Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a wonderful play about a few hours in the life of the fabled blues singer and her accompanists, and if the uneven production at American Stage doesn’t often do it justice, still it offers a few moments of inspired and inspiring theater. Most of all, it brings us the talented Sharon E. Scott as the imperious, peremptory Ma Rainey, a woman whose will is as strong as her singing voice, and who won’t take any guff from the white men who make her records or the black men who play behind her.
Those four black men — Levee, Toledo, Cutler and Slow Drag – are the real focus of August Wilson’s play, and the key to any production. We need to feel, as we watch them, that there’s as much unity to their life offstage as there is to their music when they’re on. But though the fine actors who play them — Ben Cain, Kim Sullivan, Alan Bomar Jones and Ron Bobb-Semple, respectively — are convincing individually, they seldom mesh into a credible ensemble. When any one of them has a monologue, you can depend on its power. But put them all together — and that’s where they are for most of the play — and they hardly seem to know each other.
This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2011.
