3/31/2024 0 Comments American masters august wilson![]() While worthy on its own, the play is just one-tenth of the monumental project that defined Wilson’s career. “They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking.” They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there,” Ma says in the play. “White folks don’t understand about the blues. Accordingly, the pith of the show is Ma’s voice - not just her husky murmur but the sound of a Black artist singing her story to and for her community. That’s the conflict, but much of the play’s pleasure is its dialogue: the characters gabbing, joking and arguing. Ma finds herself at odds with Levee, as she does with her controlling white agent and the white studio owner, both of whom she knows are exploiting her. Ma’s musicians rehearse in a back room, or at least talk about rehearsing: There’s the sensible Cutler (played in the film by Colman Domingo), the laggard Slow Drag ( Michael Potts), the thoughtful Toledo ( Glynn Turman) and Levee ( Chadwick Boseman, who died in August, in his final film role), a young and impetuous trumpet player with an idea for what a new sound might be. ![]() The play, first produced in 1984 at Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Conn., is a fictionalized account of a famous blues singer, Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, who is in Chicago with her band in the 1920s to record a few songs.
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