fences and ma rainey's black bottom august wilson

Wolfe narrates a sequence from his film featuring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman.

Transcript ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ | Anatomy of a Scene George C. Wolfe’s screen adaptation - one man is dead and another has seen all his prospects evaporate. By the end of the play - a swift hour and a half in George C. The members of Ma’s band swap stories of lynching, assault and humiliation, and Ma fights with the white owner of the record label (Jonny Coyne). The specific and manifold evils of Southern Jim Crow repression and Northern economic exploitation are unavoidable. Absurdities and frustrations abound, and the lethal, soul-crushing shadow of American racism falls across the musicians and their instruments. “ Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Wilson’s 1984 play about a recording session in Chicago in the 1920s, both dramatizes and expresses that duality. The art of the music’s practitioners, he wrote, involves “confronting, acknowledging and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the possibilities that are also there.”

They don’t understand that that’s life’s way of talking.”Īlbert Murray, the great 20th-century philosopher of the blues, put the matter more abstractly. “They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there. “White folks don’t understand about the blues,” says the pioneering singer Ma Rainey, as imagined by August Wilson and incarnated by Viola Davis.

Fences and ma rainey's black bottom august wilson