Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was August Wilson’s first Broadway hit — and a preamble to his cycle of award-winning plays about the African-American experience across the 20th Century that included Fences and The Piano Lesson.

Now Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the first of the late playwright’s works to be adapted for Netflix — premiering Dec. 18.

Wilson was a little-known poet when the play opened at Yale Repertory Theater in the spring of 1984.