Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
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| Tina Fabrique as Ma Rainey. (Photo by Scott Suchman) |
Arena Stage
1101 Sixth St. SW, Washington, DC
November 1-December 29, 2002
Tues., Wed., Sun. at 7:30; Thurs., Fri., Sat. at 8:00
Matinees: Saturdays at 2:30; Sundays at 2:00
Discounts for groups, seniors, students, persons with disabilities
Box office: (202) 488-3300; website:
www.arenastage.org
Reviewed by Dorothy Chansky
If Aristotle had written his "Poetics" following the jazz age instead of during the time of Alexander the Great, the nonpareil of dramatic construction might have been not Sophocles but August Wilson. Wilson's method is to meld jazz's performative riffs, calculatedly random-seeming ensemble work, and extended solos with classicism's simplicity and relentless inevitability. It's all there in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" - the single locale, single day, and the hero with hubris destroyed by a fatal error of judgment. But the language and rhythm are a hyper vernacular layered to feel improvised; the topic as well as the catalyst for disaster is musical style.
"Ma Rainey" takes place in a Chicago recording studio on a cold day in 1927 and is based very loosely on an aspect of the career of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, often called the mother of the blues and a popular recording artist in the twenties. The focus here, though, is on the four members of her band. As the diva keeps them and the white studio owner waiting to begin the session, the men vent their frustrations, reveal their pasts, share their dreams, and play some music. Everything about these characters' lives is the product of segregation. What differentiates them from each other is not just how they remember the past and negotiate the present but how they plan for the future.
Slow Drag, the unlettered, easygoing bass player, has been bumming smokes and playing by the rules for twenty years. Clinton Derricks-Carroll's performance in the role comes close to stealing the show as Slow Drag fills in for the absent Ma, singing and sashaying through a solo so the others can rehearse their backup parts. Cutler (Hugh Staples), the pragmatic trombone player who is also the don't-ask-questions band leader, maintains a relaxed tolerance until his religion comes under attack. Notably, he'll blow up at a colleague's casual remark but keeps a lid on anger at genuine mistreatment by the white establishment.
The oldest band member, Toledo, is the group's pianist and philosopher. He gets through hurry-up-and-wait time with newspapers and books. The others call him Booker T. Wahsington, but his Africanism makes him more likely an admirer of Marcus Garvey-a Harlem-based civil rights leader who advocated a return to Africa for American blacks-or maybe W.E.B. DuBois, who straddled the line on whether American blacks should become "New Negroes" through a reworking of their recent stateside experiences or by favoring African arts. Frederick Strother conveys the patience of age, the resignation born of experience, and the warmth of an old timer who has faith that there will be sexual conquests in his future.
The wild card in the quartet is Levee, the trumpet player. His is the style of the future and he scorns the foursquare, old-timey "jugband" work that satisfies the others. In Gavin Lawrence's performance, Levee crackles with energy, dancing when he's excited and combining gyrations with crooning when he has seduction on his mind. Levee spends his spare moments writing music. Backup isn't where he lives; he wants his own band.
This band, of course, is Ma's. When she finally shows up for the session trailing a small entourage that includes a stuttering nephew (Kenyatta Rogers) and a pretty but probably faithless girlfriend (Kashie-Tara), Ma takes stage and takes charge. Tina Fabrique makes her flashy entrance looking resplendent in a brocade coat with big metallic flowers woven into its fabric and trimmed with a huge fur collar and cuffs. She soon sheds this outer eye candy to reveal a fire engine red dress glittering with metallic threads and accessorized with a huge feather fan. (Costumes are by Merrily Murray-Walsh.) Ma finally does sing, and Fabrique makes you want to hunker down for a whole evening of her earthy blues.
Wilson won't let us do that, though. He keeps interrupting the music to show the cost of making what we might erroneously think of as just some old 78. Ma sings "cause that's a way of understanding life." She throws tantrums and makes demands because she knows full well that once a white producer has what he wants from her - here her voice on a wax platter - she's treated no better than a post-coital whore.
So the band is really the white man's. Timmy Ray James as the producer, Sturdyvant, conveys the pressures as well as the opportunism of a character who understands that Ma's style is on the way out while Levee's is up-and-coming. In one of the play's most memorable moments Ma's white manager literally begs her on his knees to finish the recording. Actor Hugh Nees, looking a bit like Elmer Fudd, endures momentary humiliation. This comedown is nothing, though, compared to the k-o leveled in Sturdyvant's cheating Levee, the play's penultimate punch in the stomach. That Levee is, despite saying otherwise, "spooked up" by the white man (in general and by this one in particular) prompts the final kick. None of the characters can figure out how to "improvise on the theme" of changing times without destroying themselves or each other.
Tazewell Thompson's staging takes its cue from jazz, too. It feels casual and easygoing, as the musicians banter, settle in to the studio, unpack, set up, record a bit, record again, take breaks, and go out for Coca Cola. But as each slides into a big verbal solo, Thompson freezes the others in stage pictures that are completely posed and yet feel completely inevitable. The solos are stories, and each is a window onto the lives of the individual characters as well as onto the lives of the racist nation. Levee watched eight white men rape his mother; Slow Drag watched a man of the cloth reduced to dancing at gunpoint for a white mob; Toledo loved and left when he lost patience with his wife's possibly not-so-innocent fascination with the church.
Aristotle never specified who was supposed to be the object
of tragedy's "pity and terror." In "Ma Rainey" it's
surely the body politic as much as it is the characters so well realized
by Wilson and by this production.
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