How Chadwick Boseman embraced his mortality
Delivery of August Wilson monologue in Netflix film was devastating
In George C. Wolfe’s excellent new Netflix film of August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Chadwick Boseman looks gaunt, tired and vulnerable. This great actor was, aswe now all know, battling the colon cancer thatwould bring about his death last summer at age 43.
In “Ma Rainey,” which features a screenplay by Ruben Santiago-Hudson that both honors and expands the original 1982 play, Boseman plays Levee, a trumpeter in the band of the illustrious blues singer. It is an astonishing, revelatory performance and formidably distinct from the numerous interpretations I’ve seen on the stage. For it is both gentle and suffused with mortality.
Perchance many of Boseman’s colleagues were unaware of the actor’s declining health as they all filmed together, or at least the imminence of his demise. We have the benefit, and the loss, of hindsight.
As played by Viola Davis, Ma Rainey is cutting a record in a Chicago studio (“Ma Rainey” was the only play in Wilson’s great cycle of the Black experience in the 20th century to not be set in his hometown of Pittsburgh). She knows that she has power as long as the white guys recording her voice still need her artistry and a signed release form. Wilson wrote Ma as a practical woman schooled in the expedient. Because she is aware of the limitations of her clout within this racist landscape of Chicago in 1927, she is able to maximize what she can
achieve in a particular moment. And she has learned never to let her guard down for even a second.
But Levee comes from a different place. He is a classic male Wilsonian character— closely related to Booster in “Jitney,” Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton in “Seven Guitars” and King Hedley II in the play of that name. He is a man with dreams and talent, a song writer and an improvisational master. In other words, he is a guy who deserves and needs a break.
Two things prevent that happening, both related to systemic racism.
One is that the white gatekeepers in the studio would rather steal from him than help him along.
The other is that Levee has a violent tragedy in his past, involving the rape of his mother by a gang of white men in the South and his father’s subsequent quest for revenge. Thiswas another of Wilson’s dominant themes: how America’s racist past constantly cut and undermined the Black people of the present, no matter the decade under review. By creating 10 plays, one for each 10-year span, Wilson was uniquely able to show the impact of the willful and racist destruction of the Black family across all of American modernity, however far slavery seemed removed.
In thiswork, Levee cannot escape what he saw when hewas 8 years old. To introduce that in a
drama, though, Wilson had to write a monologue wherein the character recounts the experience for everyone to hear.
As performed by Boseman, these few minutes are the most gripping of the film, as is invariably true when the play is produced on stage. The writing is as poetic as it is shocking; other characters fall silent; individuation is replaced by collective experience and understanding; a man is finally better understood. By some.
There are many of these monologues throughout the Wilson canon. They are one of the writer’s great signatures. As the plays made their way around the country, hewould often cut them, meaning that those
of us lucky enough to see the plays in their earliest versions experienced something thatwould not necessarily last. But he also added them. One actor in Wilson’s long-standing repertory company toldme that he’d asked for one for his character, mostly as a joke in rehearsal, and Wilson had come back the next morning with paragraphs penned.
Those monologues have become a key part of how young Americans access the Bard of Pittsburgh as the new Netflix documentary “Giving Voice” reveals. As directed by Jim Stern and Fernando Villena, the moving film follows six young contestants in the August Wilson Monologue Competition; three of them are from Chicago.
This competition, closely associated with Derrick Sanders, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is an acting tournament, but also a celebration of Wilson’s work and of the young people who strive to find themselves in his characters. I’ve served as a judge in years past and watched live exactly what you see in the documentary: a gorgeously eclectic array of talented kids learning that great acting is a collision between a fictional character and the actor’s self.
That doesn’t mean actor and character need to be aligned in age or gender identification or even race (the competition is open to all and these six contestants reflect that diversity). Wilson was a pedagogic writer with an open heart; alas, he did not live to see the influence of his monologues on young people all over the nation. He died in 2005 at age 60; the cause was liver cancer.
Which brings us back to Boseman and that particular monologue of memory in “Ma Rainey.”
It’s exquisitely done and it changes howthe play’s violent end lands, because of the underpinning sense of sorrow, of potential undermined. For Boseman, the damage to this character was done to him as a child and cannot be repaired.
Great sociopolitical writing— as opposed to the majority of such work— understands that advocates for radical change must confront mortality and spiritual longing.
Neither Boseman nor Wilson lived long lives, God knows, but they both packed a lot inside their allotted years.
And they sure took their chance here to fuse together as one.