A “Piano Lesson” with No False Notes

LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s star-studded Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” is, in a word, magnificent. As an actor, Richardson Jackson has long been part of the countrywide, unofficial Wilson theatre company—she was part of the momentous 2008 Kennedy Center series of staged readings honouring his work and, in 2009, she played Bertha Holly in a Tony-nominated revival of the playwright’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” The production, now at the Ethel Barrymore, may be Richardson Jackson’s first time directing on Broadway—her 2013 directorial début, “Two Trains Running,” also by Wilson, at Atlanta’s True Colors Theatre Company, is her only other professional directing credit—but her touch here is deft, sure, confident. After all, she has known Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play since its première, in 1987 at Yale Repertory Theatre, when her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, created the character of Boy Willie. There are moments in her thrilling production (which again stars Jackson, this time as Boy Willie’s uncle) when she seems to have known it in some deeper, stranger way even before then.

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