(BOSTON) – The Huntington Theatre Company presents Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson’s first Broadway hit, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, completing the Huntington’s mounting of Wilson’s Century Cycle. Liesl Tommy, director of the Huntington’s acclaimed 2011 production of Ruined, returns. The ensemble stars “ER” cast member Yvette Freeman as the legendary blues singer Ma Rainey and features local rising star Jason Bowen (Ruined, A Civil War Christmas at the Huntington) as Levee and favorites Thomas Derrah (Red) and Will LeBow (The Cherry Orchard). In the play, a quartet of blues musicians gather in a run-down 1920s Chicago studio waiting for legendary blues singer Ma Rainey to arrive to record new sides of her old favorites. Young, hotheaded trumpeter Levee aspires to a better life for himself and sees the emerging form of the blues as his ticket to fame and fortune. When he clashes with veteran musicians Toledo and Cutler and Ma Rainey spars with her white music producers, generational and racial tensions explode in the powerful and moving drama Newsweek calls, “Extraordinary.” Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the first of ten plays August Wilson wrote that became his Century Cycle, one chronicling the African-American experience of each decade of the 20th century. Wilson wrote Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom before establishing his relationship with the Huntington, but beginning in 1986 with Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the Huntington and Boston audiences enjoyed a special relationship with Wilson who came to consider the Huntington an artistic home. Here, he mounted early productions of seven of his Cycles plays before their New York productions. “August would spend six weeks here working on each play,” recalls Huntington Managing Director Michael Maso. “At times, I would see the next play come to life in front of me as he started to talk about the characters that were still in his head and what he was discovering about them. Here at the Huntington, we had the privilege of seeing some of these stories come to life in his head before he ever wrote a word down.” “I have a long and valued relationship with the Huntington. They have contributed enormously to my development as a playwright, and I guard that relationship jealously,” Wilson remarked in 2004. The Huntington staged Radio Golf, the final play of his Cycle, in 2006, shortly after his untimely death at 62 from liver cancer. In 2009, the Huntington produced Wilson’s second play, Fences. The production, helmed by Kenny Leon (Fences and Stick Fly, both on Broadway) received the 2010 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production (large theatre). “When I first arrived at the Huntington, one of the questions I was asked most frequently by members of our audience was when would we complete August Wilson’s magnificent Century Cycle,” says Artistic Director Peter DuBois. “This production closes such a meaningful chapter in the Huntington’s history. Ma Rainey’s exemplifies Wilson’s true jazz-poet genius.”
ABOUT THE ARTISTS The cast includes: Joniece Abbott-Pratt (Dussie Mae): Gem of the Ocean (Hartford Stage), The Piano Lesson (Yale Rep); Corey Allen (Sylvester): A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Great River Shakespeare Festival), The Fall of Heaven (The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis); Jason Bowen (Levee): Ruined, Prelude to a Kiss, and A Civil War Christmas (Huntington Theatre Company), The Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night (Actors’ Shakespeare Project),