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posted by Camp Design at
Monday, September 29, 2008
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Temperley refused to talk about the situation with the Dispatch.
Things like this happen, but it's not how an artistic director wants to begin their tenure.
But it's already becoming just an unfortunate memory as Bond, in his Syracuse Stage directing debut, opened the company's season Saturday night with a searing production of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," August Wilson's Tony Award-winning recording studio-set tale of lives ruined by racism.
It's winter 1927. A blues group comes to a Chicago studio to record a set of songs highlighted by "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and featuring "Mother of the Blues" Gertrude "Ma" Rainey for a recording company's "race records" division.
By the session's end, the aspirations of the group's talented young trumpeter will have been stamped out by a shattering self-destructive act.
Wilson's play, the first in his 10-play cycle chronicling the African-American experience in America, garnered praise at its reading at the prestigious Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Conn. in 1982. The play hit Broadway, via the Yale Repertory Theatre, which gave the work its world premiere in April 1984, opening at the Cort Theatre on Oct. 11, 1984, with Theresa Merritt as Ma Rainey and Charles S. Dutton as Levee. (Dutton will play Willy Loman in Yale Rep's staging of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" in spring 2009.) Wilson's last play in the cycle, "Radio Golf," opened at the Cort on May 8, 2007.
In the Syracuse Stage production, William Bloodgood's tri-level dilapidated recording studio set immediately lays out where the characters stand in the scheme of things.
In the basement is the hole of a rehearsal room, which the despotic Ma won't deign to visit. Here musicians Toledo, Slow Drag and Cutler, soon to be joined by the horn man, Levee (Warner Miller), banter while waiting for the overdue songstress to arrive.
The second level-the studio-is Ma's domain, with the microphone as the focal point of the power she wields here.
Above the studio is the recording booth, with Sturdyvant, the white record producer (John Ottavino), its chief occupant.
Toledo, Slow Drag and Cutler simply have come to make a record. But Levee, who sets himself apart from the others-to their amusement-with his flashy suit and new Florsheims, has other plans, intending to bypass Ma to have his own arrangement of "Black Bottom" recorded.
"You ain't here to do no creatin'. You play Ma's music when you're here," Cutler warns him, emphasizing that Levee needs to understand where he fits in when he's in the studio.
The conflict between Levee and Ma, who prefers the "old style" of music, starts long before she arrives.
But this conflict is about much more than just music. It's also about power-who has it, who thinks they have it and who doesn't.
Undeterred, Levee persists in his belief that color will have nothing to do with his achieving success in 1920s' America, and that, solely by virtue of his horn talent and sweet way with notes, he'll be treated by men like Sturdyvant differently from the way they treat other blacks.
Ma, however, knows she means nothing but money to the likes of Sturdyvant and, as a headliner, holds power over him only until she inks the release form, ending the game.
Until then, she calls the shots.
And she does, unmoved by pleas to just get the recording done.
Having to put up with daily humiliations in her life like not being able to get a cab, she's not about to let these white men off easy. When she learns there isn't a drop of Coca-Cola in the studio, she holds up the recording session until others fetch her the Cokes she demands.
She insists that her stuttering nephew Sylvester (a wonderfully sympathetic James F. Miller), a well-meaning young man caught between the seasoned musicians and his overbearing aunt, deliver the prologue to "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom."
She flaunts in the studio her much-younger materialist lesbian lover Dussie Mae, played by a steamy, kittenish Danielle Lenee.
And she bullies her white manager, Irvin (Kenny Morris), who genuinely seems to be a more decent person than Ma will ever give him credit for.
Meanwhile, the undercurrent of rage that is slowly filling the recording studio is barely noticed.
Wilson meticulously sets up Ma's appearance midway through Act I, when "Madame" Rainey sweeps into the record studio swathed in Helen Huang's garish scarlet costume topped with a gold opera-scale regal headdress. Ebony Jo-Ann's aristocratic and coarse (and yet still able to inspire the admiration of Cutler, Slow Drag and Toledo) Ma delivers all that Wilson promises.
Especially nice was the brief interim of harmony all share following the session's completion.
As Toledo, Cutler and Slow Drag, Thomas Jefferson Byrd, Cortez Nance and Doug Eskew delivered evocative portrayals of peripatetic musicians who have spent their lives playing in music halls and brothels in the South while trying to live quietly on the periphery of the white world.
Bond is an excellent interpreter of Wilson, who deploys spirituals and folklore seamlessly, never getting heavy-handed. And that includes how racism infects everything.
Bond may like individuals to be depicted in theater production artwork as anonymously as possible to avoid audience members linking the depictions to the actors in the roles, but Syracuse Stage's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" poster, designed by Kevin Mann, becomes something more. The viewer is forced into an uncomfortable position. The faces of the woman before the microphone and the horn player in the background are indistinct. All the viewer can see--just as a racist might--is that they are black. It is an exceptional piece of artwork that captures what this play is about.
While Dutton's Levee was big and brash, Miller's slighter stature belies the anger Levee can barely contain within himself. Encounters with racism have left Levee filled with wrenching memories that can never be purged, manifested in the stunning Act I-ending outburst where the rage literally makes his eyes nearly pop out of his head.
But the staging was weakened in the last critical seconds of the play with Miller needing to do more than he did to show the realization that Levee, in a deadly second, just irretrievably threw away any future he may have had, leaving Cutler in gasping disbelief over how a simple recording session could have gone so terribly awry.
* * *
At Syracuse Stage, 820 E. Genesee St., through Oct. 4. Tickets: (315) 443 3275 or online at www.SyracuseStage.org.
