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    Book Review: ‘August Wilson: A Life,’ by Patti Hartigan

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    The first major biography of the playwright recounts his life and boundless vision.AUGUST WILSON: A Life, by Patti HartiganIn 1986, David Mamet published his best book, a slim and semi-hardboiled treatise on theater and life titled “Writing in Restaurants.” This was decades before he became “the Kanye West of American letters,” as The Forward put it last year. Alas, the book was only vaguely about restaurants.Mamet’s title came back to me while I was reading Patti Hartigan’s biography of another essential American playwright, August Wilson. Wilson, who died in 2005, spent so much time lingering in diners that “Writing in Restaurants” is a plausible alternative subtitle for Hartigan’s “August Wilson: A Life.”Wilson was a large, bearded man, often in tweeds and a pageboy cap. He’d sit in the back with a cup of coffee and an overflowing ashtray. (He smoked five packs a day and didn’t pause while in the shower.) He’d write on napkins or receipts, whatever was handy.He wrote one early play, “Jitney,” in an Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips. As his fame grew, he’d find a place in each city where his plays were staged. He’d call this joint “the Spot.” In New York City, he liked the seedy charm of the Hotel Edison’s coffee shop, known to regulars as the Polish Tea Room. In Boston, it was Ann’s Cafeteria. In Seattle, Caffe Ladro. He’d bring newspapers, and sometimes a friend. Over breakfast he’d hold court for four or five hours at a time. It was his daily slice of experimental theater.Wilson was a raconteur, with an autodidact’s darting curiosity. He was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, to a single Black mother who raised him and his siblings largely on welfare checks. He mined that city, especially its historically African American Hill District, as if it were coal; he was tapping a seam. The family’s first house had no hot water and an outhouse in the backyard. Wilson dropped out of high school and had a brief stint in the Army. He educated himself in Pittsburgh’s libraries the way Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that he did at Howard University: “three call slips at a time.”He thought he might be a poet. His early verse was ornate and indebted to Dylan Thomas; it made him a figure of gentle derision. He discovered Bessie Smith and the blues, and he fell sideways into theater. Amiri Baraka was a key influence; the poet, playwright and activist had come to Pittsburgh in 1968, at the height of the Black Power movement, and delivered a galvanizing speech. Wilson was 23 at the time.Baraka had founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School in Harlem in 1965. Wilson and his arts-world friends decided to start their own theater, which they called Black Horizons. No one volunteered to lead it, and Wilson was chosen by default. Material was needed, and Wilson began to write it. The words were simply there; the African American voices of an entire city came pouring out of him. His was a self-replenishing vision.This is the first major biography of Wilson, whose 10-play Century Cycle (also called the Pittsburgh Cycle) made him arguably the most important and successful playwright of the late 20th century. These plays, one for each decade of the 1900s, include “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” both of which won Pulitzer Prizes, as well as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and what might be his most electric play, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”“Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” became films starring, respectively, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, and Davis and Chadwick Boseman. His plays provided career-boosting roles to Angela Bassett, Delroy Lindo and Samuel L. Jackson, among many others. They luxuriated in his language. He had a special gift for lowlife dialogue and camaraderie — the cries of characters craving to be understood.Hartigan is a former Boston Globe theater critic. Her book is an achievement: It’s solid and well reported. But it’s dutiful. It lacks ebullience and critical insight. The writing is slack and, by the second half, the clichés are falling so heavily you need a hat. A play is “a diamond in the rough” or “a well-oiled machine.” An event is, to grab just one example, “as likely as snow in July.”Yet Wilson’s story carries you along. Hartigan describes the then-novel system that Wilson and his most important director, Lloyd Richards, developed to nurture his plays. Before arriving in New York, they would open at a string of nonprofit regional theaters, in Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle and elsewhere, allowing Wilson to make cuts (his early drafts tended to be unwieldy) and hone his material.Frank Rich, then the theater critic for The New York Times, was an essential early champion. This biography’s best set piece might be the lead-up to a public debate in the winter of 1997 at Manhattan’s Town Hall, between Wilson and a less generous critic, Robert Brustein of The New Republic. (Standing outside the theater, Henry Louis Gates Jr. called it the “Thrilla in Manila.”) The evening was moderated by Anna Deavere Smith. Even before the event, Wilson and Brustein had tangled over, among other things, color-blind casting, which Wilson had declared “an insult to our intelligence.” He thought developing Black playwrights was more important. Patti HartiganMarisa IhWilson never got over certain childhood racial slights. In one Pittsburgh store, only white shoppers received their purchases in paper bags. For the rest of his life, Wilson asked for anything he bought to be placed in one. He had a temper. He hated it when a waiter would say something like, “What’ll you have, boys?” He was light-skinned. His absent father was a white man. He disliked having this fact mentioned.Wilson was married three times and had two daughters. He was not an attentive father or husband; his work came first. His second daughter grew up referring to him as “the slippery guy.” He was also, Hartigan writes, a lifelong womanizer, a sexual locavore.Critics have noted the relative lack of strong women’s roles in his work. Some other Black playwrights felt his overweening success left them in the shadows — that American culture had room for only one of them.This book couldn’t have been easy to write. Wilson tended to have three or four projects going at once: a play in New York, one in development somewhere, a third he was starting to write. Hartigan is adept at keeping the lines straight.Wilson argued with his directors, and often with his actors. He delivered rewrites up to the last minute. He procrastinated. Everyone was forced to live on what they called “August Wilson time.” He never learned to drive.Wilson mostly avoided Hollywood. He knew too many talents who disappeared there. He turned down an offer to write the film “Amistad” for Steven Spielberg. He was a complicated man and, even in an imperfect book, it’s a pleasure to make his company.AUGUST WILSON: A Life | By Patti Hartigan | Illustrated | 531 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $32.50 More

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      The Playwright Who Changed the Face of American Theater

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      Since 1965, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, tucked away in the bucolic seaside town of Waterford, Conn., has lured theater professionals every summer for the National Playwrights Conference. Named for the Nobel Prize-winning playwright who spent his childhood summers nearby, the O’Neill was initially informal and heady, but Lloyd Richards, who directed the 1959 Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” brought a sense of gravitas when he became artistic director in 1969.August Wilson first arrived at the O’Neill in 1982 with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” At 37, he was older than the others, but he presented himself as a neophyte who worked as a short-order cook. He had applied five times — and was rejected five times — but finally got his chance with “Ma Rainey.”During Richards’s era, the O’Neill became a haven for writers to test their work outside the commercial pressure of Broadway. Yet it was also a clubby place, with a regular company of actors and directors. Wilson didn’t immediately fit in, but by the end of the summer, he had developed an esprit de corps with his fellow playwrights.The O’Neill was a place, Wilson once said, where “you can fail and your life won’t disappear.” Writers mattered. They stuck up for one another in the way that playwrights today have supported the writers’ strike in Hollywood. It was at the O’Neill, after all, that Wilson got his ticket to the world of professional theater. “Ma Rainey” opened on Broadway in 1984, and Wilson, who died in 2005 at 60, went on to write his series of 10 plays about the African American experience in the 20th century.In 1983, Wilson returned to the O’Neill with “Fences.” The story of that summer is recounted here in this excerpt from “August Wilson: A Life,” an upcoming biography by Patti Hartigan, a former theater critic for The Boston Globe.AUGUST WILSON WAS SETTLING IN to the life of an itinerant playwright. He had been invited back to the O’Neill for the 1983 National Playwrights Conference for a workshop of “Fences,” and this time, he knew what to expect at the preconference weekend. He had one goal before he got on the van to Waterford. He needed to stock up on scotch. When he arrived at the pickup location, he spotted someone he had never seen before. He seemed unfamiliar with the routine, with the same apprehension that Wilson had experienced the year before. He was James Yoshimura, a writer from Chicago who had attended the Yale School of Drama. After a brief introduction, Wilson told Yoshimura that they needed to get some liquid sustenance in order to make it through the long weekend. Yoshimura was up for the chase. They found a store, pooled their money, and bought a large bottle of scotch. By the time the van deposited them at the mansion, they were smashed. And they became fast friends.“Fences,” Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, arrived on Broadway in 1987 after premiering in 1985 at Yale Repertory Theater. Both productions starred, from left, Mary Alice, Ray Aranha and James Earl Jones.Ron ScherlLike Wilson, Yoshimura was raised Catholic and came from a large family. His parents converted when they were forced to live in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. “That does not work for birth control,” Yoshimura said. “I am the middle of 11 children.” His family was one of only three Asian families in a predominantly German American Catholic parish on the North Side of Chicago. “You are the other,” he said of his childhood. “August could empathize with that. He knew what the ‘other’ was. We shared this friendship. It wasn’t like we would discuss Catholicism. This was just how we grew up. We never felt part of the mainstream of the faith that we were baptized into.”During his first year at the O’Neill, Wilson was stunned to see all the theater people hugging one another, but now he was one of them. He took it upon himself to initiate his new friend to the summer camp experience. “The bottle of scotch made the preconference much better,” Yoshimura said. And they were willing to share. “We made a lot of friends.” Yoshimura needed liquid encouragement to get through the process of reading his play aloud before strangers. He was there with “Ohio Tip-Off,” a drama about seven athletes on a minor-league basketball team who are vying to make it to the N.B.A. The team has four Black players and three white players. Wilson did not question his new friend’s subject matter, but he did question the way he read his play for the group. “I read my play very badly, and he laughed aloud about how bad I was — while we were still sharing our scotch.” Wilson did not tell Yoshimura that he had been at the O’Neill the summer before (nor that he had become the controversial star after the Frank Rich [review disguised as a feature] ran in The New York Times, nor that he was in discussions about bringing “Ma Rainey” to Broadway). When Yoshimura found out, he asked Wilson about it. “He was humble. He didn’t want to talk about it.”Wilson, who later went on to make strong public statements about the need for a Black director to direct a film version of “Fences,” nurtured Yoshimura. He never suggested that Yoshimura should not be writing Black characters. His friend played basketball, and he was writing what he knew. “All of our discussions were about aesthetics,” Yoshimura said. “It was never a matter of color. He was like, ‘If you write it, you write it. If it doesn’t work, you gotta fix it.’” Wilson told other playwrights the same thing over the years. Laura Maria Censabella, who was also a jazz singer, came to the O’Neill with her play “Jazz Wives Jazz Lives.” The characters included Black jazz musicians that she based on her friends and colleagues in the jazz world. Some at the O’Neill questioned whether she, as a white woman, should write Black characters. Wilson defended her; she was writing from her own experience. Because of his support, the griping stopped.Wilson had different issues with “Fences.” It clocked in at more than four hours when Wilson read it at the preconference. “My impression was, this guy can write, but he hasn’t heard of the two-hour limit,” Yoshimura said. “It took two hours to get through the first act.”Yoshimura was the perfect partner for Wilson at the O’Neill, where, in addition to learning about playwriting, he enjoyed the college experience he had never had. The two bonded over sports. Wilson was still obsessed with the 1965 boxing showdown between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston. Ali unexpectedly knocked out Liston early in the first round, leading to suspicions that the fight was rigged. Wilson could dissect that match for hours, and Yoshimura was a willing audience.The Broadway revival of “Fences,” in 2010, featured Viola Davis, Denzel Washington and Stephen McKinley Henderson. They all went on to star in the 2016 film adaptation.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen Yoshimura’s wife showed up to visit, Wilson made sure to teach their young son how to hit a baseball with a tree branch, a skill he had learned on the streets of Pittsburgh’s Hill District. They were improvising, onstage and off. This endearing friendship was formative for both men. Yoshimura had been told that he would succeed only if he wrote plays about Asian Americans, but Wilson assured him that was nonsense. Yoshimura tried to engage him on the subject of father-son relationships, since that is the foundation of “Fences.” Wilson, who was willing to talk about any subject for hours, shut down when asked about his father. Yoshimura intuited that his friend was “deeply wounded” and didn’t push the issue.Bill Partlan [the director of “Ma Rainey” the year before] was assigned to direct “Fences,” and Edith Oliver, the theater critic for The New Yorker, was the dramaturg. At the preconference, they both told Wilson that the play needed cuts. They made suggestions, but he said he wanted to see it first before excising any scenes or monologues. Wilson had never studied dramatic structure. He was learning fundamental rules such as the fact that an actor can’t be soaking wet in the rain at the end of one scene and then appear at the top of the next scene in fresh new clothing and dry hair.After the first performance, he stayed up all night and cut 45 minutes from the script. (Helen Hayes had been in the audience that night, and she left after the first act, reportedly saying, “I think I’ve had enough theater for one night.”) Wilson took out a long monologue about bones walking on water, a poetic piece of writing. Partlan told him to hold on to it. The monologue would be the foundation of a moving speech in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”“Fences” revolves around the tragic hero, Troy Maxson, a former slugger in the Negro Leagues who never got a chance to play in the Major Leagues because of the color of his skin. At its heart, the play is about the confrontation between Maxson and his son Cory, a theme that Wilson had explored in “Jitney!” as well. At the end of the play, Troy dies, and his brother, Gabriel, who was wounded in World War II and is mentally disabled with a metal plate in his head, wants to send his brother off to St. Peter in heaven. He blows his trumpet, but no sound comes out. The stage directions say it all. “He begins to howl in what is an attempt at song, or perhaps a song turning back into itself in an attempt at speech. He finishes his dance and the Gates of Heaven stand open as wide as God’s closet.” With that, Gabriel lightens up and says, “That’s the way that go.”On the second night of the performance at the O’Neill, the fog from the Atlantic Ocean rolled in at the end of the play. This was a common occurrence. Eugene O’Neill wrote about the fog in his masterpiece, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” “How thick the fog is,” he wrote. “I can’t see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know.”At the O’Neill, the natural setting was magical. The weather changed just as Gabriel, played by Howard E. Rollins Jr., went to play his trumpet. “The fog came in, and the lights pierced through the fog,” Partlan said. “I sent Howard up the ramp that leads to the door in the barn to usher Troy into heaven. It was magic. I can still see and feel it today.”The wallop of that final scene became a sort of touchstone at the O’Neill. Other playwrights aspired to achieve that emotional depth. At the end of the preconference when Wilson first read his play, he and the playwright John Patrick Shanley got drunk together one night [a story that is recounted in Jeffrey Sweet’s “The O’Neill”]. Shanley said, “You son-of-a-bitch. You wrote that stage direction at the end of that play,” referring to Gabriel blowing the trumpet. “You son-of-a-bitch. Nobody can touch that.”A revival of “Fences” is running at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Mass., through Aug. 27. Hartigan will be there at the Aug. 12 matinee for a discussion about her book, which will be published by Simon & Schuster on Aug. 15. More

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      When Black Characters Double-Deal to Make Ends Meet, It’s Never Enough

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      In three Broadway plays this season, a quest for financial stability can’t undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In “Between Riverside and Crazy,” a Black man haggles over the concessions he’s being offered by his former employer, the New York Police Department, eight years after he was shot by a white cop. In “Topdog/Underdog,” two brothers hustle pedestrians on the street and, at home, each other. And in “The Piano Lesson,” family members bristle at a scheme that would involve hocking a precious heirloom.While these Broadway plays couldn’t be more different, they all similarly explore what happens when Black characters aren’t able to achieve financial stability through traditional, or official, channels. They are left little choice but to create and work in their own separate economies: A hustle is the only way the Black characters can even the playing field. And yet they never manage to do so — at least not for long. Even when one profits from a con, it’s a Faustian bargain that comes at the expense of another Black man’s opportunities.Ultimately, there’s no real winning, no outcome that can undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In that regard, the shows mirror the reality facing many Black Americans who have dared to dream of financial success. Back in the 1930s, the setting of “The Piano Lesson,” federal housing programs under the New Deal segregated Black families by steering them to urban housing projects far from the almost exclusively white suburbs. The effects of these government programs, along with a variety of other exclusionary tactics used by agents and white residents — what we now call “redlining” — put many Black Americans at a disadvantage. (In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic “A Raisin in the Sun,” revived this past fall at the Public Theater, the Younger family experiences this firsthand when a white representative from the neighborhood where they recently bought a house offers them a bribe to keep them from moving in.)And it’s not just housing: There are racial inequities in hiring practices, and in pay rates and retention in the job force; gaps in access to quality education and health care; and of course Black Americans are imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates than white Americans.Corey Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Booth in “Topdog/Underdog,” which is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what the brothers do with a deck of cards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” a revival of which is at the Golden Theater through Sunday, the brothers Lincoln and Booth share Booth’s tiny efficiency apartment. Lincoln’s wife has kicked him out, and Booth refuses to hold down a job. Lincoln supports them with a gig as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth spends his days shoplifting, aggressively trying to woo an ex and planning his debut as a master of three-card monte. In some ways, Booth’s on top: Though he has no job, he gets along fine and still has his $500 inheritance. Lincoln’s struggling: a job that he fears he’s going to lose, no wife, no home and his own $500 inheritance is long gone.“Topdog/Underdog” is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what Lincoln and Booth do with a deck of cards. Booth never subscribed to the losing game of American capitalism by getting a 9-to-5, and yet Lincoln, a former card hustler, now takes “nowhere jobs” and plays the 16th president in an arcade that underpays and then fires him.Though the economy Lincoln built on the street was illegal, it was at least more reliable than what he faces in the traditional job market. Yet again, there’s a blood cost. After Lincoln pulls off the ultimate con — hustling his brother out of his inheritance — Booth shoots him.Nobody wins. Nobody profits.Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Between Riverside and Crazy,” now playing at the Helen Hayes Theater (and livestreaming its final two weeks of performances), had its Off Broadway debut in 2014, during the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the play, Walter, a Black former police officer who was shot while off duty, has lost his wife and is now being pushed out of his rent-stabilized apartment in an area experiencing gentrification.He tells his son, Junior, that despite following the straight and narrow — “Married your mother. Joined the police. Paid taxes. Bought insurance. Got a Riverside Drive apartment. Had you. Put down firm roots” — he knew he would be cheated and disrespected. It doesn’t matter that he’s an “old patriotic, tax-paying, African American ex-cop, war veteran senior citizen,” as he says twice in the play. At the end of the day, he’s still just a Black man in America.So he has no qualms lying about a detail in the shooting and later about demanding that his former partner’s $30,000 engagement ring be included in his new settlement. Given the circumstances, Walter’s con feels like reparations, not thievery. He successfully gets his payout and keeps his apartment, and the play ends with Walter ready to move on from his old life. But in this final scene we also see that his son has taken his father’s seat at the kitchen table. Dressed in Walter’s robe, Junior, an ex-con with a roomful of suspiciously acquired electronics, has been left behind. Though the city, in its deal with Walter, has expunged Junior’s criminal record, the play suggests that this is far from enough for Junior to build a life of success.In “The Piano Lesson,” a family grapples with how best to preserve its painful legacy, which is represented by an elaborately carved piano.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese plays depict dire times — contemporary times (“Between Riverside and Crazy” is set in 2014, and “Topdog/Underdog” premiered at the Public in 2001) when the American dream, which has been accessible to white Americans since before the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, is still so far out of reach for Black people.August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” however, is set in 1936, during the overlapping period of the Great Depression and the Great Migration, when Black Americans were working to distance themselves from the economy that slavery built — trying to survive, even thrive, amid national fiscal insecurity.When Boy Willie, a sharecropper in Mississippi, arrives in Pittsburgh at the home that his uncle Doaker Charles shares with Boy Willie’s sister, Berniece, he feverishly reveals his plan to become a respectable landowner. He simply needs to sell the watermelons that he hauled up there in his broken-down truck, and find a buyer for a family heirloom in his sister’s possession.The land he wants to purchase isn’t just any plot — it belonged to Sutter, the white man whose ancestors owned the Charles family as slaves and who employed Boy Willie as a sharecropper. By cashing in on his family’s history, and pain, Boy Willie wants to buy a piece of the American dream that was stolen from his family generations ago.Berniece is adamant that the price is too high, and she suspects that the recently deceased Sutter was killed by Boy Willie so that he could buy the property. Boy Willie goes behind his sister’s back to sell the heirloom, a piano engraved with the Charles family’s story of enslavement, separation and death, which is in large part a result of the instrument — a slave-owner’s anniversary gift to his wife, paid for in slaves. Though Berniece keeps the piano, and thus a connection to their family’s legacy, the cost is Boy Willie’s dream of the financial security and independence that would have come from owning his own property. (Though that dream, the play indicates, was always a delusion, because a Black landowner in the South would almost certainly be targeted.)Wilson’s play is a window into the ways our country’s perverse economics make even one’s trauma psychologically too pricey to keep. At least that’s Boy Willie’s feeling. For Berniece, it’s too valuable to sell off and forget.Boy Willie misses out on landownership, Junior loses his father, Booth his inheritance, and Lincoln his life. When it’s Blackness versus the American dream, that paradise of white capitalism, the house always wins. More

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      ‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: August Wilson’s Phantom Notes

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      John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson star in the first Broadway revival of Wilson’s haunting family drama set in 1936.Four Black men gathered around a kitchen table exuberantly sing a work song (“When you marry, don’t marry no farming man, hoh-ah,” they holler, clapping and stomping their feet), a Black woman girds herself with her grief for the husband and father she lost to the anger of white men, and siblings fight over a seemingly haunted family heirloom that tells a story of generational trauma and loss. These circumstances are more than enough to raise the dead.Or at least they are in the Charles household, in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.First staged in 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theater, “The Piano Lesson” made its Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr three years later. That year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — one of two Wilson won for his American Century Cycle, a collection of 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, depicting African American life.In “The Piano Lesson,” it’s Pittsburgh, 1936, in the house of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), an old railroad worker who is now a train cook. His niece, Berniece (Danielle Brooks), and her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha (played by Jurnee Swan at the performance I saw), live with him in what is, in Beowulf Boritt’s too on-the-nose scenic design, a skeletal facsimile of a house — just beams and planks, some of which don’t even connect. Though there’s not much to the house — a love seat, a tiny kitchen with an ice box — there is an ornately carved piano that commands attention, despite its place in the far corner of the living room.It’s an august instrument with a knotty history, linking the Charles family to their enslaved ancestors and the white family that owned them. Each panel is covered with figures representing the Charleses; even the piano’s front legs are elaborately sculpted.From left, Ray Fisher, Washington, Brooks, Trai Byers, Jurnee Swan and Samuel L. Jackson. The elaborately carved piano is covered with figures of the Charles family.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBerniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), has traveled up north from Mississippi with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) planning to cash it in for a plot of land and in the process hoping to transform an artifact of their family’s past struggles into a path to a better future. But Berniece refuses to give up the piano and all the bloody history it represents. To complicate matters, the piano is haunted by a recently dead member of the white family that once owned generations of the Charleses.Wilson’s usual signatures are here, including the somber subject matter related to Black disenfranchisement, prejudice, history and trauma — paired with witty, casual dialogue and flights into the surreal. Wilson makes poetry out of the mundane minutiae of daily African American life without forgetting how the past is present, alive and immediate like the melody of a song played by a piano that seems to have sprung to life.And yet even among Wilson’s outstanding and occasionally surreal plays, “The Piano Lesson,” both a family drama and a ghost story, stands out as one of the odder works. It’s a mix of themes and tones, both concrete and ethereal, ghoulish and comedic, but the imbalanced direction here, by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, overemphasizes the horror too literally; it works best on a metaphorical level.The performances are, in almost every case, engaging. Michael Potts, the veteran stage and screen actor who has appeared in other Wilson works, including the 2017 Broadway revival of “Jitney” and the 2020 film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” is perfection as Doaker’s brother Wining Boy, an itinerant musician who can never seem to hold onto a dollar.As the surviving Charles brothers, Potts and Jackson (who played Boy Willie in the original 1987 production) have a breezy rapport: They joke, drink and reminisce like a couple of cads retired from most — but not all — of their wayward ways. Wining Boy remains a smooth scammer, and Doaker is an even-tempered dispenser of wisdom. Trai Byers, as Avery, a new reverend who’s enamored with Berniece, takes on his character’s highfalutin sermonizing with comedic aloofness, and April Matthis makes a brief, though memorable, appearance as a minor character with some big-city attitude. As the simpleton Lymon, Fisher occasionally goes too hokey, especially when it comes to his Southern drawl, but is endearing nonetheless with his dopey physicality and witless expressions.From left: Potts, Fisher, Jackson and Washington singing an old work song from their time as sharecroppers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFisher is a great contrast to Washington’s downright feverish performance as Boy Willie. He speaks in a hot spitfire of stubborn refusals, denials and lofty aspirations, convinced that he can put a price tag on his family’s past and use the money to build a future where he is equal to the white men who owned his ancestors and still hold power over him and his family.Washington, in a revelatory stage debut, is a blaze of energy lighting every scene he’s in. Brooks, who was a delight in “The Color Purple” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” as well as in her TV roles in “Orange is the New Black” and “Peacemaker,” isn’t as radiant a presence as in her other outings. Though she has a few standout moments, she, like her character, too often fades into the background, overshadowed by the extensive history and myths in the play.Despite Wilson’s eloquent writing, “The Piano Lesson,” at nearly three hours, drags on. The repetitive dialogue, especially in the second act, evokes a nagging sensation of déjà vu. The spooky shifts in lighting (by Japhy Weideman) and Boritt’s broken home, like a metaphor brought to life, leave nothing to the imagination.While in this production the play’s supernatural elements come across like anomalies, on the page they aren’t; the characters aren’t all that shocked by the eerie, odd occurrences and in fact continue on with their lives as usual. What haunts the Charles household is what haunts Black America every day — the living history of racial violence and pervasive inequality. Part of what’s missing in this mostly entertaining but often underwhelming “Piano Lesson” is the sense that this is a reality we’ve lived ourselves. Who hasn’t heard the melody of a ghost’s song in the middle of the night?The Piano LessonThrough Jan. 15 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; pianolessonplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      LaTanya Richardson Jackson on Directing ‘The Piano Lesson’ (and Her Husband)

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      As she makes her Broadway directorial debut, she said her “vision is about seeing a deeper way into” what August Wilson intended with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play.LaTanya Richardson Jackson believes in ghosts. Better put: She believed her parents, and grandparents, when they talked about being frequently visited by people who were invisible to the human eye. Such a childhood has not only opened her up to having similar experiences but also made her uniquely qualified to bring one of August Wilson’s most haunting plays, “The Piano Lesson,” back to Broadway this fall.It first premiered there in 1990, and this Broadway revival — the show’s first — will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington. The play, initially produced in 1987 at Yale Repertory Theater, is the fourth in Wilson’s 10-play series known as “The Pittsburgh Cycle,” which explores a full century of African American life in Pennsylvania’s Steel City.Jackson saw that original production, in part, because she was an actress and lifelong admirer of Wilson’s work. (She later starred in a Tony-nominated revival of Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” in 2009 and made her directorial debut with his “Two Trains Running” at True Colors Theater Company in Atlanta in 2013.) But she was also there to support her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, who was playing the lead character, Boy Willie. He’s also starring in the revival, but as Boy Willie’s uncle Doaker.From left: Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and Ray Fisher in “The Piano Lesson” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where it is scheduled to open Oct. 13.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSet in 1936, “The Piano Lesson,” for which Wilson also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1990, follows two siblings, Boy Willie (Washington) and Berniece (Brooks), as they debate the fate of their family heirloom, a piano upon which the faces of their great-grandmother and her son are carved. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano and buy the property their enslaved ancestors worked on in the South. Berniece wants to keep it, understanding that the piano itself offers them another connection and liberation from their oppressive past. In contrast, Doaker sees the piano as haunted both by Boy Charles, his dead older brother and Boy Willie and Berniece’s father; and the ghost of the white slave owner, Sutter.On Broadway, Jackson, 72, is best known for portraying Lena Younger in a 2014 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” and, more recently, as Calpurnia, in the substantially expanded role of Atticus Finch’s sagacious and reserved housekeeper in Aaron Sorkin’s 2019 adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird.” But, within African American drama, in regional theaters and on television shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” Jackson has long been a familiar face.“The star thing,” she told me. “You have to have a mind-set for that. And I just was never willing to do that.”What she has been doing is giving life to complex Black female protagonists on the stage and screen, and now working to unlock the deeper elements of Wilson’s women. Wilson once said he wanted to create a female character in “The Piano Lesson,” which “was as large as Troy was in Fences.” But, in the end, Wilson had to admit that his interests in the themes of self-worth, tradition, and tracing the history of the piano for 135 years took over the plot so much that his female character was “not as large as I intended.”Knowing that, Richardson said she paid homage to Wilson the best way she knew how: by making visible the many worlds, obvious and hidden, his play offers us. She added that her early encounters with the play, as well as Wilson and his other works, empowered her to take those risks here in her Broadway directorial debut.In a recent video interview, Jackson talked about navigating the gender politics of Wilson’s plays, what working with Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington has been like and how she discovered that directing was really her first love. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.You’re the first woman to direct an August Wilson play on Broadway. How has your perspective as a Black woman impacted your approach to his material?August was such a man’s man. When I directed “Two Trains Running” for Kenny Leon’s True Colors company in Atlanta, I told him [Leon], “As a woman, I look at things differently, and what might appear to you as minutiae, I find to be an important point.”I remember telling Pauletta [Washington], who played Risa, “Every time one of those men mention a woman who has died or was killed, you drop something in the kitchen and make a big, loud noise so that they have to stop and think about what they just said.” We can’t just have a conversation about women being cut or stabbed to death like that’s just a regular part of life. Our presence should not be something that’s taken for granted. Our presence is important.In “The Piano Lesson,” Berniece, like Risa, is the only woman in the cast.Yes, Berniece is surrounded by all of this testosterone. I saw the first production of this play at Yale, and I remember asking August after, “Where are all the women? Where are all the parts for women?” And he said, “Well, you know, Joe Turner has women.” I said, “But we’re always singular.” Then, he told me, “I’ll write about them when I really know what I’m saying.”My mentor, Douglas Turner Ward, told me: “Great playwrights don’t always know what they’re writing or what they have written. They attempt to do something, and if it’s great, the spirits visit them, and they just write. It’s a director’s job to see what they have actually written, whether or not it was their intention or not. Usually, with great writers, it’s bigger than what they intend.” And I find that to be so true of August.You embrace the otherworldliness of this story. Why was that important to you?Oct. 2 was the anniversary of August’s transition, so I’ve been thinking about him and his widow, Constanza Romero, and how to approach this story spiritually. I’m telling everybody, “This is a ghost story.” I believe there are other worlds where things are occurring, even if we don’t see them. To manifest that in the play, I felt that every member in that house was fighting their own ghosts. But Sutter [the white slave owner] represents the ghost of racism and the cruel manner we have had to navigate life in this country. August metaphorically shows that this ghost was an albatross around our necks. But I wanted to visually manifest it so that there was no question that we were attempting to exorcise it.Like any good ghost story, the house also seems haunted.I told myself that I had to find a designer who could build a house that was not raggedy but was really broken. August was a genius. In this play, he gave us these two-sided Janus figures. Not just between Boy Willie and Berniece, but [the brothers] Wining Boy and Doaker Charles, and the family and Lymon [Boy Willie’s friend]. And he did so because he believed that our people deserve to be recorded and documented in a classical way. That’s why we call him our Shakespeare.So, when I told our gifted set designer, Beowulf [Boritt], that house had to be split open, he was intrigued. Then when I said, “And the house has no walls.” He said, “I’m going down that rabbit hole with you.” Listen, we don’t change August’s words. That’s sacrosanct. That’s not what this vision is about. This vision is about seeing a deeper way into what he has given us.Mostly known for her work as an actress, Jackson says directing is her true passion: “I wish I were younger. But this is all I want to do now.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe piano is so meaningful to this family, and its symbolism is heightened by its physical beauty. Is there a story behind its design?Other versions of the play always have these pianos with these beautifully carved fresco plaques on them. But, Sam and I — you know I am married to Sam Jackson, right? — well, back in our house in Los Angeles, we have a Tree of Life statue made by the Makonde sculptors from East Africa. They start with a piece of ebony and then pass it among the community members to carve until it is all done. So, I wanted the piano to look like a Makonde statue and Mama’s face had to be the most prominent, and then the little boy Charles. And you know how they made that happen? A 3-D printer.Speaking of Samuel L. Jackson, he starred as Boy Willie in the original production. Now, he is playing the role of one of the uncles, Doaker Charles. What was it like for you to direct him?Sam and I are used to working together and being around each other 24/7. But I realized in this particular context, he doesn’t like to take a note. I had heard that about him before, but I just thought, “Oh, he just doesn’t like to take notes from people he feels don’t know what they’re talking about.” I didn’t think I’d even have to tell him, “That’s the note, brother.” And when I did, he said, “Well, I think I would know how that goes.” And I said, “I’m just bringing it to your attention that it didn’t go the way I would like it to go.”The way that I operate is that there are no stars in the room. We are an ensemble, and we are moving together or not at all. But, it was a true gift that this project came to me with Sam and John David already attached to it.This is John David Washington’s first play. You’ve also known him for a long time, did anything surprise you about his performance?Denzel and Pauletta Washington have been very generous with their children with me, and I love all their children. They, like our daughter, Zoe, are all worker bees. So to watch John David’s career and be able to help develop it is beyond a responsibility. It’s like being given something from God that says, “OK, you take care of and nurture this.” And to him, I said, “We got this. Just trust me. Your instrument is built soundly. We are going to give you the notes, and all you have to do is play them.” And he has exceeded my wildest imagination.This brings us back to Berniece. There are the words on the page, and then what you bring to her character.Or what Danielle [Brooks] brings. I’ve only been trying to guide Danielle toward who I think Berniece is. I’ve seen different renditions of this character, and she is always so angry, almost too angry. And I know she’s frustrated because she lost Crawford, the love of her life, and blames Boy Willie. But there are times that the anger covers up that hurt. So, I’ve told her, “Sometimes I just want to see the hurt because it allows me into you in a different way.” This is a family that loves each other, so she has to have a heart for him, too.Do you want to continue directing?Since I was in sixth grade, I knew that this was something inside of me, and God only knows who or what I could have been or done by now if I had just followed that track. I wish I were younger. But this is all I want to do now. More

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      Denzel Washington Honors August Wilson’s Legacy at House Opening

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      After fund-raising and restoration efforts, the childhood home of the playwright will offer artist residencies and other programming.PITTSBURGH — On Saturday, crowds gathered outside August Wilson’s childhood home in the historic Hill District here to celebrate the grand opening of the August Wilson House. After a yearslong fund-raising and restoration effort, the house where the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright spent the first 13 years of his life will now be open to the public with the goal of extending Wilson’s legacy and advancing Black arts in culture.Wilson, who died in 2005, is perhaps best known for his series of 10 plays called the American Century Cycle, which detail the various experiences of Black Americans throughout the 20th century. Nine of these plays are set in this city’s Hill District — a bastion of Black history, arts and culture — and one, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” is set in Chicago.The restoration effort was a long time coming. Wilson’s nephew, Paul Ellis Jr., began the project after his uncle’s death. The abandoned house had been left to sit in a state of disrepair. Although it became a spot of cultural pilgrimage for Wilson’s fans after his death, those pilgrims saw only decay once they arrived.With the help of various Pittsburgh foundations and other benefactors — among them, the two-time Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington — the house is now a home for those who will follow in Wilson’s footsteps.The August Wilson House is not a museum. Instead, the restored space is a community center that will offer artist residencies, gathering spaces, fellowships and other programming for up-and-coming artists and scholars. There is also an outdoor stage behind the home, which is currently showcasing the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company’s production of Wilson’s play “Jitney” through Sept. 18.The playwright spent the first 13 years of his life in the house in Pittsburgh’s Hill District neighborhood, the setting for many of his plays.Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesAccording to Sam Reiman, a trustee of the Richard King Mellon Foundation here and a board member of the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, the space will be “the birthplace of August Wilson’s successors.”Along with Reiman, Saturday’s ceremony featured a star-studded lineup of speakers, including Washington, who helped raise millions toward the home’s restoration. Washington also starred in, produced and directed the 2016 film adaptation of “Fences,” one of Wilson’s Pittsburgh-based plays, that filmed throughout the Hill District. He also produced the 2020 film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”Washington praised those in attendance for their support of Wilson and his legacy.“I want to thank the community,” Washington said, because Wilson “is yours, and you are his. You just share him with the rest of us.”Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero Wilson, who designed the costumes for many of Wilson’s later plays, also spoke at the event.“This is sacred ground,” she said of the house, located at 1727 Bedford Avenue. It “commemorates our generation’s hero — August Wilson. August Wilson House belongs to the Hill, to Black Americans, and because his stories are American stories of triumph under oppression, it belongs to all of us Americans.”Washington thanked the community for its support. “You just share him with the rest of us,” he said.Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesAlso in attendance were local leaders, including Ed Gainey, Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor, and Daniel Lavelle, a city councilman.The commencement speaker for Gainey’s college graduation in 1994 was none other than August Wilson, whose name the mayor admitted to never hearing before that day. He called his mother, he said, and she told him everything about the playwright.“There’s not a child in this city who should not know who August Wilson is. Not a child,” Gainey said. “And today speaks volumes to how far we’ve come in recognizing African American history in this city and celebrating the heroes that came before us.”He added, “Today is August Wilson’s Day.”It was a sentiment echoed by Lavelle, who had one note for Gainey’s speech.“Not only should every kid in our city know who August Wilson is,” he said, “but every person in this country should know who August Wilson is.”Lavelle also read a City of Pittsburgh proclamation declaring Aug. 13, 2022, Paul Ellis Jr. Day, honoring his work to preserve Wilson’s home.“People actually told me that my vision was too big,” Ellis explained, adding that when he spoke about what he wanted his uncle’s house to become, people looked at him as if he was a child proudly declaring he’d someday be president.“But as Nelson Mandela said, ‘It always seems impossible until it’s done.’” More

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      ‘Piano Lesson’ With Samuel L. Jackson Plans Fall Broadway Bow

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      The revival of August Wilson’s play, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, will also star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington.From left, Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and John David Washington, who will be appearing in the revival of “The Piano Lesson” at the St. James Theater.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via Shutterstock, Leon Bennett/Getty Images, Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images LaTanya Richardson Jackson first saw August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” in 1987 — it was the original production, at Yale Repertory Theater, and of course she was going to see it, because her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, was in the cast.This fall, Richardson Jackson will direct a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, again with her husband in the cast, although in a different role.The Broadway revival — the first since “The Piano Lesson” arrived there in 1990 — will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington as a sister and brother at odds over whether to sell a piano on which are carved the faces of their enslaved ancestors. Jackson will play their uncle, Doaker Charles (at Yale, he played the brother).Richardson Jackson will be the first woman to direct a Wilson play on Broadway. She is best known as an actress — in 2018, she originated the role of Calpurnia in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and in 2014, she was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as Lena Younger in a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” This will be her first time directing on Broadway, but she has directed elsewhere, including a production of Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” at True Colors Theater in Atlanta.In her view, Richardson Jackson said in an interview, the play is “about the struggle of African Americans in this country to actually face what it is that we’re against.” She noted that her own ancestors had been enslaved, and reluctant to talk about it, and she said that she sees the tension within the Charles family as a vehicle for exploring “us facing all of it.”“I’m dealing with this as a ghost story — I’m unashamedly, unabashedly telling a ghost story,” Richardson Jackson said. “And it’s about the bigger ghosts that haunt us, that are part of our lives, that we are carrying around like an anvil.”“The Piano Lesson” is part of a series of 10 plays Wilson wrote about African American life; each is set in a different decade of the 20th century. “The Piano Lesson” takes place in the 1930s, and, like most of the plays, is set in Pittsburgh.The revival is scheduled to begin performances on Sept. 19 at the St. James Theater; the run is expected to last 16 weeks.Brian Moreland (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”), Sonia Friedman (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”) and Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) are the producers. Moreland said the play would be capitalized for about $6 million.The producer Scott Rudin previously planned to stage a revival of “The Piano Lesson,” with many of the same artists, but relinquished the rights when he stopped producing after being accused of bullying employees and collaborators. The actor Denzel Washington, who is John David Washington’s father, last year told The Daily Mail he was planning to produce a film adaptation, with the same stars, and with Rudin as a co-producer; a spokesman for Denzel Washington said the actor is still planning to produce a film adaptation. More

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      Arthur French, Negro Ensemble Company Pioneer, Dies at 89

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      He more or less stumbled into a career as an actor, but it proved to be a long and prolific one, on film, on television and especially on the stage.Arthur French, a prolific and acclaimed (if relatively unsung) actor who was a founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company, died on July 24 in Manhattan. He was 89.His death, in a hospital, was announced by his son, the playwright Arthur W. French III, in a post on Facebook.Mr. French more or less stumbled into his theatrical career. After abandoning early plans to become a preacher, he aspired to be a disc jockey, but when he showed up at the D.J. school he had hoped to attend, he found that it had closed after bribery investigations began into the radio payola scandal of the late 1950s.Fortunately, the Dramatic Workshop, where Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler taught, was located in the same building, and Mr. French signed up for classes. He was coached by the actress Peggy Feury; he caught the attention of Maxwell Glanville’s American Negro Theater; and his career as a supporting actor was born.Mr. French made his professional debut Off Broadway in “Raisin’ Hell in the Son,” a spoof of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1962. Three years later he appeared in Douglas Turner Ward’s “Day of Absence,” which spawned the Negro Ensemble Company. He first appeared on Broadway in Melvin Van Peebles’s musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” in 1971.“That’s when I decided to quit my Social Service job,” he said in a recent interview with the arts journal Gallery & Studio. He had been working days as a clerk with New York City’s welfare department.Mr. French appeared in Broadway revivals of “The Iceman Cometh” (1973), “Death of a Salesman” (1975) and “You Can’t Take It With You” (1983). His films included Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” (1992) and “Crooklyn” (1994). Among his many television appearances were three episodes of “Law & Order,” two of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and one of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”Reviewers often called attention to his sonorous voice and the civility of his performances; his notices in The New York Times were consistently positive. Reviewing his portrayal of Bynum, a “conjure man,” in a 1996 revival of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at the Henry Street Settlement, Vincent Canby called it “a variation on the seer, sometimes the idiot savant, who turns up with regularity in Mr. Wilson’s work but never as fully realized as the character is here.”When Mr. French was seen in “Checkmates” at the same theater that year, Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in The Times, “The real treats are Ruby Dee and Arthur French as the Coopers, gifted old pros who tickle the funny bone and touch the heart.”He occasionally directed, most recently a 2010 production of Steve Carter’s 1990 play “Pecong,” a retelling of the Medea story set in the Caribbean, at the Off Off Broadway National Black Theater.Mr. French taught at the HB Studio in New York. He received an Obie Award for sustained excellence of performance in 1997 and a Lucille Lortel Award for his supporting role in August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” in 2007. In 2015, he was awarded a Paul Robeson Citation from the Actors’ Equity Association and the Actor’s Equity Foundation for his “dedication to freedom of expression and respect for human dignity.”Mr. French, right, with Frankie Faison in the Signature Theater Company’s 2006 production of August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running.” Mr. French won a Lucille Lortel Award for his performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesArthur Wellesley French Jr. was born on Nov. 6, 1931, in Harlem to immigrants from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean. His father, a former seaman, died young; Arthur himself survived a bout with asthma. His mother, Ursilla Idonia (Ollivierre) French, was a garment workers’ union organizer, and Arthur helped her earn extra money by embroidering material she took home.His mother encouraged him to take music lessons, which led to a piano recital at Carnegie Hall. He attended Morris High School in the Bronx before transferring to the Bronx High School of Science; after graduating, he attended Brooklyn College.In 1961, he married the singer Antoinette Williams. She died before him. In addition to their son, he is survived by a daughter, Antonia Willow French, and two grandchildren.In the Gallery & Studio interview, Mr. French was asked what he had learned about himself during his 50-year career.“I like the world of fantasy,” he replied. “And my father told me, ‘Learn something so well that you won’t have to lift up anything heavier than a pencil.’” More

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      ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ Review: All the Blues That’s Fit to Sing

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s pick‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ Review: All the Blues That’s Fit to SingViola Davis and Chadwick Boseman star in a potent adaptation of August Wilson’s play.Viola Davis stars in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” August Wilson’s 1984 play about a recording session in Chicago in the 1920s.Credit…David Lee/NetflixDec. 17, 2020Updated 11:26 a.m. ETMa Rainey’s Black BottomNYT Critic’s PickDirected by George C. WolfeDrama, MusicR1h 34mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“White folks don’t understand about the blues,” says the pioneering singer Ma Rainey, as imagined by August Wilson and incarnated by Viola Davis. “They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that that’s life’s way of talking.”Albert Murray, the great 20th-century philosopher of the blues, put the matter more abstractly. The art of the music’s practitioners, he wrote, involves “confronting, acknowledging and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the possibilities that are also there.”“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Wilson’s 1984 play about a recording session in Chicago in the 1920s, both dramatizes and expresses that duality. Absurdities and frustrations abound, and the lethal, soul-crushing shadow of American racism falls across the musicians and their instruments. The specific and manifold evils of Southern Jim Crow repression and Northern economic exploitation are unavoidable. The members of Ma’s band swap stories of lynching, assault and humiliation, and Ma fights with the white owner of the record label (Jonny Coyne). By the end of the play — a swift hour and a half in George C. Wolfe’s screen adaptation — one man is dead and another has seen all his prospects evaporate.[embedded content]But the sense of play and possibility, the joy and discipline of art, are also, emphatically, there. There in Ma’s big voice and smoldering, slow-rolling charisma. There in the tight swing of the players behind her — Cutler (Colman Domingo) on trombone; Toledo (Glynn Turman) on piano; Slow Drag (Michael Potts) on bass; and an ambitious upstart named Levee (Chadwick Boseman) on cornet. There in the voices and personalities of the actors: Turman’s gravelly wit; Domingo’s avuncular baritone; Boseman’s quicksilver; Davis’s brass. And there above all in the singular music of Wilson’s language, a vehicle for the delivery of vernacular poetry as durable and adaptable as the blues itself.This version of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” on Netflix, is part of an ongoing project to bring all of Wilson’s plays — a cycle representing aspects of Black life in the 20th century — to the screen. That makes it, in some ways, definitive by default, part of an archive of preserved performances that will introduce future generations to the playwright’s essential work.From left, Glynn Turman, Chadwick Boseman and Michael Potts are the players behind Viola Davis’s Ma Rainey.Credit…David Lee/NetflixIt’s also definitive because it will be hard, from now on, to imagine a Ma Rainey other than Davis, or a Levee to compare with Boseman. The rest of the cast is first-rate too, but those two carry the play’s meatiest, most complicated theme, and enact its central antagonism. Each character is an ambitious, inventive artist, and their inability to harmonize creates an undertone of tragedy that grows more insistent as the day wears on.Ma, who rolls into the studio late, flanked by her nephew, Sylvester (Dusan Brown), and her young girlfriend, Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige), can seem almost like a caricature of the “difficult” artist. She insists that Sylvester, who stutters, record the spoken introduction to her signature song. She demands three bottles of Coca-Cola (“ice-cold”) before she will sing another note, and continually upbraids her nervous white manager (Jeremy Shamos). But this behavior isn’t the result of ego or whim. It’s the best way she has found of protecting the value of her gift, which once it becomes a commodity — a record — will enrich somebody else. The hard bargain she drives is the best deal she can get.She also represents the old school — an established star who works in a Southern style that Levee thinks is behind the times. Part of the history embedded in the play is the story of the Great Migration of Black Southerners to the industrial cities of the North, and Levee suspects that his fleet, light-fingered approach to the blues will appeal to the tastes of the migrants, and also cross over to white record buyers. He epitomizes a different kind of artistic temperament as well — cocky, impulsive, tilting toward self-destruction. He argues with the other musicians, refusing to listen when they try to talk sense to him. He seduces Dussie Mae, a risky career move to say the least. He’s a young man in a hurry, eager to cash checks before they’ve been written.Of course it’s hard to watch Levee — to marvel at Boseman’s lean and hungry dynamism — without feeling renewed shock and grief at Boseman’s death earlier this year. And though “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” has been around for a long while and will endure in the archive, the algorithm and the collective memory, there is something especially poignant about encountering it now.Not because it’s timely in an obvious or literal way — the argument of Wilson’s oeuvre is that time to reckon with racism is always now, because Black lives have always mattered — but because of some unexpected emotional resonances. Wilson’s text is a study in perseverance, but it’s haunted by loss, and to encounter it at the end of 2020 is to feel the weight of accumulated absences.Some are permanent and tragic, like losing Boseman at just 43. Others are, we hope, temporary. This is a rendering of a work written for the stage that begins with a concert — a sweaty, sensual spectacle of the blues in action. It’s also a movie that you’ll most likely encounter in your living room or on your laptop, further confounding an inevitable identity conundrum. Should we call this theater, cinema or television — or a sometimes graceful, sometimes clumsy hybrid of all three?Maybe the question doesn’t matter, or maybe it will matter more once we regain our critical bearings and the theaters and nightclubs fill up again. But at the moment, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art, of its sometimes terrible costs and of the preciousness of the people, living and dead, with whom we share it. “Blues help you get out of bed in the morning,” Ma says. “You get up knowing you ain’t alone.”Ma Rainey’s Black BottomRated R. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More