August Wilson’s powerful play comes to the screen.
August Wilson’s powerful play comes to the screen.
A ugust Wilson’s Century Cycle — ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century — is one of the monumental achievements of the American theater and one that figures to grow in relevance in coming years, given the plays’ focus on black Americans’ struggle to deal with the facts of the collective past. It is to the great credit of Denzel Washington, one of the few Hollywood superstars equally dedicated to the theater, that he has set about putting the entire cycle on film with first-rate casts and directors so that anyone, not just theatergoers, can experience the work.
Being faithful to the material, though, means asking a lot of the audience; Wilson’s plays are talkfests, they’re subtle, they require teasing out the hidden meanings of symbols and archetypes, and they can’t be reengineered to make them into visual spectacles. Theater requires paying attention, which is why it’s best experienced in the total-concentration environment of a space set aside for that purpose, not in a home where your attention may be diverted by pets, children, cellphones, snacks, etc.
Because Wilson’s plays are tough to adapt for the screen, it’s going to take Washington longer than he anticipated to bring the project to fruition. But four years after he starred in and directed Wilson’s Fences, which won his co-star Viola Davis an Oscar in 2016, he has produced a second one, this time for Netflix. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which opened on Broadway in 1984, was the first Wilson play to attract serious attention. This time the project is helmed by George C. Wolfe, the much-lauded theater director, and it stars a riveting Chadwick Boseman in his final performance.
Boseman plays a hotshot young horn player who typifies every black artist and rule-breaker who had to develop a strategy to maintain his dignity while trying to scramble up the ladder in a white man’s world. He and three other musicians (Glynn Turman, Colman Domingo, Michael Potts) spend the early scenes talking and warming up at a Chicago recording studio in 1927, considering the central quandary of Wilson’s work: “What’s the colored man gonna do with himself? That’s what we waitin’ to find out,” as a veteran musician puts it. The quartet await the entrance of the diva Ma Rainey, one of the most successful blues singers of the era.
Ma — a demanding, frightening, imperious talent — is played as a walking volcano by Viola Davis in one of those astonishing performances that make it hard to believe we are observing a familiar presence, this time with a completely different body type, strange makeup, and a voice that makes the floorboards tremble. Boseman, looking thin and haggard in a manner that suits his haunted character but who was suffering from advanced colon cancer that would kill him a year after filming, takes yet another amazing turn in a chameleonic career that led him from Jackie Robinson to James Brown to Black Panther. This time Boseman deploys a high-pitched, wheedling voice and a Deep South accent as he plays Levee, a cool calculator with a chip on his shoulder who explains to the others that he has worked out how he is going to outsmart the white man and have himself a fine time doing so. An older colleague — perhaps wiser but perhaps merely more submissive — admonishes him to know his place: “More n—-rs get killed tryin’ to have a good time than God got ways of countin’.”
As with other plays in the Century Cycle — the most chillingly effective of which, The Piano Lesson, is next on Washington’s list to be filmed, in the summer of 2021 — the underlying motivation is a long-ago incident of white racism that reverberates across the decades. Wilson used this device so many times that his plays can fairly be termed schematic — in Fences (1985), the racist act is the denial of a major-league baseball career to a Negro League star; in Jitney (1979), it is the false charge of rape against a black man by his white girlfriend; in both, these episodes happened many years before the actions seen in the plays — but taken as a whole the cycle amounts to a detailed, penetrating exploration of the hidden gears of racism that is unparalleled in American culture, as far as I know. Wilson has a furious argument to make, but he makes it exactingly and with remarkable concentration and control.
The casual viewer of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom who hasn’t seen other works in the cycle may not even detect what the play is actually about; Wilson didn’t make his point explicitly. The climactic events of Ma Rainey if laid out in a simple three-paragraph newspaper account would seem nonsensical to white readers, and perhaps to black readers as well. Lives get upended, for only the silliest apparent reason, as Wilson places under examination all of the stories we’ve seen about black-on-black crime over the years — “Family Mourns 14-Year-Old Killed Over Air Jordans” and so on. What an unbelievable waste of life, we think, and we turn the page, not understanding how such a thing could happen. Wilson goes deeper, building a case for how everything traces back to a single source: white subjugation of black Americans. His vision is certainly reductive, but given the long, tangled histories that go into his character motivations, it wouldn’t be fair at all to call it simplistic. It is, moreover, certainly a widely held view, and no one ever dramatized it more powerfully.
