Word: ma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
August Wilson's first commercially produced work, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, ran more than eight months on Broadway, won the 1985 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play and marked the emergence of a substantial new voice for the American theater. A self-taught man who dropped out of school in the ninth grade, Wilson, 41, announced ambitions for a cycle of ten plays meant to reveal black life in each decade of this century. Ma Rainey depicted the self- imposed racial isolation of a 1920s blues singer. His second play to reach Broadway, Fences, which opened...
...explosive violence that flows from his characters and from the warping effect racism has had upon them. Humiliated in the larger world, these people fiercely guard their dignity close to home. Defeated by enemies too distant to see, they lash out at their own kind -- a colleague in Ma Rainey, a son in Fences. These confrontations can seem like old-fashioned melodrama in comparison with the plotless minimalism now in vogue. But Wilson has the weight of history on his side. If Troy Maxson turns tyrant, betraying his wife with a younger woman and blasting his son's chances...
...terrace overlooking Lake Fuschl near Salzburg, Seiji Ozawa and Yo-Yo Ma are deep in conversation. "Remember that discussion about whether an Oriental can do Western music?" asks the Japanese conductor in heavily accented English. Ma does. "Music can be learned, really, by anybody who cares to know it well enough and deeply enough," says the cellist, who is of Chinese parentage but as American as a baseball...
...Asia, Ma notes, "conforming is more important than being an individual. That becomes hard when you have a talent. You have to speak up, you have to say, 'I have an opinion.' But when I'm in the Orient, I'm not supposed to have an opinion. I try to respect the differences." Ozawa, 51, looks at his young colleague uneasily. "Can you do that?" he wonders, and then suddenly addresses an unseen camera. "This question is very serious," he says. "This is very private." Blackout...
...food, you know, it not so bad. Not so good either. But what you want, K-Paul's in deh Quarter? Pour le dessert, bread pudding, I swear. . . Est-ce que ma mere etait dans la cuisine...