18
Dec
The new Netflix film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, starring Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman in his final screen role, is a searing drama set in 1920s Chicago, based on a Tony-winning play by legendary playwright August Wilson. The 1982 show is part of Wilson’s 10-play “Pittsburgh Cycle,” a series of plays mostly set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, each in a different decade, that use families in that neighborhood (where Wilson himself was born) as the lens through which Wilson examines the Black experience in America throughout the 20th century. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the exception. Set in…
