Rainey ‘unapologetic’ about her worth, power
Viola Davis has collected an Academy Award, an Emmy, two Tonys and dozens more acting kudos, and now another powerhouse role has propelled her to the top of the 2021 best actress Oscar race: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the unapologetically brash real-life Southern blues singer at the center of a tempestuous 1927 Chicago recording session in the August Wilson adaptation “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
It’s a juicy role that has landed Davis in the Oscar conversation along with her co-star, the late Chadwick Boseman, who dazzles in his final performance as a hotheaded young horn player with eyes for Ma’s girlfriend and radical new ideas for Ma’s music. But even the formidable Davis admits she wasn’t initially sure she could pull off the swaggering blues legend.
“There’s a typecasting that happens in the business, and after a while, you start to typecast yourself and think of 50 million other people who could have played the role,” says Davis, 55. “But that’s not what acting is. It’s a transformative art form. It’s about taking whatever you have and using it to transform into a character that is completely different than you.”
She typecasted herself, Davis says — until she stopped comparing herself to other actresses and embraced the challenge. Denzel Washington never doubted that she could fill Rainey’s shoes. “Viola can do anything,” says Washington, a producer on “Ma Rainey.” “There was no question that she could do it. She’s a once-in-a-generation talent.”
In 2010, she starred with Washington in the Broadway revival of playwright Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning “Fences.” Six years later, with Washington at the helm, Davis reprised the role of dutiful 1950s housewife Rose Maxson in the film version and won her first Academy Award.
Back in 2001, Davis won her first Tony for “King Hedley II,” another title in Wilson’s 10-play “Century Cycle.” Wilson’s impact is of major significance to Davis, who also executive produced the upcoming Netflix documentary “Giving Voice,” about an annual speech competition dedicated to the playwright’s legacy.
“August Wilson was basically a griot, which in Africa were historians, storytellers, praise singers, poets, who kept the history alive in the tribes,” she says. “They kept our stories alive. And that’s what August Wilson was — a griot. And cheap.
As the day unfolds, Ma tangles with her recording execs and the band spins yarns and trades barbs in a basement practice room. The ensuing symphony of microaggressions and melodrama is deceptively mundane; swirling tensions reach a fever pitch over a musical arrangement, a stutter and an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” — titled after the hit song that becomes hotly contested over the course of the chaotic afternoon — left Davis invigorated.
In Rainey, she found an artist whose battles hit close to home. “She was a woman who was unapologetic about her worth and her power. She’s constantly reminding people who she is, and that had a transformative effect on me too,” says Davis. “That’s what happens a lot in our profession: You’re always hustling for your worth. That’s what you’re constantly doing in this business and in this world, so it felt very liberating to play a woman who was not doing that.”
Researching such a singular historical figure was no easy feat, says director George C. Wolfe, considering that only “six or seven” photographs of the real Rainey exist today. Unlike contemporaries like Bessie Smith, Rainey was not considered glamorous or anointed by white mainstream media.
Instead, Davis drew on Wilson’s text, adapted for the screen by playwright and actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and searched within to understand who Rainey was. “What I have to rely on is my life experience, because therein lies the problem: Ma Rainey is considered the Mother of the Blues, but finding any material about Ma Rainey was very difficult,” she says.
She thought of her aunts, her mother, her grandmother and of women spiritually in tune with Rainey. “I understand the emotional life of those people because they’re in my life — those complicated, beautiful, funny, hardcore, unapologetic people have been in my life forever.”
But Ma also has a surprisingly tender side reserved for her nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown) and for her lover Dussie Mae. Her truest moments of vulnerability, however, are shared with her bandleader and trombonist Cutler (Domingo), with whom she briefly drops the exhausting veil of toughness she dons in most aspects of her life.
Domingo describes an unusually intensive two-week rehearsal period the cast had in which they pored over the script in meticulous detail, “as if we were a theater company.” “We talked about the idea that Ma and Cutler have a closeness that they don’t have with the rest of the band. She was a pioneer, she was very much a maverick — and what she did was she empowered the men in her band as well.”
By contrast, Davis conjures a prickly dynamic with Boseman as Levee, whose youthful arrogance and newer, jazzier style represent a looming threat to Ma’s authority. After playing mother and son in 2014’s “Get On Up,” the duo wage a battle of wills as adversaries in “Ma Rainey,” which Davis calls a “fitting denouement” to Boseman’s cinematic legacy.
“Levee is probably one of the greatest, if not the greatest role for an African American man, ever, because it absolutely encapsulates them — their pain, their vision, their dreams, their talent,” she says. “It’s like someone who has a great figure who has to wear a burlap sack; this is an artist being fitted with an August Wilson garment that couldn’t have been more perfect. And he wore it beautifully. He just played the role beautifully.”