WBAL-TV: ArtsCentric hopes to bring people back in history with ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ performance
Reporter: Brenna Ross
Orignally aired on WBAL-11 on April 23, 2025 at 4:55pm E.D.T
BALTIMORE — As actresses and actors perform “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at ArtsCentric, they want to take you back in history.
The show is set in 1927 in Chicago as singer Ma Rainey merges jazz and blues while emerging as a star.
“Ma Rainey, her character, she has a lot of resilience,” said Kadejah Oné, who plays Ma Rainey in the show. “She is coming in and knows that she has something that’s going to bring people love and joy, but she still has to walk through the roughness of the racism that happens in the 1920s.”
Oné’s character is based on the real-life singer Gertrude Ma Rainey. The show follows her journey and the journey of her fictional band as they produce another record.
“She has become a very prominent Black artist in the south,” said Kevin McAllister, the artistic director at ArtsCentric and the director of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” “She has released almost hundreds of records by this point in her career, which is the year 1927, but she is still having to battle to get things made the way she wants them made, to get the respect that she deserves, and her bandmates are dealing with the struggle of wanting to advance in a world that is not ready to accept them.”
The show is the third of 10 August Wilson plays performed throughout Baltimore as part of the Baltimore August Wilson Celebration, a collaboration where theaters across the city will perform plays from August Wilson’s American Century Cycle in chronological order.
Arena Players Inc. kicked off the celebration performing Gem of the Ocean last year. Chesapeake Shakespeare Theater Company continued the celebration performing Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in the fall.
ArtsCentric is excited that it’s their turn to join in.
“It’s a great thing to see people literally coming in from all over the country to say, ‘I want to see every single one of these productions,’ and also the idea that the Baltimore theater community is uniting in such a way that we’ve never done before,” McAllister said.
As the celebration unites people, Oné and McAllister hope their show does, too.
“I want audiences to leave with this idea that we can all be better, that we all can take care of each other, that we all can invest in the future,” McAllister said.
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” will play at ArtsCentric through April 27.
The next performance for the August Wilson celebration will be “The Piano Lesson” at Everyman Theatre in the fall.