Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
National Theatre presents MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, by August Wilson, in the Lyttelton Theatre, National Theatre, London, U.K. August Wilson wrote a cycle of ten plays spanning the 20th century, often referred to as the Pittsburg Cycle, of which MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, is the second, written in 1984. He was born in 1945 and died in 2005. The plays form a kind of fever chart of the trauma of slavery. Their historical trajectory takes African-Americans through their transition from property to personhood – ‘a profound articulation of the Black Tradition’. I have been fortunate to have seen many of…