Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✭
by August Wilson, directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
May 10-June 9, 2018
“Ah, do it ma, do it, honey
Look it now Ma, you gettin' kinda rough here
You gotta be yourself now, careful now
Not too strong, not too strong, Ma”
(“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”, 1927)
SouIpepper has staged an electrifying production of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Set in 1927, Wilson’s play from 1984 provides great insight into the institutionalized racism that is still with us and the rage that it engenders. Ma Rainey contains music but is no musical. It is as much a drama about the different strategies Black people use to cope among themselves and with White society. It’s a play filled with both comedy and menace that moves under Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu’s taut direction to a shattering conclusion. It is also a production studded with outstanding performances. It may be a play about the blues, but it is also an incisive analysis of the conditions that led the form’s creation.
Though set in Chicago, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the first play written in Wilson’s ten-play sequence called the “Pittsburgh Cycle” chronicling the lives of Black people in each decade of the 20th century. Ma Rainey embodies the 1920s and the craving of both Black and White folk to hear recordings of the blues. Ma Rainey in the play is based on the real Ma Rainey (1886-1939), who was one of the first Black singers ever to record the blues. Her version of the Black Bottom, a type of dance, is also a real song as is the “Moonshine Blues”, also performed in the play.
The action takes place on a single day in a recording studio. The White studio owner Sturdyvant (Diego Matamoros) and Ma Rainey’s White manager Irvin (Alex Poch-Goldin) become impatient waiting for Ma Rainey, who both know to be extremely difficult, to arrive to cut “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”. Ma Rainey’s band arrives on time – trombonist Cutler (Lindsay owen Pierre), pianist Toledo (Beau Dixon), bassist Slow Drag (Neville Edwards) and the newest member, the trumpeter Levee (Lovell Adams-Gray). The band goes down to their room to rehearse, but instead of rehearsing they become involved in wide ranging discussion of race, religion, assimilation, their exploitation by the producer and their views on dealing with it.
The discussions are led primarily by the avid reader Toledo, who is interested in the survival of African traditions in the American Negro and who believes that all Black people will have to stand together one day to protest their oppression. Until that time he regards American Blacks as “imitation White people” because of their desire to adopt the White man’s habits and think them a sign of success.
All four have witnessed horrific examples of White bigotry – humiliation, lynchings, gang rape. But key differences arise. Cutler is a religious man, but Levee can’t see how anyone can believe in God given the terrible injustice he allows. Levee’s main plan for success is to form his own band and then be free, like Ma Rainey is, to dictate his own terms to White people of how he is treated. He even has been writing his own songs with Sturdyvant’s encouragement because Levee believes Ma Rainey’s style of the blues is on the way out and he’s sure he knows the new style that is sure to come along. The symbol of his confidence is the expensive pairs of new shoes he has bought, much to the derision of the other band members.
Ma Rainey (Alana Bridgewater) finally does arrive with her girlfriend Dussie Mae (Virgilia Griffith) and nephew Sylvester (Marcel Stewart) with her after an altercation after a minor car accident when a White police officer was ready to charge her with assault and battery. Irvin, as always, is ready to fix things (with a bribe), but a new problem crops up when Ma Rainey insists that Sylvester perform the spoken intro to her song. Sylvester stutters, but Ma Rainey insists. The struggle over Ma Rainey’s demand only ratchets up tensions between her, the band and Sturdyvant and well as tensions simmering within the band between the cocky Levee and the others.
Though Ma Rainey is the title character and the play centres on meeting all her conditions to record her song, the actual focus of the drama is Levee, whose dreams don’t fit in with the band or the recording system but involve his belief in himself and being completely fee of constraint. The point of the play is to show that Levee’s dream is not possible in 1920s American and likely not even in Wilson’s 1980s or indeed in the present because racism and exploitation have become so ingrained in businesses including the entertainment industry and the assimilation Toledo warns of has become the norm.
Lovell Adams-Gray gives an absolutely outstanding performance as Levee. He seems to be so bursting with energy that he can hardly stay still especially in contrast to the slow, sedate ways of the rest of the band. Whatever emotion Adams-Gray expresses we can sense a myriad of others, all mixed with rage and ambition, roiling behind it. Adams-Gray makes Levee the embodiment of two conflicting ideas – complete confidence in himself and his abilities and complete cynicism about the empty world around him where he imagines he will triumph. He trusts a White man like Sturdyvant to help further his career yet loathes White people in general. The Levee of Adams-Gray is like a fire that burns so bright because it is on the verge of burning out. It’s rare to see a character played with such intensity on stage that we worry about what will happen to him from his first appearance.
Bridgewater is also expert at showing us the other side that Wilson gives Ma Rainey, namely her knowledge that once the White producers capture her voice she means nothing to them. We see that her diva-like antics are a means of wielding the little power she has before the White men snatch the prize they want from her.
The rest of the cast is very strong. Beau Dixon is excellent as Toledo, the prime source of intellectual debate in the play and the one character who sees clearly how institutionalized racism works. Dixon shows that Toledo’s reading and insight have left him intellectually detached from the world which is his way of coping with its injustices. Lindsay Owen Pierre’s Cutler and Neville Edwards’ Slow Drag are men who simply want to get on with life and accept whatever benefits they receive with the view that things are better now than they used to be. While Edwards’Slow Drag is clearly the most laid-back member of the band, Pierre as the band’s leader, is concerned with uprightness and propriety that puts him at odds with both Toledo’s radical ideas and Levee’s puffed-up self-importance.
Things are not well with the two main White characters in the play. There is a constant struggle between the miserly Sturdyvant and Irvin, who keeps having to calm down Sturdyvant and the easily ruffled Ma Rainey. Diego Matamoros makes us believe that Sturdyvant has no redeeming qualities and that money, not talent or innovation, is his sole motivation in life. Alex Poch-Goldin serves as the main source of comedy in the play since he is continually put upon to “work things out” by increasingly humiliating himself before Ma Rainey.
Sylvester and Dussie Mae show two sides to Ma Rainey. Sylvester, naive and completely cowed by his famous aunt, is totally in her control and Marcel Stewart shows that Sylvester’s resulting sense of self-worth is near to zero. In contrast, Dussie Mae seems to be in the play not merely to underscore Ma Rainey’s lesbianism, but to show that others like Dussie Mae may be using Ma Raine to their own advantage. Virgilia Griffith’s sly demeanour throughout culminating in Dussie Mae’s flirtation with Levee, shows that Dussie Mae is ready to abandon Ma Rainey should anything better come along.
Detailing the use and abuse of power both within the Black community as well as between Whites and Blacks is what makes Wilson’s play so complex and so powerful. He makes it clear that Black people, having no true outlet for their pent-up rage against White oppression can take out their anger on other Blacks. The devastating conclusion of the play is a portrait of all hopes for the future destroyed. August Wilson’s depiction of the situation of Blacks in America has only become more relevant with the passing years. It’s more necessary than ever for people to take in his insight and along with it the tremendous performances that bring that insight home. Toronto, embarrassingly, has seen only one professional production of Wilson’s plays before – The Piano Lesson in 2003. The time has come to see more of his work.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Alana Bridgewater as Ma Rainey; Marcel Stewart, Diego Matamoros, Alex Poch-Goldin, Beau Dixon, Neville Edwards and Alana Bridgewater; Vigilia Griffith and Lovell Adams-Gray. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2018-05-16
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom