The Unconscious Rebellion of August Wilson

It’s a glorious moment for devotees of the late, great playwright August Wilson, even with many theaters closed. Netflix has two new Wilson films on offer: a swift, sumptuous version of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and the heartening documentary Giving Voice, about high-school students who discover the thrill and resonance of Wilson’s characters while preparing for a national monologue competition. Together, the films reflect not only on the achievement of Wilson’s American Century Cycle—his 10-play chronicle of Black life in America through each decade of the 20th century—but also on his long-running battle with the conventions of white, Eurocentric drama.

features two Black artists (in the film, Viola Davis’s eponymous blues singer, Ma, and ’s jazz trumpeter, Levee) struggling for a white-dominated music industry in 1920s Chicago to recognize their worth. Much of the play takes place in a subterranean rehearsal room where Rainey’s backup musicians swap stories, boasts, and insults as they debate the prospects of gaining, has “virtually no story.” Wilson, who wrote poetry before he turned to playwriting, drew inspiration from what he called “the four B’s”—the oral tradition of the blues, the collage art of Romare Bearden, the political engagement of Amiri Baraka, and the metaphysical explorations of Jorge Luis Borges. Wilson produced lyrical, chatty, digressive scripts, rich in African American character, history, and ritual, that didn’t slot neatly into mainstream expectations of a well-made play.