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The time is 1927. The place is a run-down recording studio in Chicago. Ma Rainey, the legendary blues singer, is due to arrive with her entourage to cut new sides of old favorites. Waiting for her are her Black musician sidemen, the white owner of the record company, and her white manager. What goes down in the session to come is more than music. It is a riveting portrayal of black rage…of racism, of the self-hate that racism breeds, and of racial expression. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a play dealing with issues of race, art, religion and the historic exploitation of Black recording artists by white producers.
The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.
This edition includes a Foreword by Frank Rich.
It was hard to watch Ma Rainey without thinking of Eugene O'Neill's Iceman Cometh. The plays are both marked by claustrophobia, a slow-fuse dramatic structure, meaty arias, a devastating dramatic payoff and their authors' profound identification with those who are betrayed by the gaudy promise of the American dream.
—Frank Rich, from his foreword