Cathy Rawlings plays the title role in August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at Actors Guild of Lexington. Copyrighted photo by Larry Neuzel.
Half-an-hour into the Sept. 21st performance of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at the Downtown Arts Center, the sounds of fireworks at the Festival Latino de Lexington overtook the black box theater for what must have been 10 or 15 minutes.
It was an unfortunate coincidence on a very busy night in Downtown Lexington. But it was nonetheless frustrating as the actors had to compete with the explosive sounds in the theater, and all the more frustrating because of the occasion: The first production of an August Wilson play in Lexington in more than a decade. With Wilson, like Shakespeare, Arthur Miller or some of our other great stage scribes, you want to hear every word.
Through next weekend, there are gems like this, from Ma Rainey’s chat with her band leader, Toledo: “The blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain’t alone. There’s something else in this world. Something’s been added by that song. This be an empty world without the blues.”
Wilson’s words are deep with meaning, particularly when it comes to the blues. In May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson, edited by University of Kentucky English professor Alan Nadel, Afro-American scholar Sandra Adell writes about the strong connection between Wilson’s drama and the blues in Ma Rainey.
“The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural responses of blacks in America to the situation that they find themselves in,” she quotes Wilson as saying in an interview with Bill Moyers. “Contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. You get the ideas and attitudes of the people as part of an oral tradition.”
Indeed, though Ma Rainey is not a musical, and the two songs she does sing are not designed to advance the story, they do feel completely in place in the story and in the poetry of Wilson’s script.
Theater, like most art forms, is most effective transporting us to and enlightening us about worlds we do not know. While much has been filmed and written about the struggles of African-Americans, the blues and the plays of August Wilson bring to whites the strongest visceral sense of the indignities, disappointments and fear of being black in America. In Ma Rainey we see this in Cutler’s story of black preacher forced to dance to get away from a group of whites alive, the indignity of Levee having to accept a pittance for his songs because he won’t be allowed to record them, and Ma grabbing every smidgen of respect she can get because she knows it's in limited supply.
The play is set in the 1920s, but when we’re hearing stories of white high school students threatening black students with nooses in 2007, the stories in Ma Rainey are relevant and immediate.
That’s why the biggest disappointment at that performance last weekend wasn’t that a few minutes were hampered by fireworks. It was the fact that theater was about half full. There may be better, more popular American playwrights, but I would argue none are more important than Wilson. We haven’t seen much of his work here, so Lexington should be taking advantage of this opportunity.
And hopefully, there won’t be any fireworks displays to contend with when you go.