Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis as Bess and Porgy
This
controversial production comes to Broadway with the baggage of both historical
and contemporary critique. First
produced in the 1930s as a “folk opera” by George and Ira Gershwin, and DuBose
and Dorothy Heyward, this production, directed by Diana Paulus with a revised
book by Suzan-Lori Parks and Deirdre L. Murray, opened August 17, 2011, at the
American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, where Paulus is the artistic director.
Before
he’d even seen the production, Stephen Sondheim excoriated the artistic team
for what he found unethical meddling with the Gershwin’s original work. But as Hilton Als wrote in a lovely background piece and review for The New Yorker, the “original” was full of racism, an artifact of a moment in
theatre history when white people represented their skewed vision of people of
color for other white people. Why in the
world would anyone want to preserve such original intentions for a 21st
century audience?
More
than a bit of sexism surfaced in Sondheim’s argument, too. Here’s a young white woman director and two
talented women artists of color engaging one of famous narratives of American
opera and theatre, all with an eye to renovating the central character of Bess,
the drug-addicted woman whose desires drive this revision’s plot. Given this refocusing, Sondheim’s unfortunate
objections might derive from his personal taste and respect for some artists
over others, as well as from his professional investments in preserving the
sanctity of the original text.
The
Sondheim kerfuffle sent the production to Broadway on a cloud of critique, but
from my perspective, this Porgy and Bess provides
a transformative theatre experience. With
a simple set by the talented Riccardo Hernandez; unobtrusive but evocative choreography
by Ronald K. Brown; a superb ensemble, each one of whom seems to follow his or
her own grounded and nuanced narrative arc; and stage pictures that seem
organic instead of posed, the production offers a thrilling experience at the
theatre.
Hernandez
creates down at the heels Catfish Row, in Charleston, South Carolina, with a
one-dimensional curvilinear back drop, all corrugated tin and wooden window
frames through which light (designed by Christopher Akerlind) projects in
geometric patterns that change with the time of the day. A simple working water pump establishes the
outdoor scenes, and performers bring on wooden chairs and crates to give the
stage picture levels and textures.
Yet
with so few props and such a schematic set, Paulus and her actors create a
whole world, an African American community of fishermen and washerwomen, of
tinkerers and tradespeople, of grifters and preachers, and of good people and
bad. The ensemble moves constantly,
providing a living backdrop to the story of Bess and Porgy’s doomed
relationship.
Paulus
draws attention to her stars through their costumes. Bess (the sublime Audra McDonald) wears a beautiful,
bold red dress when she arrives in Catfish Row on the arm of her evil
lover/procurer, Crown (Phillip Boykin).
Costume designer ESosa leaves McDonald’s arms bare and her breasts heaving
over the bodice, accentuating her figure with a high slit up the side and barely
supportive straps. Porgy (Norm Lewis)
wears layered, dirty but pure white shirts, which help him stand out among the
rest.
Bess's red dress makes her the focus of the stage picture
Although
the careful design and direction lets spectators track the show’s central
couple, Paulus embeds Porgy and Bess’s story within a lively, close-knit neighborhood
both visually and narratively. Theirs
isn’t a singular story, but a relationship aided and abetted by a community
that’s very protective of its “crippled” friend.
Porgy,
hobbled from birth, walks with a stick and a limp, his hips extended awkwardly
and his left leg twisted impossibly. His
disability makes it difficult for him to maneuver more than a few steps without
being offered a seat by one of his neighbors.
But Lewis plays Porgy with quiet dignity, not an ounce of self-pity, and
a sexy magnetism that makes him the production’s emotional core.
Shortly
after he and Bess arrive at Catfish Row, Crown murders one of the community’s men. To avoid prison, Crown hides
out on an island off the coast of Charleston while Bess slowly, hesitantly
begins to embed herself in the domestic life of Catfish Row, forming an awkward
relationship with Porgy. When she joins
her new neighbors for a picnic on the island where Crown happens to be hiding,
and dallies behind when the others board the boat for home, Crown accosts Bess,
insisting that she’s still his woman and that he’ll come for her once he thinks
it’s safe.
Boykin as Crown with McDonald as Bess
In
a scene that could easily be played as a rape, Paulus’s direction and McDonald’s
terrific acting indicate that although his physical force makes it difficult
for Bess to resist Crown, she’s also attracted by his sexual clarity. Her desire confuses Bess. In this production, it’s not her drug
addiction that’s her Achilles heel, though that weakness appears at key moments
to throw her integrity into doubt. But
it’s Bess’s deep sexuality, her own desire, by which she’s ultimately undone.
In
Catfish Row, women are supposed to channel their sexuality into marriage and
child-rearing. The upstanding, loving
couple Jake (Joshua Henry) and Clara (Nikki Renée Daniels) represent the ideal
relationship, one to which Bess knows she should aspire but can’t quite
figure.
Henry and Daniels as Jake and Clara
She holds Jake and Clara’s new-born
baby with great wonder and tenderness, staring into its face as though it holds
a secret she wishes she could fathom.
And when the couple dies in the hurricane that rocks Catfish Row, Bess
insists that their baby now belongs to her.
But exactly this contained and proper domesticity eludes Bess, however
truly happy she seems in Porgy’s embrace.
Bess experimenting with domesticity
Although
Porgy repeatedly scoffs that “no cripple can hold Bess,” he never really seems
to believe it, because the character’s goodness radiates from Lewis’s presence
whether or not he’s speaking. Lewis’s is
a smart, clear, intensely human performance, in which the typical pitfalls of
the “crippled” character redeeming the “abled” through his unsullied humanity admittedly
is present, but not as salient as it might be.
In this revision, his character feels fuller and more fleshed out, and in
fact, Porgy doesn’t ever really redeem Bess.
The typical trope is foiled in ways that help play against the
stereotype.
Porgy
loves and protects Bess, and finally finds his manhood by killing Crown, who
continues to appear in their lives like a demon that just won’t die. After Porgy stabs Crown to death in a stage
fight in which they struggle on the ground, the only level at which Porgy might
have a chance to even the odds against Crown, Porgy struggles to stand and
declares that he’s now a man.
It’s
unfortunate that the disabled Porgy distinguishes himself through violence, and
that his gentler, more domestic masculinity is pitted against Crown’s volatile force
in the first place. Boykin, as Crown, is
a muscular, large, dark-skinned African American man, who presents the
character in all his brutal sexuality and contrasts starkly with Porgy’s less
stable physical presence.
Even
after Porgy kills Crown, theoretically freeing her from the violent man’s hold,
Bess is seduced by Sporting Life (played by David Alan Grier as a kind of Ben
Vereen-as-the-Leading-Player-in-Pippin
spin-off), who tells her that Porgy will be imprisoned for life and that she
belongs in a big city. Sporting Life smoothly
urges her toward the boat that’s leaving soon for New York (in another of the
musical’s many numbers that became standards in the American repertoire).
David Alan Grier as Sporting Life
Played
by the truly astounding McDonald, Bess’s desires muddle her, pulling her from
one choice to the contradictory next.
She clearly feels safe with Porgy, but her blazing sexual heat draws her
to danger and to a larger palette on which to paint herself.
Bess
never looks quite comfortable in the cotton shifts in muted prints and soft
fabrics that signal her acceptance into the quotidian life of Catfish Row. The image of her lush body presenting itself draped in red in those first scenes always haunts her attempt to be just one of the women, to
domesticate herself for her own safety and acceptance.
Nonetheless,
this production doesn’t demonize Bess and neither does it leave Porgy broken by
her disappearance at the end. He decides
he’ll follow Bess to New York to win her back.
What
will happen after is anyone’s guess, but that future isn’t as important as
knowing that both Porgy and Bess have opted to move out into a larger world,
one less predictable, perhaps, one less full of love and care and
fellow-feeling than the landscape of Catfish Row, but one in which
they can find bigger, more ennobled versions of themselves in which to live.
That,
in itself, is an achievement.
The
Feminist Spectator
Porgyand Bess, Richard Rodgers Theatre, Broadway.