“I Killed That S–t”: Samuel L. Jackson Originated the Role That John David Washington Is About to Play

“I was around when August would come and lay out eight pages of a new speech that we had to put in that night because we were doing previews—and you run and you do it,” says Samuel L. Jackson. He’s thinking back to 1987, when he originated the role of Boy Willie in August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson at the Yale Repertory Theatre. He regards the late playwright as “the Black Shakespeare” but says, “Man, it was a lot of words. It was grueling.”

This fall, John David Washington plays Boy Willie in a Broadway revival directed by Jackson’s wife of 42 years, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, and—because Jackson himself will appear as Boy Willie’s uncle, Doaker Charles—he’ll do it while standing onstage with the man who first gave the character flesh and blood. “I’m coming in as a student,” Washington says in a dual interview with his costar. “I’m coming in to learn as much as I can from our director, LaTanya, and this man here.” Washington has known Jackson since the former was a toddler, thanks to Jackson’s friendship with his father, Denzel. Still, it sounds like it’d be intimidating to re-create the role right in front of him. Jackson waves the idea away. “He didn’t see me do it,” he says, then adds playfully, “but I killed that shit.” Washington laughs: “And the ghosts, like in the theme of the play, will forever haunt us.”

The Piano Lesson, which won Wilson his second Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1990, takes place in the Charles household in Pittsburgh in 1936, as Boy Willie and his sister, Berniece (Danielle Brooks), battle over the fate of the family’s prized piano and contend with the good and evil spirits it conjures. Boy Willie is an impetuous striver eager to grab his piece of the American dream even if it means aggravating an already tempestuous relationship with his sister. He wants to sell the piano to buy land in Mississippi that their family toiled on for decades as sharecroppers, and to start building some generational wealth. Berniece wants to keep the piano as a testament to their tragic history; it is, after all, carved with images of their ancestors. Doaker, who makes several of the play’s key speeches, wants the most elusive thing of all: peace.

Boy Willie and Berniece’s struggle over the piano summons the ghost of a dead landowner named Sutter, who terrorized the family in the South. The malevolent spirit could be a stand-in for slavery, Jim Crow, white supremacy, or all of the above—and it’s this force that Richardson Jackson is most interested in wrangling with on Broadway. “Let’s amplify this part of it,” she tells me, flashing the most contagious smile you’ll ever see. “Let’s look at this effin’ ghost. Why is Sutter there? What does Sutter want? Why we still talking about Sutter? We keep conjuring the ghost—but we don’t deal with it. We gonna have to deal with it, and we’re gonna deal with it in this one.”

Richardson Jackson has revered The Piano Lesson ever since she saw her husband play Boy Willie at Yale Rep. “You can mess around and put different clothes on it, but you have to leave that language alone, because what he’s written is sacrosanct to me,” says the director, who was nominated for a 2014 Tony for best actress for Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun and later played Calpurnia in Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. “I’m quick to tell everyone: August Wilson didn’t create the language, but he was able to capture it better than anyone that I have ever read or seen. He writes it and I hear my grandparents.” Wilson’s dialogue, she says, reminds her of her grandfather going off to play checkers and “talk smack.”

Wilson’s monumental 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, of which The Piano Lesson is a part, captures the joys and undeniable challenges of Black life in earthy, colloquial, poetic, mysterious language that both reveals and obscures the intentions of the main characters. When I ask Richardson Jackson if she plans to reimagine any of the parts in The Piano Lesson—as Sorkin did when he amped up Calpurnia’s role in Mockingbird—she says, “The way August wrote Berniece, she’s dynamic already. She’s already ahead of the game. And with the embodiment of Danielle Brooks, it’s going to the next level.”