Word: rainey
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FENCES In Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, August Wilson launched a cycle about black life in each decade of the century. His new work, mounted by the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Chicago and Seattle and scheduled for Broadway in March, depicts a baseball player turned sanitation worker in the 1950s. James Earl Jones has his most exciting role since The Great White Hope...
James Earl Jones, one of America's foremost classical actors, is appearing at the Goodman Theater in Fences, a new play by August Wilson, author of the Broadway melodrama Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Wisdom Bridge Theater, which last year toured in Britain and played a summer season at the Kennedy Center in Washington, this week is reviving a much praised multimedia Hamlet. Directed by Robert Falls (who last month shifted from the artistic directorship of Wisdom Bridge to the same slot at the bigger-budget Goodman), this Hamlet employs a slide show, blues and rock sequences, video monitors...
Fences is an import from the Yale Repertory Theater, which also originated Ma Rainey. Once again, Playwright Wilson heaps too much plot onto a slice-of-life structure, but he gives Jones one of the very best roles of his career. Troy Maxson is a frustrated man of 53, a former baseball player who was too old to have made the jump from the Negro leagues to the majors. A former lowlife who has lived for duty, respectability and the right of absolute authority at home, he destroys everything he achieved and leaves no one to mourn him. Jones revels...
...most remarkable of the three survivors is Ma Rainey. Playwright August Wilson had never had a play produced commercially. The cast were relative unknowns. The play's subject is gloomy and its ending violent; the characters are mostly black, and the two whites are unsympathetic. Yet since it opened last October, it has played to 60% of capacity in the 1,108-seat Cort Theater, although it has not yet been able to repay its backers...
...power of the play comes from the barely suppressed rage of its central characters: Ma Rainey (Theresa Merritt), a fierce, massive singer who has reacted to prejudice by creating an isolated world in which she need not tolerate the least compromise, and her backup trumpet player (Charles Dutton), a keenly ambitious composer-arranger who is fixated on the memory of his mother's rape by white thugs. When these two potent wills clash, the bystander who suffers is, inevitably, one of their own and not a white oppressor. Episodic and slow but vividly real in portraying even minor characters...