Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
A cocksure, hotheaded young man locks horns with a flamboyant, slightly older woman as their mutual friends watch in dismay. This is the premise of a brilliant drama rich in ribald humor and tragic power, presented by a major Chicago theater in a production of impressive stature and moving insight.
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But deeper than the artistic disagreements (exacerbated by sexual jealousy, as Levee flirts with Ma’s young lesbian lover) is the musicians’ need for dignity and spiritual authenticity–an elusive goal for black artists in a white-run industry. Ma’s approach is to be tough and temperamental with her black colleagues as well as her white employer. But Levee thinks he can do better by catering to the young, urban, record-buying public’s taste for danceable jazz; proud of his ability to write music (even if he can’t spell “music”), he’s banking on an offer from Sturdyvant to publish his songs and help him get his own band–an escape as vital to him as Blanche’s need to find a nest with her sister is to her.
Streetcar’s setting was 1947 New Orleans, a milieu that allowed Williams to sketch working-class whites disillusioned by the stagnation of postwar life. Wilson’s sociological purposes in Ma Rainey are grander. Set in 1927 in a Chicago recording studio (in set designer Scott Bradley’s three-tiered hierarchy, a glassed-in upstairs booth is the exclusive domain of whites while a dungeonlike rehearsal room is reserved for black sidemen), the play is the first-produced of Wilson’s epic cycle charting the 20th-century African-American experience–six plays so far, each set in a different decade. Surrounding the conflict between Ma and Levee is a study of black culture as it shifts from southern to northern, rural to urban, conventionally religious to worldly–defiantly so in the case of Levee, who tells God to “kiss my ass.” Ma clings to her musical idiom for the same reason Levee wants to change it–it’s old-fashioned and country-style–while Levee’s up-tempo arrangement repudiates “the voice inside” that guides her. Her contempt for so-called progress extends to the recording industry itself, which she views as a necessary evil; the blues, she reminds us, is “a way of understanding life.” (One of the play’s longest and best sequences highlights the absurdity of the technological attempt to capture the spontaneous utterance of raw emotion.)
Though it was Pegasus that gave this play its Chicago premiere, Goodman is unquestionably Wilson’s home base here, having offered the pre-Broadway tryouts of his later plays Fences (with James Earl Jones) and The Piano Lesson (with Charles S. Dutton, the original Levee on Broadway), among others. With this production, Goodman becomes the first major theater to produce Wilson’s entire six-play cycle–a major artistic achievement akin to the Lyric mounting all of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. Others have complained in these pages that Goodman’s plan to mount Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom didn’t promise theatrical “risks.” But great playwriting in a production this fine always deserves a hearing.
