Golden Globes 2021: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

I was deeply fortunate to have my time on staff at The Public Theater overlap with Kenny Leon’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, the first ever production with an all Black cast at Shakespeare in the Park.

At the beginning of the Shakespeare in the Park rehearsal process, Kenny gave a talk for the staff with a few members of his creative team where they discussed their vision for the production and some of their personal philosophies towards working on Shakespeare.

Kenny Leon was mentored by August Wilson, an incredibly prolific playwright who spent his career documenting the African-American experience through his work. I am now going to extremely paraphrase a story he told us about his time with him.

Kenny was assisting August on a production of one of his plays, and I couldn’t tell you which one. Also, yes, I have decided I am on first name basis with both of these men for the purpose of telling this story. Anyway, the project they were working on had a dramaturg, which is awesome, and the dramaturg came to August Wilson with a question. One of the characters in the play is a religious man, and he makes a reference to a specific Bible verse. Once again, I couldn’t tell you which one, and I’m not gonna scan through all of his plays (I don’t have the time and also don’t own all of them!) to figure it out, so I’m gonna make one up!

So the character in the play makes a reference to Romans 10:21, but doesn’t expand on it and include the actual quote. The dramaturg looked into the verse and found it relatively insignificant and couldn’t find any deep historical or cultural resonance in his research, so he came to August and asked him why he had chosen this specific Bible verse to include in his play.

August threw his head back and laughed, and said that he’d just picked a random book of the Bible and the numbers were the address of the house he grew up in in Pittsburgh. It didn’t really matter, the line was just there to help the audience understand that the character was religious and religiously literate enough to throw around Bible verses.

According to Kenny, August is the Shakespeare of our times, and by having such a close relationship with August he feels equipped to look at Shakespeare plays more casually and less as sacred objects where every line has intense significance. Maybe sometimes he’s just referencing the house he grew up in.

Anyway, that’s my personal anecdote about August Wilson to bring us into today’s post about Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the film adapted from Wilson’s play of the same name. Ma Rainey is part of Wilson’s epic Pittsburgh Cycle, also known as the Century Cycle, in which he wrote one play focusing on the African-American experience for each decade of the 20th century. Denzel Washington has committed to bringing all ten plays to the screen, (albeit not in chronological order, which frustrates me because I am anal retentive) and Ma Rainey is his second project after 2016’s Fences, also starring Viola Davis, the queen of interpreting Wilson’s work.

Interestingly, Ma Rainey, his play for the 1920s, is the only of the ten plays that does not take place in Pittsburgh and is the only play about a real person! Ma Rainey (Viola Davis), often known as the Mother of the Blues, was an early 20th century prominent jazz and blues singer, and while she was a real person, the other characters and the events of the film are fictional. The movie focuses on a recording session with Ma and her band and specifically the turbulent relationship between Ma and her bandmates with Levee (Chadwick Boseman), the trumpet player and youngest member of the group, who longs to break free from the group and secure his own record deal. Over the course of the hot summer afternoon in the studio, the group deals with internal conflicts as well as the conflicting interests of their own artistry and the demands of the white record company.

What Wilson does so brilliantly in his plays is that he’s always working at two levels- the story of the individual characters and the greater story of the Black experience, but he never reduces his characters to symbols or metaphors. I found myself so invested in the characters and lost in their journey that I wasn’t intellectualizing it in the moment, but was able to reflect after the fact on the inherent commentary on the relationship of Black entertainers to the white audience as well as the white supremacist capitalist system that they find themselves in- just as much in the 2020s as they did in the 1920s.

While the ensemble cast did a great job carrying this piece, special attention must be paid to Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, who happen to be the only nominated cast members, as well as the only nominees from the project in general (I would have thrown in a nom for composer Branford Marsalis but, as per usual, I am not in charge). Viola Davis is one of the greatest and bravest actresses of her generation, and her turn as Ma Rainey is further evidence of her utmost commitment to her work and impeccable taste in projects that challenge her as an actress while also demonstrating her skill and mastery of the art form. Ma Rainey as a character is a testament to August Wilson and Viola Davis and their cosmic collaboration. Ma was, in real life and in the story, a large, queer, Black woman, and it is theorized by historians that her image is possibly why her legacy is not as strong as say, Bessie Smith. She’s not a woman who was easily digestible in the 1920s, nor in the 1980s when Wilson wrote the play. Theatre is generally years ahead of film in terms of representation, and seeing Ma take the screen in 2021 still feels revolutionary. The film and Viola’s portrayal does not shy away from any parts of her- her romantic relationships with women, her size, her flamboyant yet unflattering sense of style. You can see her sweat. You can see every intense emotion she feels. She is bold and brash and uncompromising. We still don’t see women like her, in movies or in the real world, who are rewarded for that kind of behavior, nonetheless Black queer women.

Although Ma is the titular character, I could sing Viola Davis’ praises forever, I would assert that the film is actually Levee’s story. It felt haunting, initially, to watch Chadwick Boseman on screen in his final performance before his untimely death last summer, but it is a testament to his ability to fully give himself to a role that it was not long before I was watching Levee, and not Chadwick. He created an incredibly vivid character whose dreams were so big that you can’t help but root for him to succeed, even though there’s an aura of Shakespearean tragedy around him. Through out the film, I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that something was going to happen- there was no way his dreams were coming true.

I almost forgot about Chadwick until a pivotal moment in the film. Things come to a head for our characters during a break from recording to fix some broken equipment, and in the break room Cutler (Colman Domingo), the band’s trombonist and one of Ma’s most trusted collaborators, shares a story of a preacher he knew being cornered by white men while waiting for a train. The men forced the preacher to dance and then stole and destroyed his Bible. The story riles Levee up, and he shares his own story of a traumatic childhood and his complete lack of faith as a result. In part of his monologue, he says, “Now death. Death got some style. Death will kick your ass and make you wish you never been born. That's how bad death is. But you can rule over life. Life ain't nothing.”

I was very aware of Chadwick in that moment, and through out the film until it’s tragic ending I felt a piece of him in that performance in a very profound way. Of course, when he filmed the project he had no idea it would be his last or that he would no longer be with us when it was released to the world. His coworkers and his fans had no idea how much he was suffering. While I don’t believe that his loss in anyway enhances the beauty of his performance, the circumstances of his own life must have informed the way he approached his character and his monologues about trauma and death, and with the knowledge we have now it’s hard not to see it on screen.

Okay, this post got very heavy, which is both a reflection of the topic and my mental state at the moment. I am going to take a quick break from Golden Globes content because there are a few unrelated movies that need to be discussed, so this weekend’s posts will be a bit lighter in a tone. I hope anyone who’s reading this has a good weekend in whatever way is possible for you right now. Stay safe.