes me so happy, like on a euphoric level and makes me feel better about life. About what you see every day. To just get inspired. So if somebody can feel that from a performance I did, or I was a part of, a production I was a part of, then I guess that’s one goal. If I can motivate or inspire somebody to make actual change in the world that actually is in the real world doing something more significant than putting on makeup and saying lines, but is inspired by somebody that puts on makeup and says lines, that’s another goal. To be able to have these discussions like this, you know, and people that are listening to this that might want to see it now, might want to find more understanding about what it was like for a certain demographic, a certain group of people in this country. Not to be hit over the head with it, felt guilty by it, but to be informed by it, maybe inspired to lean in to somebody that doesn’t look like you and ask questions of why this happened, how do you feel about this or want to help? This is also another goal. In the form of entertainment… These grand questions mean. I’m like, Sheesh. (Laughs)
Joe Skinner: A big thank you to John David Washington for taking the time to meet with us in the middle of what must be an exhausting Broadway run.
American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Josh Broome.
Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, and the Philip & Janice Levin Foundation.
