Porgy and Bess

Last night I saw Porgy and Bess at the Lyric Opera, their first production of the work.

Composer Geroge Gershwin required that all productions of Porgy and Bess be sung by black singers. The acting and the voices were beautiful, soaring, true, clear. The staging was very interesting and the music is familiar and singable, despite being truly Twentieth Century with its typical discordant notes. I loved the production and I was deeply moved by parts of it, particularly the “Doctor Jesus” scene in which the citizens of Catfish Row (North Carolina) pray over the rape-traumatized Bess, and the scene in which Porgy, the crippled underdog, defeats Crown in a fight and kills him.

I loved also that I finally saw people of color at the opera, both on stage and in the audience. The audience remained, however, pretty much the elderly white people in furs that I am accustomed to see at my Tuesday night series.

Yet I found the story of the opera very disturbing and bleak.

Clara opens the opera by singing Summertime to her infant. “Your daddy’s rich and your mammy’s good looking” is ironic at best and certainly does not foretell both parents’ drowning, Daddy on his fishing boat and Clara trying to save him.

Porgy is a beggar, played last night with a club foot, and Bess is the drug-addicted moll of the outlaw bully Crown, who kills another character with a cotton hook - it looks like a big meat hook - on stage. When the white police come, they take a random old man and jail him as a material witness until they can find Crown, which they never do.

When Crown escapes, Bess and Porgy become a couple who apparently truly love each other (Bess You Is My Woman Now). Crown reappears, rapes Bess, and forces her to go away with him. Porgy kills Crown in a fight, and when the police require him to identify Crown, he refuses. The white cops jail Porgy for contempt of court, somehow completely blind to his guilt.

In the meantime Bess is re-addicted and leaves with her drug dealer for New York. When Porgy is released, he returns to Catfish Row, and in the spirit of false hope decides to find Bess in New York. But we know he will never find her.

All this is pretty bleak. I tried to fit it into a typical tragedy mold, and found I couldn’t. The hope at the end is falsely uplifting, but . . . But there’s really no hope.

I also found the language used by the librettists DuBose Hayward and Ira Gershwin to be condescending. It is more a mix of what educated whites (although Hawyard was black) expect to hear from poor black people than the way they actually speak. My problem was that it was a mix that incorporated sophisticated and subtle grammar - like the subjunctive mood - with Gullah dialect, the Ebonics of the 1930’s.

In the end, I suppose that I must accept that Porgy and Bess is a cultural artifact of the first half of the last century. (I have no problem reading, loving, and admiring The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, mostly because the only true, human character in the entire novel is the slave Jim.) And I should probably stop thinking, willingly suspend my disbelief, sit back, and enjoy the glorious music and voices that are Porgy and Bess.

As always I welcome you to click comment below and leave your thoughts.