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Greg Williams No question, 2020 has been a rough year for pretty much everyone, but the tail end of August was particularly terrible for Taylour Paige. When we connect over Zoom, just three days after the world learned her Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom co-star Chadwick Boseman had died of colon cancer, Paige, understandably, is not quite sure how to respond when asked how she’s doing. “Lordy,” she says. “Let’s take a deep breath together.” In Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, based on the August Wilson play and streaming now on Netflix, Paige plays Dussie Mae, the titular blueswoman’s l...

Image zoom Describing the central conflict in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, between her titular diva and Chadwick Boseman’s ambitious trumpeter, star Viola Davistells EW that “Levee represents everything that is antithetical towards [Ma’s] belief system. He is representative of a new phase of music that will render her extinct, for lack of a better term. He is unruly and undisciplined. I think that makes her uneasy. She sees him sexually as a threat too, to women that she has in her life.” Throughout the Netflix film (now streaming), an adaptation of the August Wilson play, Levee plots...

Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis in August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” streaming on Netflix. Photo courtesy of Netflix. Just as every premiere of an August Wilson play on Broadway was a major event, every film based on his plays should shake the earth beneath our feet. Especially for those of us who, being white, get to know Wilson’s characters from the outside looking in, film adaptations like “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” should be a clarion call for all of us to listen actively, experience deeply, break some bread, and renew our commitment to those ever-elusive concep...

From the very first scene of the very first act of “King Headly II,” I was hooked: I wanted to immerse myself in the work of August Wilson. The language was powerful. The expressive monologues were lyrical. The depth of characterization was mesmerizing. Depicting everyday people in everyday situations, Wilson found poetry in the struggle for survival. American Stage Theatre Company is responsible for introducing me — and many others in the Tampa Bay area — to Wilson’s Century Cycle. The cycle includes 10 plays, nine of which take place in Pittsburgh’s Hill district, each set...

Written by Lavinia Hart, Lakewood. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a newly released film streaming on NETFLIX, we meet the infamous chanteuse of the Blues of the 1920’s, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and the take members of her band. Perhaps the most transformative actress in her field, Davis’s Ma Rainey explodes on the screen with a breath-taking range of emotion and nuanced manipulation. By sheer force of stage presence and a vocabulary of devilish indignation, Ms. Davis defies even the boldest of her enemies, including an extraordinarily talented young trumpeter who wants to change the sound...