Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Ma Rainy's Black Bottom is not what it's about: at the Huntington Theater

Ma Rainy's Black Bottom, play by August Wilson, at the Huntington Theater, Saturday, March 24. Directed by Liesl Tommy.

I think we've now seen almost all of August Wilson's cycle of plays. Many of the same character types and themes recur in the plays, and that's a good thing. There's always a wise older philosopher, always a young impatient and rebellious hothead, always a conservative realist, always a shrewd and patient mother who carries on. We came to look for these people. It's a little repetitious, as we've heard their soliloquies before, and you wish Wilson would shorten things up a little. But that's a small complaint. Ma Rainy was apparently the first play in Wilson's cycle.

Ma Rainy has a lot of good stuff in it. A group of black musicians are hired to play with Ma Rainy in 30s recording studio owned by a white man. By the end we realized that the character Ma Rainy is not really the center of the play (the title is from a song that Ma Rainy sings). It's Levee (played by Jason Bowen) for me. He absolutely burns with ambition -- for his trumpet, for women, for his vision of his life as big success. Wilson gives him moments of over the top rage against God and the world -- he must have loved this character. Bowen is terrific at modulating Levee. He's sometimes touching and thoughtful, though the sarcasm and impatience are always just under the surface. When he rages, you think something awful is happening, something unexpected, right there on the stage.

Why does Levee kill old Toledo the philosopher (played by Charles Weldon)? Toledo accidentally steps on Levee's new shoes while Levee is boiling. Of course I didn't like it, because I liked Toledo. It felt as if Wilson did this artificially, in order to make a point, that the defeated Levee (he just found out painfully that Sturdyvant, the white studio producer, was not really interested in Levee's compositions, and was just stringing him along) acted out of rage at the nearest scapegoat, the gentle old Toledo. As if we were being instructed on how black men wind up taking their rage out on other black men. There may be truth and deep feeling there, but it feels a little too much like instruction. And Toledo didn't deserve to die.