The Renaissance Guild

The Renaissance Guild in conjunction with
The Carver Community Cultural Center presents
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”

by August Wilson
Directed by Antoinette Winstead

See reviews at the bottom of the page

Photos by Ron Abrams

In a Chicago based recording studio, Ma Rainey’s band players, Cutler, Toledo, Slow Drag, and Levee turn up to record a new album of her songs. As they wait for her to arrive they banter, tell stories, joke, philosophize and argue. As the play unfolds it becomes clear that the tension is between the young hot-headed trumpeter Levee who has dreams of having his own band and veteran players Cutler and Toledo.

By the time Ma Rainey does turn up in full regalia and entourage in tow the recording schedule is badly behind, throwing the white producers Sturdyvant and Irvin into more and more irate disarray. Ma’s insistence that her stuttering nephew Sylvester should do the voice intro to the title song causes more havoc.
As the band waits for various technical problems to be resolved the conflict between Levee and Cutler reaches a boiling point.

Photos by Ron Abrams

Cast
Ma Rainey~Tamara Cline-Russell, Levee~Arthur Bouier, Cutler~Michael Gray, Toledo~Kevin Majors, Slow Drag~Charles Riley, Dussie Mae~Shaundra Lamkin, Sylvester~Clifford Ross, Sturdyvant ~David Clingan, Irvin~Steven Valdez, Policeman~Gene Hildabrand
Understudies~Gene Hildabrand, Tony Campbell and deAnna K. Navarro

Crew
Antoinette Winstead, Mark Denison, Cindy Rodriguez,
Gladys Karina Carielo, Hector Machado, Martin Sanchez,
Rigel Nunez, Jesse Arenas, Scharlette Donald, Rose Espinoza,
Ron Abrams, Danielle King and Paul Riddle Jr.

February 5-21, 2010
Friday and Saturday evening shows at 8 pm
Sunday Matinee at 4 pm
Little Carver Civic Center
226 N. Hackberry, SATX, 78202
Click here for directions

Photos by Ron Abrams

Tickets are $21

Click here to purchase
or call ticketmaster at (800) 745-3000

Discounts for Seniors, Military, and Students $17 ( ID required)
SATCO – $16 and ATAC $11 ( ID required)

For more information contact The Carver (210) 207-2234

Photos by Ron Abrams

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REVIEWS

Thursday, February 11, 2010
SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

Cast makes ‘Ma Rainey’s’ a must-see
BY DEBORAH MARTIN
dlmartin@express-news.net

When Arthur Bouier makes his entrance as Levee in the Renaissance Guild’s staging of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” his body language says a lot.

He strides into the recording studio, his swift pace and erect posture suggesting an innate cockiness. He’s tall, handsome and well-dressed; he’s also carrying a pair of $11 shoes — pricey in 1927 — that he’s proud of. He’s sure his career is about to break wide open. He’s given Sturdyvant (David Clingan), who owns the studio, some songs he’s convinced will sell well, and he has big plans to pull together his own band, breaking free of Ma Rainey’s outfit and setting his own course.

By the end of the play, Levee is on a very different path.

Director Antoinette Winstead, who also directed the Renaissance Guild’s terrific production of Wilson’s “Fences” in 2007, once again delivers a must-see show. The tension rises throughout, sometimes broken by comic moments; it all builds to a violent, tragic conclusion that’s shocking and hard to forget.

Bouier is marvelous. He gives a monologue, in which Levee explains how he came to his view of white people, that’s a genuine gut-puncher.

Tamara Cline-Russell, too, is sensational as Ma Rainey. When she makes her entrance — late, as is a diva’s due, — her carriage says everything about how she views the world. It’s a fiery, pitch-perfect portrait, both in terms of character and in the songs that she belts out.

Michael D. Gray, Kevin Majors and Charles Riley round out the band, pantomiming to music tracks provided by Mark Denison.

A lot of the play deals with the shifting power structure in the studio. The actors capture that vividly, particularly Majors, who radiates wit and intelligence when he’s with other African Americans and becomes much more withdrawn and deferential around the white men (strong turns from Clingan and Steven Valdez) who run the studio.
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Wednesday, February 10, 2010
SAN ANTONIO CURRENT

Waiting for the blues And singing between the lines for Black History Month
By-Ashley Lindstrom

There’s no getting past the past. There’s making peace with it. There’s taking pride in coming through it. But the past is profoundly, inevitably part of the present, an idea at the heart of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — and Black History Month.

The memorial month in fact began as “Negro History Week” in 1926, just a year before the events in Ma Rainey take place. Set in Chicago, it is the only one of the seminal African-American dramatist’s 10 plays not to transpire in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, Mr. Wilson — whose politically charged theater changed the landscape even as it drew comparisons to Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams — died just a few years before this nation elected as president a black man who started his political career as a Chicago community organizer.

Progress doesn’t come easily or overnight. Like Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wilson claimed a space for African Americans in theater, the black artists in Ma Rainey struggle to own their contributions to the American musical scene. Wilson once said he kept telling the same story over and over again: Life is hard. This month, that story is being told by San Antonio’s Renaissance Guild at the Carver Community Cultural Center.

Act I of Ma Rainey plays a little like Waiting for Godot, if Godot were a big, beautiful, boisterous blues singer (with boobs) who eventually showed up, and with a damn good excuse. Her band of four musicians — Toledo (Kevin Majors), Cutler (Michael Gray), Slow Drag (Charles Riley), and Levee (Arthur Bouier) — await her in the rehearsal room of a recording studio, less concerned with their truant party than those dodos in Godot. Such concerns are best left to Rainey’s manager, Irvin (Steven Valdez). The pipsqueak should know a queen is never late — everyone else is early — but it’s tough to keep that in mind with a sleazy, racist producer like Sturdyvant (David Clingan) breathing down your neck.

Renaissance Guild set designer Hector Machado has drawn from Wilson’s text to build a genuine sense of segregation on the Carver stage: The lowly back-up musicians are allocated to the cramped rehearsal room on the left like workhorses to stalls; the white overlords, in their wide-lapelled, double-breasted suits, have the recording stage to the right all to themselves — until Ma takes over.

Truth be told, there isn’t much rehearsing that needs doing until then. Each musician has his own way of passing the time, and each actor performs his stage business as if he was born doing so: Toledo thumbs through a book, Slow Drag plays cards, Levee shows off his new shoes, and Cutler rolls a joint.
All the while, and more importantly, insults and stories are exchanged, reflective of individuals striving to identify their relationship with the past and with the White Man. (The actors are such marvelously attentive listeners, you’d think they’d never heard one another’s lines before.) When Slow Drag tries to score some jolly green off of Cutler by invoking their history of shared exploits, Toledo looks up from his hardback long enough to tell them how African what Slow Drag’s just done is — except rather than appealing to ancestors or deities, his bandmate has “forgotten the name of the gods” and must instead summon slightly more profane bonds of kinship.

Levee, a virtuosic horn player and composer, doesn’t know about African or higher powers: His unsettling childhood memories, made right here in the U.S. of A., are far too fresh, too bleak. Director Antoinette F. Winstead certainly made the right decision in casting the towering, expressive Bouier, who recounts Levee’s tragedy with his entire voice and body. His only rival for stage presence is, naturally, the grandiose Tamara Cline-Russell as Ma Rainey, the real-life vocalist known as the Mother of the Blues.

Today, Rainey’s face is on a postage stamp and her name has been dropped mid-song by Bob Dylan, but in the 1927 Chicago, Wilson shows us, she was getting hassled by the police and refused refreshments by her producer. Hands on her hips and pointer finger stuck inch-deep into the chests of incompliant bigots, regally purple-clad Cline-Russell is having none of it, especially from the far less substantial Sturdyvant. The muscle of her demands and rebuffs is so melodic, I was eager to hear her sing the title song at last, and not disappointed when she did.

It isn’t in her tune, though, that Rainey best expresses Wilson’s views on music and the role of struggle: “You don’t sing to feel better. You sing ’cause there’s a way of understanding life … The blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain’t alone. There’s something else in the world.” Life is hard — but not hopeless.
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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Strikes A High Note
By-Lee Hurtado

The Renaissance Guild’s current production, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, is the company’s first co-production with the Carver Community Cultural Center. Directed by Antoinette Winstead, the play marks a fine beginning to their partnership.

Set in 1920s Chicago, the play covers a recording session with “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey (Tamara Cline-Russell) and her band. Rehearsing and recording soon give way to conflict, as the black musicians clash with their white producers and with each other, and one character, the trumpeter Levee (Arthur Bouier) comes to personify the African-American struggle for self-expression and self-definition in white society.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is an intense play, with moments of humor countered by moments of emotional, even physical violence, and the cast rises to the challenge of the material. Bouier is a standout as Levee, presenting a compelling portrait of hope, anger, and loss and making the most of the character’s monologues. Cline-Russell, in her acting and singing, makes Ma a larger-than-life presence, and the rest of the cast (including TRG veterans Kevin Majors and Charles Riley as Levee’s band mates) provide strong support.

Winstead describes the play as “an emotional rollercoaster ride of laughter and tears”. It is also a celebration of music, in which the characters find a place to express what they feel, what they experience. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a powerful testament to that experience.

Thank you for your interest and support!