Actor Danielle Deadwyler, who won several awards and nominations for her role as Berniece in Malcolm Washington's The Piano Lesson, will produce and star in a film adaptation of Ann Petry's 1946 novel, 'The Street'.
The official synopsis of the film has Lutie Johnson, a young Black woman, who feels distressed raising her son in the middle of violence, poverty, and racial dissonance prevalent in Harlem during the 1940s. Westworld fame Gina Atwater will pen the script of the film and serve as its executive producer.
On being a part of the project, Deadwyler said the novel "quaked" her understanding of "motherhood, Black and American family life". She called the novel essential to American literature and hopes to "rumble the film landscape" with an adaptation of her tale of the "lengths to which one mother, one woman, is stretched for self, family, and the costs of survival.”
'The Street' is a landmark novel for becoming the first one by a Black woman to sell more than 1,00,000 copies.