Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company

Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater Company alongside the August Wilson Center-African American Cultural Center will produce August Wilson’s classic, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for the first annual Highmark Blues and Heritage Festival.

The play takes place during a single afternoon in a recording studio with the famous blues singer, Ma Rainey. It is the first of Wilson’s ten-play American Century Cycle which is now considered a staple of American theater.

Businesswoman and entertainer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, known as the Mother of the Blues, was the most popular blues singer/songwriter of the 1920s. She is considered to be the first woman to introduce Blues into her performances.