Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Viola Davis Shines in Screen Adaptation of Wilson’s Music-Infused Play

October 19, 2020 by

Viola Davis in ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’

 

Viola Davis
David Lee / Netflix
Produced by Denzel Washington, with a screenplay by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom will premiere on Netflix December 18.
There are many good reasons to see the screen version of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, one of ten plays that comprise August Wilson’s epic cycle about the African American experience of the past century.
For starters, it features the final performance of Chadwick Boseman, the gifted Black Panther actor who died unexpectedly of colon cancer at age 43 in August, at the prime of his career.
Boseman excels in singing and dancing as Ma Rainey’s professional and romantic rival, Levee.  The late actor invests all the resources that he has in playing the seemingly arrogant yet deeply bruised trumpeter, abused by the white recording industry he is forced to work for.
Set in Chicago circa 1927, the music-infused drama centers on a strong-willed Southern blues singer who is in charge of her band and in love with a woman.

Davis’s role in the new Netflix adaptation of the 1984 Wilson play presented the Oscar winner with a powerful new challenge, she said, while speaking at a virtual press event for the film with her director, George C. Wolfe.

“A huge motivating factor with me is feeling like I’m not valued,” Davis said. “It either makes me come up like a pit bull or feel like crap. Ma… is up for the fight. I loved that fight in her, her unapologetic nature, even with her sexuality.”

“Chadwick is my baby,” Davis said, noting that she had played Boseman’s mother in Get On Up. “Chadwick was just an artist. For someone so young, it was incredible to watch that level of not mistaking your presence for the event.”

Davis found fuel in Ma Rainey’s relationship with her female lover, Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige), who has also caught Levee’s eye.

“I have to get back to her sexuality,” Davis said of her character. “I felt that it was my mission to absolutely not make that a negative. When I read about Ma Rainey, Dussie May was her woman. It’s your job to approach a character without any editorial comment.”

While set during a one-day recording session in Chicago, the film tells the larger story of the Great Migration of Black southerners moving to northern cities in the first half of the 20th century.

“What happened when we left the south, when we left the land and came north,” Wolfe said. “How does someone with a tremendous sense of her own power deal with coming into a culture about diminishing her power?”

Davis noted the larger arc of the film, which is part of Wilson’s ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle that chronicles the 20th-century African-American experience.

“When you look at Ma Rainey as a narrative, you see our hopes and dreams, mixed with the trauma of our past,” Davis said. “People had big visions, big dreams. The past, though, became a huge obstacle in achieving that.”

Wearing gold teeth, thick black eye makeup, substantial wardrobe padding and a mist of sweat, Davis’s Ma Rainey is a striking physical presence. The actress said she channeled a family member, her Aunt Joyce, to create the singer’s indomitable figure.

“I wanted a very specific body structure,” Davis said. “A woman of a certain size. I wanted that body. There was liberation once I had that padding on, I actually felt freer and very very cute by the way. I was always swishing my hip. I felt like, ‘look at me.’”

 

 

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