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The uptight etiquette of ballroom dancing ruled American dance floors at the beginning of the 20th century. This came to an end in the decade during which Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom takes place: the Roaring Twenties and the Prohibition Era. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously documented the social freedom of these years in The Great Gatsby: “The parties...

Let’s Do the Black Bottom

“For me every story starts with the script—the words. And Mr. August Wilson was very specific. It’s 1927, Chicago. So that’s your inspiration,” said Tony Award®-nominated costume designer Emilio Sosa on how he got started working on Center Theatre Group’s production of Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (onstage at the Mark Taper Fo...

Emilio Sosa Puts his own Spin on the 1920s

June 26, 1996—20 years ago this year—August Wilson ascended the stage at the national conference of Theatre Communications Group, the national service organization for professional theatres, to deliver the keynote lecture. Wilson had long been one of the nation’s most eminent playwrights, and the audience of theatre community members from acr...

The Ground on Which I Stand

“God can kiss my ass,” says Levee, the young, ambitious, and angry trumpet player in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (onstage at the Mark Taper Forum through October 16, 2016).

Two Levees in Conversation

Lillias White has wanted to play Ma Rainey for a long time.

Lillias White Plays the Mother of the Blues in August Wilson's 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'

The blues is much more than a musical genre to the title character of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which plays the Mark Taper Forum through October 16, 2016. To the Ma Rainey of August Wilson’s imagination, the blues is “life’s way of talkin’.” She goes on to explain, “You don’t sing to feel better. You sing ’cause...

10 Blueswomen who Changed Music Forever

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (onstage at the Mark Taper Forum September 1 – October 16, 2016) was written shortly after August Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1977. There, Wilson worked as a cook for a social services agency, earning $88 a week. It was enough money to give him the freedom to write, and from that freedom sprang the story of a...

Coming Full Cycle

In a 1999 interview with The Paris Review, playwright August Wilson stated that his work was most heavily influenced by “my four Bs”: poet Jorge Luis Borges, playwright Amiri Baraka, painter Romare Bearden, and most importantly, the blues. At the center of Wilson’s first hit play and Broadway debut, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (at the Mark Tap...

The Story of the ‘Mother of the Blues’