Download Ma Rainey's Black Bottom Study Guide
What Do I Read Next?
- Holly Hill’s essay, ‘‘Black Theater into the Mainstream,’’ which appeared in Bruce King’s collection of essays, Contemporary American Theater, examines tensions among blacks in Wilson’s plays.
- After opening on Broadway in 1987, Wilson’s play, Fences, won a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, an American Theater Critics’ Association Award, a Drama Desk Award, and the Outer Critics’ Circle Award. Fences explores the relationships between husband and wife, father and son, two lovers and two friends.
- Wilson’s play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, tells the story of Harold Loomis who, while searching for his wife in Pittsburgh, is haunted by the memory of being illegally enslaved by bounty hunter Joe Thomas in 1917. The play opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in late 1986 and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
- Carla McDonough’s intriguing book, Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary American Drama (1997), provides a sociological reading of Wilson’s plays, focusing on the subjects of crime, guns, and work among his urban black male characters.
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