The Seattle roots of Chadwick Boseman’s final movie
With ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,’ the ‘Black Panther’ star achieved his long-standing dream to appear in a drama by local theater legend August Wilson. By Misha Berson, Crosscut
Share: Chadwick Boseman in Ma Rainey s Black Bottom. (Netflix)
In the fall of 2004, a striving young theater artist grabbed the chance to meet one of his idols.
A friend had invited Chadwick Boseman, then a relatively unknown actor, to watch a Broadway rehearsal of Seattle-based playwright August Wilson’s newest drama,
Gem of the Ocean. Boseman eagerly accepted.
During a rehearsal break, a nervous Boseman spoke briefly with the illustrious but sometimes shy Wilson, telling him how much he loved and was inspired by the dramatist’s work.
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, is currently in theaters and available on demand.
This is one of the classic plays in the English-language canon, a drama about a young man who runs away from his family s farm and stumbles into a County Mayo pub claiming to have killed his father. It was the first play written in the actual speech of westernmost Ireland. It is also thrilling.
Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890).
Three decades before he won the Nobel Prize in literature, Hamsun wrote this semi-autobiographical work about a nameless young man in Norway. The novel takes us into the mind of a person who doesn t know where he fits into society and is struggling to figure that out. He reminds me very much of the character that Jamie Dornan plays in
David Lee
The director of
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, an adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play that’s streaming now on Netflix, is discussing Hollywood’s seemingly reinvigorated appetite for adapting theater evident in recent productions like
The Boys in the Band, The Prom, Cats, and even his own latest but doesn’t believe it’s anything new.
“I think what is true is that Hollywood is filled with closeted theater folk,” he says. “And then periodically some of those people who are obsessed end up in positions of authority and they say, ‘Yes, we re doing it.’ That s what it s all about, and when you come through a period where a number of those people are making decisions, it feels like you re inside of a trend. But I think it s something much simpler than that: there s just a bunch of theater queens in L.A.”
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When the pandemic hit in March 2020, D.C.’s The North Country, like most bands, experienced plannus interruptus, having to cancel their promotional efforts for their latest release America and Afterwards. “We were supposed to go to South By Southwest,” explains lead singer Andrew Grossman. […]
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This story is part of our State of the Arts collection: six stories that each check in on a specific segment of D.C.’s art scene, one year after the first lockdown.
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Chadwick Boseman’s final film performance would be
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, an adaptation of an August Wilson play. Wilson’s 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, which includes