Flint Rep Opens Its Season with August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

FLINT, Michigan — There are some stories you watch from a distance. Others call out to you and whisper with familiarity, pull up a chair, pour something strong, and invite you into the room.

On September 18, Flint Repertory Theatre will invite audiences into the latter when the lights rise on August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, opening the Rep’s 2026–27 season at Elgood Theatre and running through October 4. Tickets are on sale now.

The story is filled with music, ambition, laughter, frustration, and the complicated business of being heard. But perhaps what makes Wilson’s words especially fitting for Flint is that beneath the blues and nearly century-old setting, voices may sound strangely familiar.

Not famous voices. Familiar ones. The kind you might have heard sitting around a kitchen table.

For Nicole Samsel, producing artistic director of Flint Rep, bringing August Wilson to the company’s stage fills what she describes as a long-missing piece. This production marks Flint Rep’s first time producing one of Wilson’s plays.

“He’s one of the most important American playwrights we have,” Samsel said. “It felt very much like something that we’re long overdue to be bringing to the Flint community.”

Wilson’s words may have been the foundation, but Samsel knew the right storyteller would be essential.

Rico Bruce Wade, an associate artist with Flint Rep, has appeared on its stage more than any other actor, Samsel said. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, however, marks something new: his first time directing at Flint Rep and his first directing experience in Flint.

Samsel felt so strongly about Wade directing the production that his involvement was intertwined with her vision for the show.

“If Rico would have said no, there might have been some considerations of if we needed to reassess what the season looked like,” she said. “That’s how strongly I feel that he’s the right artist to be telling the story.”

For Wade, the invitation was an opportunity to return to a theatrical home that has continually challenged him.

“The Flint Rep in general…is a small regional theater that consistently punches above its weight,” Wade said. “The work in the theater has always been exceptional.”

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is an American classic with decades of theatrical history. Wade said his approach began by asking the artists working alongside him to “disarm the piece,” look beyond its reputation, and return to the humanity living underneath it.

“These are people. These are stories about people, and these are authentic voices,” Wade said.

And sometimes, when faced with a creative crossroads, the answer has been remarkably simple: trust August Wilson.

“There have been moments when I’m not quite sure what to do, and I’ll refer to the text and realize August kind of had it right the first time,” Wade said, laughing a little. “If you honor the text and trust the text, the playwright will help you out a lot.”

That trust matters because Wilson’s language carries more than dialogue. It carries memory.

Wade recalled first encountering Wilson through Two Trains Running roughly a quarter-century ago. After years in theater and exposure to numerous African American stories, something about Wilson struck differently.

“I got to hear voices that I grew up listening to,” Wade said.

Then he described an image that almost explains by itself why this production belongs in Flint.

“Suddenly I’m in my grandmother’s kitchen,” he said. That kitchen could be in Pittsburgh, Detroit, or even Flint.

Wade believes Flint audiences will recognize something living inside these characters. Their language, humor, conflicts, and desires travel beyond their time period.

“These voices will resonate with you,” Wade said. “It’s set in 1927, but so many aspects of these characters, aspects of these stories, are still so important today.”

The Elgood Theatre may make that recognition even harder to escape. The intimate three-quarter thrust theater places the audience on three sides of the stage. Rather than watching the story through an invisible wall, patrons will sit close enough to feel pulled into its pressure.

“You are in the basement with Ma Rainey’s band while they are warming up and talking and figuring out how they’re going to get through this recording day,” Samsel said.

That closeness is part of the magic of live theater. Two people can attend the same performance, sit several feet apart and somehow leave having witnessed slightly different stories. Wade wants audiences to do exactly that and then talk about it.

“It’s a full meal,” he said. “I want them to feel that they are emotionally and spiritually nourished.”

He hopes audiences see themselves inside the characters, become active participants in the storytelling, and leave comparing notes about what they experienced. Samsel wants that conversation to continue even after the theater doors close.

“I want people to have that feeling of like, I have to go talk about this,” she said.

More than anything, she hopes some audience members walk away with the unmistakable feeling of having been recognized by the art in front of them: “I just saw something of mine on stage.”

Maybe that is where Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Flint meet most naturally. In a city that knows music, work, survival and the necessity of making something beautiful from what you have, Wilson’s characters arrive from 1927 carrying voices that never completely disappeared.

And on opening night, September 18, Flint gets to sit close enough to hear them breathe.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom runs Sept. 18 through Oct. 4 at Flint Repertory Theatre’s Elgood Theatre. The Rep’s 2026–27 season continues with Rent, Witch, the New Works Festival, Finn, the Ghost Light Cabaret Series, and Metamorphoses on the road.

Auditions for select 2026–27 productions are currently open, and community members can also support Flint Rep through FIM giving opportunities.

Explore the full season, find audition information, support the theatre, or purchase tickets through the Flint Repertory Theatre website.