THE VOICE Viola Davis, center, as the blues star Ma Rainey in George C. Wolfe’s production of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” now on Netflix.
PEOPLE – BY WHICH WE mean critics, audiences and grouches who will express an opinion on anything – seem to have very strong feelings about “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the new version of August Wilson’s 1984 Broadway play that began streaming on Netflix on Dec. 18. So let’s stick to the facts.
WHO WAS OR IS MA RAINEY?
A major blues star of the 1920s and ‘30s. She was born in Columbus, Ga., in 1896 (or maybe just across the Alabama state line – and maybe four years earlier) and named Gertrude Pridgett She married William Rainey in 1904, and they formed a show business team. She may or may not have had a romantic relationship with Bessie Smith. She died of a heart attack in 1939.
WHERE DOES “MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM” FIT INTO AUGUST WILSON’S OEUVRE?
It was his first play on Broadway, running for eight months, beginning in the fall of 1984. It was followed by “Fences” (1987), which won four Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama. “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” “The Piano Lesson”. (his second Pulitzer Prize) and “Two Trains Running.” His last play, “Radio Golf,” opened on Broadway in 2007, two years after Wilson’s death. And “Ma Rainey’s “ had already had its first Broadway revival, in 2003.
WHAT’S THE SETTING?
Chicago, 1927. A recording session of Rainey’s new album. Rainey arrives – accompanied by a nephew she’s trying to help, a (much younger) new girlfriend and take-no-prisoners attitude toward the white record executives.
SO IT’S MA’S STORY?
Not really. At this point, she knows who she is, what she’s up against and how to stand her ground. But she has a renegade of sorts in her band. Levee (Chadwick Boseman) is hungry for his time in the spotlight, convinced that black music lovers – moving north in the Great Migration -- will go for something more modern. Ma disagrees. And knows how to win. Photo: Boseman (center, with Michael Potts and Colman Domingo), who died of colon cancer in August. This was his last screen role.
IS IT JUST LIKE THE BROADWAY PRODUCTION?
Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who wrote the screenplay, has mentioned two noticeable changes. The love scene between Levee and Ma’s girlfriend (Taylour Paige) was just a kiss onstage, anything else left to the imagination. Now it goes straight for the orgasm. And the discussion about the racial imbalance in music-industry profit that once took place among the white executives and managers? It’s now a talk among the black musicians, who see things all too clearly.
WHAT ARE THE TWO POINTS OF VIEW ON THE FILM?
Both the writer for National Review and the critic for Vulture found it revisionist, repackaging dialogue, behavior and attitudes for evolving racial concepts. A.O. Scott, the critic for The New York Times, called it “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.”