Amber Liekhus portrays blues belter Ma Rainey. [Craig Schwartz / A Noise Within]
Under Gregg T. Daniel’s direction, a 1927 Chicago recording studio becomes a pressure chamber. The production is the seventh play from Wilson’s 10-play American Century Cycle staged by the Pasadena company, according to A Noise Within. Over one sweltering afternoon, four men wait for a woman who makes them wait. Wilson uses that wait to lay bare the machinery of American ambition and American humiliation.
Amber Liekhus plays blues belter Ma Rainey like weather. You feel her before you see her. She knows her voice is the only leverage a white-run industry will ever grant her, and she spends it down to the last cent. The demands, the tantrums, the coldness toward outsiders: Liekhus plays all of it as armor, not vanity. The choice pays off.
Her foil is Jamar Gilbert’s Levee, the band’s trumpet player and self-appointed prophet. Gilbert plays him leaning forward, all elbows and appetite, sure that hustle alone can buy him out of the room. He builds his own gallows, plank by plank. By the time the trap springs, the laughs he earned in act one have curdled into something much harder to take.
Kai A. Ealy’s Cutler, Gerald C. Rivers’s Toledo, and Alex Morris’s Slow Drag round out the band with easy, lived-in rhythm: banter, grief, and arguments passed around in the band room like solos in a jazz chart. Several of these actors have done Wilson at this theater before, and it shows.
Bert Emmett’s Irvin and Matt Foyer’s Sturdyvant supply the play’s other pressure, the white producers circling the session with a mix of flattery and control. Emmett plays Irvin as a man who has made peace with his own cowardice, while Foyer’s Sturdyvant is all business, barely bothering to hide his contempt once the tape stops rolling. Neither actor overplays it, and the restraint makes Wilson’s point about power sharper than shouting would.
Tesshi Nakagawa’s stage set does its job, keeping the band room low and close, with the producers’ booth looming above. Ken Booth’s lighting and Christine Cover Ferro’s costumes are quiet and exact. Jeff Gardner’s sound design carries the era in on horns and static.
By the final note, the audience has suddenly laughed its way into a room it is trapped in. That’s the trick of this production, and this cast pulls it off.
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” runs through Sunday, Sept. 20, at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. For more call (626) 356-3121 or visit anoisewithin.org. Tickets start at $41.75, including fees; student tickets start at $20.
