August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

In a dingy Chicago recording studio in 1927, a group of musicians gathers to cut a record with Ma Rainey, the Mother of the Blues and the most celebrated Black singer of her time. She commands the room, but outside the studio, she can’t even get a taxicab to pick her up. Her trumpet player, Levee, a young, cocky musician, rides the heady wave of the Jazz Renaissance sweeping the nation. Levee must fight for acceptance not only with his bandmates, but with the larger world that refuses to hear a new music. In the way only August Wilson can, this canonical play with music threatens to tip into cacophony at any moment.