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A review by robertlashley
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: A Play by August Wilson
3.0
Raw, at times scattershot and simmering with rage, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom set the template for August Wilson as a public figure and a playwright. His first broadway hit, it has whiffs of the nationalist agit prop of the black theater of the time, and a formlessness that suggested he hadnt yet found his voice as a writer. Yet the themes, character dynamics, and majestic language are enough to propel the play above it's weaknesses, and enough to make you see why a broadway audience took notice.
Bottom was the last of Wilson's 10 play's that I have read, and from that perspective it was a bit jarring. His masterpieces( Fences, Joe Turner's Come And Gone, The Piano Lesson, Jitney, and the negected Gem Of The Ocean) are finely crafted jewels; intricately plotted, filled with narrative complexity, as sophisticated in their advancement of the 19th century realism as Tennesse Williams' masterworks were in advancing expressionism. So it was hard to read the lack of structure and reheated O'neill that consists of so much of the play. The dynamic's of the story, the fictional account of the dissolution of Ma Rainey's band, and the rage induced decline of it's trombone player, are powerful, but there isnt enough action in the play to for it to fully sustain it's power. Too often, Wilson's session players ramble where they should be advancing the plot(the weakness of all Wilson's minor plays). Also, Ma Rainey herself seems closer to the "bad black broad" archetype seen in the plays of ed bullins and Ron Milner, a character believable only to a certain segment of Black men.
And yet, and yet! The reason Bottom doesnt lose you completely because of the filaments of brilliance that are there in the play and were never on stage before him. The Characters (save Ma) arent as finely created as the ones he wrote in his masterpieces, but they are finely created, and the indelible impression they leave keeps the reader interested in the play. Leevee, the explosively hot tempered sideman, rages as much as the black male protagonists of Bullins, Baraka, and Walcott. But where the aformentioned playwrights would bring in a white woman on stage to brutalize as a symbolic gesture before riding into the sunset, Wilson makes him kill the male piano player and pay for it in a way that is actually belivable. The narrative ambiguity that surrrounds his mental descent into murder is the play's most alluring quality, hinting at some of the dynamics that made his greatest plays work.
Sadly, some critics and audience members couldnt separate Leevee fron his creator (and even saddee than that, the often iracible Wilson was willing to oblige them). Toward the end of hia career, he was known for more for his paranoid anger on the subjects of America, american theater, and even the people who saw his broadway shows's, and people stopped coming to see him. The loss was great for both Wilson's bottom line and the institution of the theater, for the public missed out on two of his best works ( 1999's Jitney, 2003's Gem Of The Ocean) If the public man was often a prisoner of his wounds and often spoke as such, the private writer created a remarkable, idiosyncratic body of work paralled by few in the history of the theater, and bettered by fewer than that. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, for all it's strengths, is only a prelude for him
Bottom was the last of Wilson's 10 play's that I have read, and from that perspective it was a bit jarring. His masterpieces( Fences, Joe Turner's Come And Gone, The Piano Lesson, Jitney, and the negected Gem Of The Ocean) are finely crafted jewels; intricately plotted, filled with narrative complexity, as sophisticated in their advancement of the 19th century realism as Tennesse Williams' masterworks were in advancing expressionism. So it was hard to read the lack of structure and reheated O'neill that consists of so much of the play. The dynamic's of the story, the fictional account of the dissolution of Ma Rainey's band, and the rage induced decline of it's trombone player, are powerful, but there isnt enough action in the play to for it to fully sustain it's power. Too often, Wilson's session players ramble where they should be advancing the plot(the weakness of all Wilson's minor plays). Also, Ma Rainey herself seems closer to the "bad black broad" archetype seen in the plays of ed bullins and Ron Milner, a character believable only to a certain segment of Black men.
And yet, and yet! The reason Bottom doesnt lose you completely because of the filaments of brilliance that are there in the play and were never on stage before him. The Characters (save Ma) arent as finely created as the ones he wrote in his masterpieces, but they are finely created, and the indelible impression they leave keeps the reader interested in the play. Leevee, the explosively hot tempered sideman, rages as much as the black male protagonists of Bullins, Baraka, and Walcott. But where the aformentioned playwrights would bring in a white woman on stage to brutalize as a symbolic gesture before riding into the sunset, Wilson makes him kill the male piano player and pay for it in a way that is actually belivable. The narrative ambiguity that surrrounds his mental descent into murder is the play's most alluring quality, hinting at some of the dynamics that made his greatest plays work.
Sadly, some critics and audience members couldnt separate Leevee fron his creator (and even saddee than that, the often iracible Wilson was willing to oblige them). Toward the end of hia career, he was known for more for his paranoid anger on the subjects of America, american theater, and even the people who saw his broadway shows's, and people stopped coming to see him. The loss was great for both Wilson's bottom line and the institution of the theater, for the public missed out on two of his best works ( 1999's Jitney, 2003's Gem Of The Ocean) If the public man was often a prisoner of his wounds and often spoke as such, the private writer created a remarkable, idiosyncratic body of work paralled by few in the history of the theater, and bettered by fewer than that. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, for all it's strengths, is only a prelude for him