Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
September 13, 2009
Thoughts on the Set
Thursday was our first day rehearsing inside the theater, and everyone is very excited about working on the newly completed set. The variety of different textures and levels fits the mish-mashed feeling of the play: a sequence of comical or disturbing stories, a group of people from different walks of life brought together for an afternoon. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom doesn’t simply develop a main plot and a subplot; Levee’s frustrated attempts at success form the basic arc of the play, but for me it’s meat consists of the stories told in the bandroom that go back to the post Civil War South, that reflect the experiences of so many African-Americans of that period. Combined with Ma’s personality and music, the play seems to me more like a fibrous web that stretches over fifty years of history from Georgia on up to Chicago than a simple plotline. The different textures—wood (old barn wood from Wisconsin for the band room, polished oak for the church), brick, and linoleum—,the four levels, twisting backstage pathway to the bandroom, and slanting angles give the set a cobbled, organic feel that not only provides a tremendous aesthetic for the actors to work in front of, but also reflects the feeling of August’s writing.
The cast and crew have been working on tech all this weekend, and we go into previews this Thursday! I can’t believe how quickly it has passed.
September 2, 2009
Three Little Bops
Yesterday I ran into Debbie Gillaspie, the curator of the Chicago Jazz Archive, who is helping us compile some material for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. She said she had just come from a meeting with some Chicago Jazz Festival people, but she was carrying a DVD of Looney Tunes cartoons. I asked her why she had it, and she said, “The Three Little Bops. I didn’t even get to show it.”
Three Little Bops is a 1957 cartoon telling the story of the Three Little Pigs with be-bop jazz. Apparently it’s well-known among jazz enthusiasts for the mystery behind which musicians actually provided the instrumentation for this cartoon. And here it is:
I’m agnostic about any racial undertones of the piece (I could go either way with “No Wolves Allowed”). But there’s a lot of August Wilson’s character of Levee you can see in the trumpet-playing wolf. And the blues lick Slow Drag sings at the end of Act One: “If I had my way, I would tear this old building down”—the common lament of both Levee and the wolf. What do you think? Stretching it? Wait and see the play—you’ll see.
August 27, 2009
Mwata Bowden
Ma Rainey calls out “I’m trying to listen to my voice mail!” Levee, nearby, has discovered middle G on his trumpet and is plugging it long and hard. Meanwhile, Cutler is having less luck with his embouchure, producing a sound in his trombone that sounds something like dying water fowl.
On any given day, the rehearsal room for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom sounds less like a room full of professional actors and more like a room full of eager 5th grade band students. That’s because none of the actors in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom actually play the instruments their characters play (except our Ma Rainey, Greta Oglesby, who does actually sing in the performance, and quite beautifully too). All of the instrumentation will be dubbed in using a sophisticated sound design.
That may seem like the ultimate cop-out in a play all about the blues and authenticity. But as Ron has pointed out, it was always more important to August Wilson that the play be done by actors first, musicians second. “If you can get an actor who can play, that’s great,” says Ron, “but not a musician who’s not an actor, because these characters are deep.” In one production he saw, the director used actual musicians who could really play the music, but it compromised getting the right actors for the part.
Still, these actors need to know how to convincingly appear to be really playing their instruments. Enter Mwata Bowden.
Mwata Bowden
Mwata is the Director of Jazz Ensembles at the University of Chicago (his faculty page is here). He’s best known around Hyde Park as the Director of the Jazz X-Tet, an ensemble of university students and Chicago professionals who tackle innovative and experimental jazz pieces. He showed up at the end of yesterday’s rehearsal to give each actor a crash course in their respective instruments. The cast seemed delighted to have him there, and soon Mwata began giving style tips. (AC looked over the moon when Mwata taught him how to spin his upright bass.) “It’s all about the body language,” explained Mwata, and he directed actors to find a groove where they could improvise and feed off each other like real musicians. It turned out that details like eye contact and body language are much more convincing than finding the correct string to pluck. I’ve not yet seen Mwata with his own band, but in his afternoon at Court, he proved to be a natural theater director!
Mwata with A.C. Smith (Slow Drag)
Mwata and Director Ron OJ Parson
August 20, 2009
John Culbert’s Scenic Design
I thought I’d add a few notes to those pictures of John’s set model I posted the other day.
The scenic design has three spaces: on the right side (stage left) is the recording studio proper, on stage right is the band room (located in the building’s basement), and above is the entrance to the building. The entrance is rarely depicted in most designs for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and here I think it gives the set a “third leg” that offsets and unfolds the space quite elegantly.
One of Ron’s goals for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is that the audience get a full-bodied sense of the 1920’s. For most people, it’s a difficult decade for the imagination to grasp beyond flapper girls and the Charleston. As John points out, most productions of Ma Rainey realize a set that resembles something close to a modern recording studio: a window separating the studio from the technician booth, an intercom, high-tech recording equipment, etc. In fact, the recording industry was so very young that many of its most recognizable conventions hadn’t been adopted yet. John’s idea is that the play’s recording studio is rather primitive and makeshift—the kind of operation that Sturdyvant, the producer, would put together with the cheapest materials possible.
In keeping with this concept, John and Ron’s idea is that the recording studio is built into a “found space.” Can you guess from the picture what kind of building it is?
August 19, 2009
Artists playing artists
The first two days of rehearsal for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom have been a blast and everyone is excited about diving into the world of the blues and 1920’s Chicago. In any rehearsal room, the line between actor and character often can often become indistinct, but Ma Rainey in particular breeds a dynamic in the rehearsal room that is in many ways strikingly similar to that in the play. Much of the play takes place in the band room where the members of Ma’s band rehearse (or avoid rehearsing) before the recording session. They are artists preparing for their performance just like the actors in Court’s show, and this similarity of circumstance makes it especially easy for the world of the play to melt into the reality of the rehearsal room. The actors tease other with the same language that their characters use, and I caught Greta (Ma Rainey) already playing the mom as she tackled the dirty dishes in the sink. It will be interesting to see how not only the scenes develop as the actors get on their feet, but also how the relationships and language of the play continue to influence the vibe during rehearsal.
