Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

In his American Century Cycle, playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) crafted 10 plays about the African American experience, each one set in a different decade of the 20th century. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, set in the 20s, was the second work completed.

Award-winning Broadway director George C. Wolfe's Netflix film adaptation is based on a screenplay by Ruben Santiago-Hudson (a stage and television performer who has appeared in Wilson productions) that trims the original two-act script, one of the shortest in the Cycle, into a breathless, 90-minute period piece that retains the play's theatrical intimacy while intensifying the heat.

Much of the film's intensity is contributed by Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman (one of his last major roles before his death earlier this year) as the eponymous Mother of the Blues, an irascible figure, and a reckless young trumpeter named Levee, who wants the fame that Ma seems to take for granted. Both are marvelous, but Boseman is brilliant as the manic music man, a battered and blustering braggart who is carrying literal and figurative scars of racial violence.

This wonderful production is quite different from 2016's Fences, which also starred Davis along with Denzel Washington, who directed. Ma Rainey, confined to a few hours of a recording session, does not have the epic sweep, the allegorical and spiritual overtones of Fences, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, along with another Cycle play that was adapted for the screen, The Piano Lesson.

Wilson's plays are dense and expansive, mixing history and folklore, mind science, philosophy and mysticism as they explore race and the nature of blackness in America. I would imagine they are bears to stage and challenging for audiences because Wilson's language is so rich, his stories so-reliant on the oral tradition. Some monologues go on for pages.

One interesting note concerning Santiago-Hudson's adaptation -- he changed Wilson's n***er to n***a in places when the boys in the band are referring to one another and retaining n***er when recounting threatening events involving menacing whites. Wilson's original script does not contain this distinction.

One Night in Miami

 

The catalytic role in Regina King's impressive directorial debut, One Night in Miami, is that of Malcolm X, played by British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir. It is Malcolm who convenes the meeting with soul man Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), football legend Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and the newly crowned heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) on the night of Clay's defeat of Sonny Liston for the title. It's 1964. Just months before both Cooke and Malcolm would die violent deaths.

That specter hangs over everything that is exchanged between the four old friends in that motel suite, giving Malcolm's urgency, his paranoia and perhaps monomania such chilling potency. He needs Clay's conversion to Islam to fuel his move to separate from Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad and the organization that Malcolm feels has grown corrupt and abusive. Malcolm will need followers to build his own movement, and he wants his friends to step up and energize Black Americans. The men are not altogether receptive to Malcolm's entreaties, but their love and respect for him keep them in the room.

The screenplay by Kemp Powers, based on his stage play, crackles with electricity, awareness and relevance. The lines are knowing and probative of the audience's understanding of the civil rights movement beyond familiar tales of bus boycotts and lunch counter demonstrations. One Night in Miami is not about strategy and tactics; it's about self-awareness, passion, conviction and the need to write one's own history. It's thought-provoking and splendidly acted, with a palpable sense of period and locale.

Our Friend film trailer

This film trailer bubbled up on my newsfeed this morning, coincidentally, the day after a friend and I had a pretty intense conversation about memorializing death.

We came down different paths to arrive at different understandings, he and I, but agreed that much of what folks do focuses on the experiences of survivors, which sometimes are only tangential to the life of the departed. Some monuments are less about loss than about the standing of the living, their prominence. And, we agreed, as long as church and commerce are involved it will ever be thus.

Reflection, reticence, regret.

The language we use -- pass, transition -- suggests not a termination but a continuation, a notion that has come down from antiquity, millennia before Jesus of Nazareth talked about preparing a place for believers.

This further suggests that for some of us the judgment of observers might be joined by the scrutiny of the departed. The acreage devoted to the disintegration of the mortal coil -- some count about 25,000 private and for-profit cemeteries in the U.S. -- is pretty astounding.

The crux for my friend is our apparent failure to imagine the dead within those graves, beneath monuments to what has passed, saying to those standing above, "Keep Living."

Our Friend film trailer

The Mandalorian

Even those of us who do not know Star Wars by chapter and verse have found much to appreciate and connect with in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, which is planning a third season once 'Rona loosens her death grip.

Series creator Jon Favreau has shaped a conventional quest narrative into a highly affective story of "human" connection, our fractured alliances and identities. Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones) leads the sparkling, diverse cast as the eponymous warrior/mercenary tasked with delivering a mysterious abandoned big-eyed, big-eared moppet to whichever of the remaining Jedi sorcerers he can find in the universe who will take him. The Mandalorian, who lives by a strict code of discipline, was himself a war orphan (a foundling) and though encased in metal and emotional scarring develops a strong attachment to his young charge.

How Pascal, who is faceless for 95 percent of his screen time, and Favreau, who wrote most of the series' scripts, move the character from cold metal man to warm protector without reducing the narrative to sticky goo is a tribute to both. Those who are open to it would undoubtedly find lessons here about how we assess the value of connections and our duty to one another.