Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Court Theatre’s ‘Ma Rainey’: Grabbing clout, while you can

by Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

THEATER REVIEW: "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" ★★★  Through Oct. 18 at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.; $32-$56 at 773-753-4472 and www.courttheatre.org.

For the climax of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the only August Wilson play set in Chicago, the late, great maestro wrote  the kind of stage direction that either terrifies an actor by its sheer impossibility, or gives him permission to reach deep inside , and let everything rip.

“All of the weight of the world suddenly falls on Levee,” Wilson writes of the play’s pivotal moment, involving a talented black songwriter and trumpeter whose ambitions have been thwarted at every turn.  Think about it for a second. Could you act that?  

James T. Alfred gives it one heck of a go in Ron OJ Parson’s intense, emotional revival for the Court Theatre.  Alfred, who delivers one of the best performances of the season so far, clearly gets Wilson’s admonition that he is, at once, a powerless individual, a representative of a larger group of African-Americans in the ruthless white-owned, black-music business of the late 1920, and a stand-in for every regular Joe who has had a great idea at work, only for insecure bosses to slam the door in his face.

Alfred’s Levee has the slickness and charm of a born entertainer, but also the anger of a man who understands that he must break down the door, because it’s about to locked for good. And Alfred is well matched by Greta Oglesby, the powerhouse, Minneapolis-based actress and an old Wilson hand who turns Ma Rainey into an uncompromising, staccato-loving, diva-like blues singer who understands that she must demand all she can before the greedy white producers have her voice in the can, and she’s back to being just another black woman who can’t hail a cab on the streets of Chicago.

As Wilson’s complex oeuvre goes, “Ma Rainey” is among the more straightforward works. It doesn’t probe the spiritual heights of Wilson’s greatest plays, but it’s the clearest dramatic expression of his view that workers (and African-Americans in general) can only gain power when they have leverage. Even then, being difficult can sometimes be the only way. Viewing this play in the current economic climate surely gives it some new resonance.

Aside from all the incendiary fights between Ma and the white men who control her work (Thomas J. Cox  and Stephen Spencer play the oily duo), “Ma Rainey” also contains Wilson’s signature riffs and monologues, all enjoyably rendered here by Alfred H. Wilson, A.C. Smith and Cedric Young on an ambitious and textured set from John Culbert that attempts to show an entire American hierarchy inside a Chicago recording studio.

This is a tricky piece to do—action suddenly lunges out of casual conversation and the varied rhythms of the words are like an album with tracks reflecting all the prisms of the blues. If you pull off everything in “Ma Rainey” without any sense of contrivance, you’ve nailed a tough set of charts.

I wouldn’t say everything flowed in perfectly organic fashion at Friday night’s performance.  The multi-level playing space is broken up into several distinct areas—there are one too many staircases, I think. And the most credible human path through the warren, music and words isn’t always taken.

But Parson’s crew is mostly there. Productions of this play always get more truthful with time. The key performances are incisive and honest. The pain is earned. You sense throughout that you’re in the company of artists at ease with Wilson and his American blues.  And “Ma Rainey” has found a resonant moment, one more time.