Gary Halvorson and James Robinson | Porgy and Bess / 2020

 it ain’t necessarily so

by Douglas Messerli

 

DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin (libretto and lyrics, based on the fiction by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy), George Gershwin (music), James Robinson (director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Porgy and Bess / 2020 [The Metropolitan Opera live-HD broadcast production]

 

What can you say about the great American opera, Porgy and Bess? Yes, there are some of the greatest Gershwin brothers’ songs which include “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing,” “I Loves You Bess,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” and “Oh, Lord, I’m On My Way”—“Who could Ask for Anything More”?

      Yet there is so much more to this opera, now finally redeemed by the new MET production I saw on an HD live performance with my husband Howard on Saturday, February 1, 2020, in a production so blessed that I can’t imagine why this “folk opera” was not previously perceived as one the most significant of US opera conceptions. It is definitely not a Broadway musical, at least the way I heard it this time round.

 

    

      And yes, we know this was a work is conceived by white boys and a woman, the original book being written by DuBose Heyward and his wife Dorothy (who deserves her own special tribute), and then reconceived by George and Ira Gershwin. And, we recognize, years later, that they translated their work into a South Carolina dialect and sometimes stereotypical behavior of the denizens of Catfish Row. Yet, this great operatic presentation asks us, straight-forwardly, to recognize its unintentional racist flaws and get over it. There were dialects that blacks spoke, at that time, different from white idioms of speech, and even if they aren’t quite rendered precisely by their white interpreters they do not necessarily demean their characters. American language is all about its distinctive idioms, which is also what makes it so lively.

      And no one who sees this opera can really proclaim that these figures are entirely stereotypes: in fact these characters, at least in this production, are amazing individuals, each in their own way suffering and challenging us to comprehend their particular identities in a manner that no previous US musical or opera performances had previously demanded.

      Clara (Golda Schultz) hushes her baby by declaring her own ascendency into the black community in which she resides:

 

Summertime,

And the livin' is easy

Fish are jumpin'

And the cotton is high

 

Your daddy's rich

And your mamma's good lookin'

So hush little baby

Don't you cry

 

      Her son, later adopted by Bess and then the entire community, will ascend eventually into this all-black world as a person able to “spread his wings.” The Gershwins, in short, made it clear from their first song, that this was not a closed community, but an expression of new possibilities. Catfish Row, although locked down each night, expressed the possibility of the new, of something outside of the racist world in which most of the opera’s figures, faced always with their mortality, knew also that their desolate community was stunningly alive, willing to create a new world outside of their limited confines.

      Beyond that the central characters, with George Gershwin’s remarkable soaring orchestrations which conductor David Robertson evinces from the always remarkable MET orchestra, help us to perceive that the drug-driven and highly abused Bess (the amazing Angel Blue) must, in order to survive, make the impossible decision to move away from both Crown (Alfred Walker) and the truly satanic figure of this opera, Sportin’ Life (a devilishly loveable Fredrick Ballentine).

     As much as she loves Porgy (the always engaging Eric Owens) and much as he loves his Bess, she is doomed by her own past. Another “crippled,” like Porgy, destroyed as an individual in this community—Porgy cannot quite save her, even if he successfully protects her from the brutal Crown’s attempts to reconnect her to a world of Eurydice and Hades (if there was ever a “them and us” world it is here in Catfish Row); they protect one another while still slightly being ostracized their own community members. The balance is nearly impossible; at one moment you are at home, the very next moment thrown out for you own natural proclivities.

      Bess is one of the most tragic figures in all of opera. She loves her Porgy but cannot truly escape the errors of her past. She is hated and loved in a community that would embrace her but, in the very next moment, which send her, as the last song proclaims, “on her way.”  This is, in fact, a story about community—all of our communities—which love us and hate us for our variances at the very same moment. The tragedy of this great opera—and in this production I did perceive it as a great opera—was that Bess, despite her love of Porgy, cannot get rid of her demons.       

 

     Porgy, in his last song, has to embrace them, presumably moving on New York City, to where drugs and Sportin’ Life has taken her, but also to where we know will also be his own death, “The Promised Land.”

     Of course, his reverse travel from South to North (I recall the impossible journey in Irving Reis’s The Big Street, wherein Henry Fonda moves Lucille Ball by wheelchair to Florida), will probably result in his “promised land” death. He will never recover his Eurydice surely, and if he might, he will obviously turn back to see her following him, resulting in her death again. The turning back to check whether she will or will not follow her is an expression of his inability to forgive. His journey to “the promised land” is a certain statement of his sorrow and breakdown.

      Porgy and Bess is as tragic as any European opera. Catfish Row is Venice, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and all the communities of the world that have witnessed tragic deaths of divas and their tenors, baritones, and even contra-tenors who loved them. Forget the dialect and the white writers and composers who created them. These are major statements of love and desire that remain eternally located in all of our imaginations. Porgy is always in love with his beautiful Bess no matter how we might reimagine them.

 

Los Angeles, February 5, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2020).