In his twenties, Ruben Santiago-Hudson saw “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the first play by August Wilson that appeared on Broadway, and “I was smitten, captured, put in a spell,” he says. “Nobody had represented me with such integrity; nobody seemed to have the love for me and the people I knew like August did.”
Three decades later, having performed in such August Wilson plays as “The Piano Lesson,” “Gem of the Ocean,” and “Seven Guitars,” for which he won a 1996 Tony Award, Santiago-Hudson returned last night to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” directing the first of an ambitious project to record for radio broadcast all 10 of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle plays within the next month.
Santiago-Hudson, who will perform in “Fences” and “Seven Guitars” and direct three of the plays, is the artistic director of the project. It is the first given permission by the Wilson estate since Wilson’s death in 2005 to record all 10 plays, each set in one of the ten decades of the twentieth century. Each recording session will feature many performers who were in the original casts — the nearly 60 actors include Jesse L. Martin, Phylicia Rashad, and Leslie Uggams — and be presented in front of a live audience at WNYC’s The Greene Space. The video will be livestreamed on The Greene Space website, but only the audio will be preserved, in effect turning Wilson’s plays into radio dramas.
In the video, Santiago-Hudson explains his choices, and several of the performers for the first play, including Clarke Peters and Larry Gilliard Jr. (both from the TV series “The Wire”), as well as associate artistic producer Stephen McKinley Henderson, a consummate interpreter of the playwright who has performed in eight of his 10 plays, describe their love for his work.