Pulitzer Landmark August Wilson’s Prize-Winning Play Reaches A Wider Audience As A TV Movie

For a guy who couldn’t write dialogue, Seattle playwright August Wilson has a lot of fans who love the words he sends on glorious journeys from one character to another.

It was halfway through his 30-year career as a writer that Wilson discovered how to make people talk the truth to each other. Since then he has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his stage works.

But until now, none of his plays has been preserved on film so a larger audience can immerse itself in his words.

On Sunday, Hallmark Hall of Fame will present one of his Pulitzer landmarks, “The Piano Lesson,” at 9 p.m. on NBC.

For the veteran actors and even his celebrated director, the chance to work with Wilson’s TV script of his original play was a glorious moment of collaboration with one of the country’s leading playwrights. (The only other double-Pulitzer winners: Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder and Tennessee Williams.)

Wilson, the son of a black mother and German father (whom he barely knew), captures the black experience and the language it spawns.

Lloyd Richards, former dean of the Yale School of Drama who has directed five Wilson plays and now this film, says he found that chord in one of Wilson’s earliest works.

“The thing that struck me about it were the people who were involved in it, the human beings,” Richards told a gathering of TV critics. “They were very human and I knew every one of them. I know how they felt. I knew how they thought. … This playwright was speaking for me as well as to me.”

Added actor Carl Gordon, who has appeared in two Wilson plays: “Once you read his words, as an Afro-American actor, they just leap off the pages for me, because I’m familiar with these people. I’m familiar with the language, the way that he puts it down on the paper.”

Wilson, who turns 50 this year, wasn’t always able to put it down that way.

“I’ve been writing since I was 20 years old, but I wasn’t writing plays because I couldn’t write dialogue,” he told the critics.

“I didn’t write dialogue because I didn’t value the way in which blacks in America spoke. I thought in order to make art out of it that you had to change the way that they spoke.”

About 15 years ago, Wilson said, he began to understand that language is a product of culture and thought process, and those are different for black Americans than for white Americans.

“Once I arrived at that very simple understanding, then I didn’t have a problem writing dialogue,” he said. “The problem then became to get my characters to stop talking, as opposed to make them talk.”

Wilson said he has wanted to commit some of his work to film and welcomed the opportunity when Hallmark approached him about “The Piano Lesson.”

He had a wonderful time doing the teleplay, he said, helping visual elements appear, where they could only be suggested on stage, and bringing to life characters that had been offstage or didn’t exist at all in the original.

The result, Wilson said, is different from the play but also very similar.

One of the lead roles in “The Piano Lesson” was written for actor Charles Dutton (“Roc”), and he is back for the movie version, which he called “a joyous experience.”

“When you do an August Wilson play, if you’re a conscientious enough actor, you leave an ounce of your essence on the stage every night,” Dutton said.

“Maybe it’s an idealistic attitude, but I felt in doing an August Wilson play, I was really and truly helping to advance civilization, that I was going to affect someone’s life each night in the audience.”

For Alfre Woodard, the film was her first chance to do a Wilson play, which she had craved for many years.

“I was always jealous that all these women in New York, these actresses, were getting to do August’s plays,” she said, “Because from the first time I heard of him and I saw a play, it was like …” and she finished with a gasp of being thrilled.

“It’s words,” she continued. “Words that are full. All the words you can think of, and they’re all pointing to something very specific. And that specific thing is a picture of what my mother, or grandmother, my uncle, my father, what they might have specifically been like before I met them.”

Woodard said the presence of director Richards, whom she also had coveted working with, made the film experience even more rewarding.

“When the opportunity came up to have, like, this incredible double-date with two men that I have desired from my youth, I jumped at it,” she said.