The Bromberg distraction, though irreverent, is not totally irrelevant to the storyline of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, as "Mr. Bojangles" also depicts the co-optation of the Black and blues, some stranger's private danse macabre seen as entertainment, rueful intellectualized empathy without follow-up action other than to drown another's Sorrow in another drink. Nobody really cares about Bojangles. There's a touch of the Twilight Zone about it. You almost expect Rod Serling to come out, cigarette in hand, and give us the low-down on the meaning of Bojangles. But Bromberg will do for now.
Wilson's Ma Rainey is a two-act play that takes place in a late 1920s recording studio in Chicago over the hours of one day. Act One features the boys in the band getting to know each other (for us), as they wait for the arrival of Ma Rainey, Mother of the Blues, to begin jamming. Levee, the trumpeter is the dynamo in this act. In Act Two, Ma arrives and the dynamic changes dramatically, as she aggressively imposes her will on the band and the white studio engineers trying to make a buck off her music. This triadic dialectic is the key to understanding the motifs and themes of the play. The recently released film version, directed by George C. Wolfe (You're Not You), stars Wilson veteran Viola Davis, who won a Tony for best actress in 2001 for her depiction of Rose in Wilson's Fences. She teams up with Chadwick Boseman (Da 5 Bloods), whose restless energy is an excellent counterpoint to Ma's authoritative control of the situation.
Wolfe leads into the action by flashing images of the South, from which the music we'll hear in the studio derives. There's Ma in a vaudeville tent onstage crooning to a sparse crowd of Negroes, black bottomed dancers wagging the junk in their trunks. It's that 50-year transition period in the post-Reconstruction when Blacks became ex-slaves turned sharecroppers turned itinerant dream seekers. They can stay in the Jim Crow South or move and look for a better world on the roads North and West, where there was no slavery. But when Wolfe shows signs enticing Blacks to come North to fill the many service sector positions available (dishwashers, waiters, busboys), an appropriate funk sets in. Ma Rainey brings her blues North to make records with white folk who only want to exploit her 'songs of experience' for money. Images of Chicago in the late 20s. Then, essentially, it's on to August Wilson's play, his crisp, charged dialogue, telling the story, providing the energy -- along with Ma's deep black bottom blues.
Levee is a brash trumpeter, who composes and insists he'll have his own band soon. Wilson might have been referencing Thad Jones, brother of the great drummer, Elvin Jones, who played in John Coltrane's band on A Love Supreme. Levee wants to move a new sound -- not "this old jug-band sh*t." When he arrives, a bit late, he brings a pair of flashy new shoes he dances around in. The aging Cutler (trombone), Toledo (piano) and Slow Drag (bass) are content to be session men, earning cash for keep, cheap drink and willing women. Levee's not all talk; Sturdyvant, the more cantankerous of the two engineers, wants to record Levee's music and even feature his arrangements on "Moonshine Blues" (without asking Ma).
The band tolerate Levee's brashness, but don't think he knows how to deal with white people. But Levee's not just pushy, and his past hurts strike chords with his mates as they listen to a seething Levee explain past encounters with whites, including the rape and murder of his mother by 8 or 9 men, and what happened when he tried to stop them: Levee gets slashed across the chest (he shows them the ugly scar). He explains,
My daddy went and smiled in the face of one of them crackers who had been with my mama. Smiled in his face and sold him our land...He got us settled in and he took off one day...He sneaked back, hiding up in the woods, laying to get them eight or nine men. (Pauses.) He got four of them before they got him.
His tale is poignant, but worrisome to the others, as it suggests a dissembling Uncle Tom filled with rage. Boseman does an excellent job with Levee's complex character whose brilliant musical sublimations seem to denote primal rage.
And Viola Davis's Ma Rainey is sublime; she's true to the "real" Ma Rainey; and, she really gets August Wilson's sense of cultural tragedy; of living two lives simultaneously -- essence before existence and, l'existence pre'cà ¨de l'essence, like some Franz Fanon Frankenstein monster who also plays slide. Trombone. Davis supplies her Tony Award-winning depth to Ma in her receding years, the glory going, little signs seem to indicate. The whiteys want to put new rhythms into her songs -- juice them up with the new hep -- without her okay. References are made to doing a cover of a song Bessie Smith made famous, forcing Ma to rebuke the reference, reminding us that Bessie was a 14 year old girl when she signed on to work with Ma Rainey down South and develop her voice.
Though Irv and Studyvant work Ma like a good-engineer/bad-engineer team -- Irv keeping Ma in Cokes to keep her in-session, Studyvant is clearly unhappy with Ma's attitude, her diva approach and ouchy sassiness. There's no play in his clay. Ma's got them figured though. She tells Cutler:
They don't care nothing about me. All they want is my voice...They ain't got what they wanted yet. As soon as they get my voice down on them recording machines, then it's just like if I'd be some whore and they roll over and put their pants on. Ain't got no use for me then. I know what I'm talking about.
She finagles as she can -- "Get me a Coke!" -- or having her stuttering nephew, Sylvester, do take after expensive take, wasting platters, for a tiny intro bit that she forces management to pay full share for.
She knows that time is not on her side, and she sometimes yearns to return South, where the white man may be evil but he doesn't hide it behind duplicity and disingenuous empathy for plights he could never understand, like up North, which, as far as she's concerned, was in no hurry to fight the Civil War to free slaves. It took the nation's first-ever draft to force Northerners to fight (ironically by a form of slavery) the South in sufficient numbers or the War would have ended otherwise. Even Lincoln's famous "Emancipation Proclamation," freeing slaves, was nothing more than an executive order -- fully reversible, before Constitutional reification, by future presidents.
Music is everything to Ma and the band. This needful understanding of music is poignantly expressed by Ma in a conversation with Cutler and Toledo:
MA RAINEY It sure done got quiet in here. I never could stand no silence. I always got to have some music going on in my head somewhere. It keeps things balanced. Music will do that. It fills things up. The more music you got in the world, the fuller it is.
CUTLER I can agree with that. I got to have my music too.
MA RAINEY White folks don't understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life.
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