MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM (2020)

On the stage, in his decalogue of plays covering the Black Experience in 20th Century America (one for each decade), playwright August Wilson often seemed to be vamping in search of a theme before unleashing a series of carefully placed/spaced/paced dramatic monologues, spoken ariosos to cauterize some great ‘original’ racial sin that had been hiding in plain sight since the curtain went up.  When the original cast was still around, the effect could be devastating, but if the plays ran long enough to get replacements (not a given on later works), detonation never arrived.  And this makes for unusually difficult screen transferals.  Filmed ‘as is,’ you get canned theater without the frisson of a live happening; reworked into a more naturalistic presentation, and you have to be brave enough to lose the big speeches, Wilson's raison d’être.  This well received version of one of the earlier/better plays in the cycle, sees director George C. Wolfe & adapter Ruben Santiago-Hudson splitting the difference between the two approaches, achieving artificial & suspense free results.  They open by tossing aside a classic delayed star entrance for Viola Davis’s Ma Rainey with a misconceived prologue: a phony ‘cinematic’ start with an apparent chain-gang escape that actually leads directly into a blues concert in the swamp-lands.  But it only unbalances things as Rainey, in  losing an aura of anticipation and mystery as unseen presence, gives the play entirely over to Chadwick Boseman’s ambitious musician, his talent constrained as backup man when Rainey (with Davis slathered in makeup as apparently was true of the real Ma Rainey) goes to the studio to make some 78rpm records.  (Inappropriately shot in classic Hollywood ’Golden Hour’ lighting in spite of drab/cloistered studio conditions.)  There’s a lot of dreary forced drama about the Blues singer’s prerogatives, but the main interest (certainly for Wilson) lies in how a display of force against white privilege (studio & music rights held by white owners & white manager) feed Black frustration and how the inevitable violent eruption is taken out not on the white perpetrators, but on their own Black Community.  Powerful on stage, here, under Wolfe, and in spite of Boseman’s handsome work, feeling arbitrary.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *No doubt, the shock ending more effective on stage in 1984 with Charles Dutton in the role.  Though it’s great to see Boseman, in what proved to be his final role, working a less deferential mode than he often was assigned to play.