BLACK HISTORY MONTH IN THEATER : ‘Ma Rainey’ Gets to Orange County : Dominguez Hills Students Will Perform at Cypress College

Ma Rainey has finally made it to Orange County. August Wilson’s play, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” a piercing study of black rage and white exploitation, won acclaim on Broadway three seasons ago and at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and San Diego’s Lyceum Theatre last year.

This weekend, it can be seen at Cypress College, in a production from Cal State Dominguez Hills, the heavily black-populated campus in Carson. The show comes here as part of a play exchange between the two schools.

The timing couldn’t be better. Not only is it Black History Month, but Wilson, who is black, is the hottest young playwright in America right now. Along with the New York Drama Critics Circle Award he won for “Ma Rainey,” he has picked up a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for his play “Fences.”

(Wilson’s latest work on the black experience, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” is at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, in a Broadway-bound production directed by Lloyd Richards of Yale, who staged “Ma Rainey” on Broadway.)

And there’s strong socio-demographic significance in presenting “Ma Rainey”--an unsparing account of the crushing effects of white bigotry--in predominantly white Orange County, a point that isn’t lost on Kaleta Brown, chairwoman of the theater department at Cypress College, where only 2.8% of the 12,800 students are black.

“We didn’t start this exchange with Dominguez Hills with any specific play or content in mind,” said Brown, whose department will be bringing its “Man of La Mancha” to the Carson campus April 15-17. The inclusion of the Wilson play was “purely coincidental,” she said.

Still, she added, “we couldn’t be more excited about having it here. It’s highly innovative and will give our students and community a greater exposure to very crucial issues.” It would have been difficult for Cypress College to stage the play itself, she noted, “considering our own student (ethnic) composition.”

With no such casting obstacles (nearly 42% of the 8,000 students are black), the Cal State Dominquez Hills drama department presents a work by a black playwright every Black History Month. Previous productions have included Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Story” and Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” This is the school’s first production of a play by Wilson, according to Hal Marienthal, the theater professor who is directing.

The play, set in 1927, focuses on a recording session in a shabby Chicago studio. Students portray four black backup musicians, the two blacks in singer Ma Rainey’s retinue and the three whites involved with the session.

Ma Rainey is acted and sung by Melanie Curtis-Andrews, 38, who has performed and directed in regional theaters in Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area, and who co-starred in a touring version of “Dreamgirls.” She also teaches drama at Compton High School and has led black-student performing troupes to international events in Washington and Jamaica.

In “Ma Rainey,” she plays an imperious, bawdy, cantankerous, commanding and ultimately tragic figure, fully aware of her servile status to white businessmen and her racial anonymity outside the recording studios.

“She symbolized what was happening to blacks at that time--all their humiliations, yet their searches for pride and dignity,” Curtis-Andrews said. Even though she was considered the “mother of the blues,” Rainey was limited to performing on the black theater-and-tent circuit, mostly in the South. Still, Curtis-Andrews noted, “she was the trailblazer for the later black artists, like Bessie Smith, who became the first great crossover singer.”

“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” underscores tragic parallels between the 1980s and 1920s, Curtis-Andrews said. “Despite all that’s happened with civil rights and the marches, that kind of (1920s) racism still flourishes. It’s just that it’s more subtle, more sophisticated.” If Ma Rainey “walked in today,” Curtis-Andrews added, “she would find no real surprises--very little has really changed in this society.”

MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM

Friday, Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m.

Cypress College Campus Theater, Cypress

$5 general admission

Information: (714) 821-6320