Al’Jaleel McGhee had been waiting for Levee Green. That’s the only explanation for this young actor’s truly astonishing performance as August Wilson’s impetuous young blues trumpeter, a Prohibition-era Black Chicagoan with such talent and potential that its constant subjugation causes him to experience a psychic implosion.
So good is McGhee in director Chuck Smith’s new Goodman Theatre production of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” that his performance as one of the late, great Bard of Pittsburgh’s most visceral characters — and there is plenty of competition there within his unparalleled Century Cycle — recalls that of another former Chicago stage actor, Chadwick Boseman, who was nominated for an Oscar for this very role, which turned out to be his last on film.
McGhee’s take is all his own. The actor innately understands how to foreshadow Levee’s tragic end while still injecting him with both oodles of charm and an optimistic naivety, his initial belief that if you only blow harder and harder, all the walls of structural racism will fall.
And that makes his collapse all the more crushing.
The Tony-worthy performance (I know it’s not eligible!) is far and away the best of the year so far in town. And it’s the main reason to see again (or the first time) the only Wilson play set in Chicago, the story of the titular recording artist who knows both the extent and the limits of her power and the musicians trying to survive in this transactional moment in a city replete with unequal opportunity that they know will stomp on the weak.
The Goodman was, of course, one of the first regional theaters to stage the entire Wilson cycle, being part of the writer’s bespoke network of regional theaters, and his own informal company of actors, who all worked on the plays as they wended their way around the country with Wilson cutting and honing them on their journeys to Broadway.
Now the Goodman is re-staging these plays, alongside Court Theatre’s own efforts to produce the entire cycle. So audiences here are seeing the final version of these scripts. There is also an opportunity for new takes and, of course, to reach a fresh generation that does not remember Wilson, standing at the corner of Dearborn and Randolph Streets, smoking a cigarette and ready to riff with anyone who walked by.
Smith’s fresh production, which stars the ebullient E. Faye Butler in the title role, has a more comic tone and, throughout, I kept thinking that the veteran Chicago director, known for casting judiciously and then letting actors do their thing, actually was probing the play’s latent capacity for healing, except for what happens to Levee, of course. This is not a staging focused on hyper-realism but on providing a canvas for performance; Linda Buchanan’s set feels far more expansive than you’d have found on Chicago’s Music Row.
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“Ma Rainey” is the only Wilson play with significant white characters, yet Matt DeCaro and Marc Grapey, playing the guys who take most of the money earned by Black musicians working for Black audiences, are not essaying the harsh racists often seen in these roles, but more of a pair of hapless clowns, almost like Vladimir and Estragon with Ma Rainey playing the intimidating role of Godot.
Fair enough. It’s interesting to see those roles taken in such a context. After all, Wilson’s admiration for his real-life blues singer, determined to exploit every second of her brief window of power over the inept white establishment, was unbounded. And Butler, whose performance is physically and vocally just as free as can be, brings every last note of that home.
At the end of the night, during the bows, Butler slaps the guys playing her two antagonists gently on their butts, a gesture that would have jarred in most stagings but fully in keeping with the inclusive, humanistic vibe of this production. It is as if Smith and Butler are saying, Ma always was the reason everyone was here; history had just not yet caught up with her talent.
The whole show is infused with that kind of nod and a wink, typified by a delicious little bit of choreography created for Dussie Mae, “Ma’s gal,” in the words of the guys in the band who know the rule that no one messes with her. Tiffany Renee Johnson, lost in a kind of solo reverie, does an entire self-choreographed dance of 1920s flapper styles: her moves feel aspirational, dream-like and funny, all at once.
The creation of such a time-capsule milieu is Smith’s longtime directorial strength of course, even if occasionally at the expense of homing in an audience on a specific moment. For all the agony on its pages, “Ma Rainey” contains some of Wilson’s most comedic material, not to mention more music than any other of his plays.
Smith well knows that Wilson also was probing the pleasures of Black male camaraderie throughout the 20th century, which no writer ever explored more fully nor understood better. Here, Kelvin Roston Jr.’s Toldeo, Cedric Young’s Slow Drag and David Alan Anderson’s especially droll Cutler all embody the pleasures of each other’s company, fighting for what they know they are worth but not incapable of simultaneously enjoying the struggle.
These were, after all, highly successful Black musicians, held back by their racist industry but not when it came time to lay down ‘Hear Me Talking to You” or “C.C. Rider.” Those songs, first recorded by the real Ma Rainey in the early 1920s, always were alive. So is this entire show, which wants your focus to be on the whole, on Chicagoans doing their best in difficult circumstances. Even if they created the difficulties.
Until Levee, punched once too often, punches back.
Then we all fall into an abyss from which even Wilson could never write us out.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (3.5 stars)
When: Through May 3
Where: Goodman Theatre 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Tickets: $34-$109 at 312-443-3800 and goodmantheatre.org