I
don’t want to review the misleadingly titled The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess—really, what am I going to tell you that
you don’t already know about Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis and David Alan Grier
and how they hold an audience and deliver a song & etc? Take that as read.
What I’d really like to do, in the wake of the controversy that has attended
this production, is simply consider it, and what this revisionist version
brings up.
Let’s
start at the source, with the original.
On
the one hand, you have a story of poor, Southern blacks creative by a
collective of white writers—novelist-librettist-lyricist DuBose
Heyward, composer George
Gershwin and lyricist Ira
Gershwin—who may not have
understood the black experience from “within the skin,” but who did the most
sincere and thorough research (combined with getting to know and/or having
lived-worked with and/or having known members of that community) of which they
were capable. From this they created a kind of folk tale, populated by
larger-than-life archetypes who had big behaviors, big passions and big
superstitions. These white artists would have told you that they were painting
a sympathetic portrait of a milieu and a specific sub-culture of society, and
that bigotry was the last thing on their minds (indeed, in the cameos made by
while police officers, it is white racist society that is a clear villain).
On
the other hand, many blacks, even those who might acknowledge the point, would
claim that nonetheless, such well-intentioned homages to “American Negroes” as
they were then oft thought of, also implicitly presented the sub-culture as
something other and separate, more prone to subservience and superstition and
folksiness—and were therefore also more prone to be seen as universally
representative. Such a response from blacks goes back to the days of the
opera’s premiere in the ‘30s; coming from the ranks of an increasingly
empowered African-American community in the New Millennium, even after many
made peace with the piece (in the wake of the Houston Opera revival of the
‘70s), it inspired a more pro-active type of accommodation. So a creative team
of black artists—female black
artists, at that—director Diane Paulus, playwright Suzi-Lori Parks (to adapt the libretto) and composer Diedre L.
Murray (to adapt the
music)—set about to reclaim Porgy and Bess for a new millennium sensibility. Remember the
concept of reclamation. Because it’s key.
For
the sake of the philosophical muse, I’m going to sidestep the notion that if
you option the rights to a work, or get an estate’s permission to alter and
adapt, you essentially have the
right to do as you will (unless or until such time as the rightsholder or
estate—if they have any contractual approvals during the development
process—decides to pull the plug). For the sake of the muse I’m going to
maintain, further, that since Porgy and Bess was already a work of musical theatre that is
itself an adaptation (of Debose Heyward’s original novel Porgy and
his and his wife Dorothy’s straight-play
adaptation) in which rights to an underlying story had vested (i.e.
merged
legally for the creation of an exclusive musical work) that this is not
quite the same thing as an adaptation from one medium to another. And
finally I’m going
to take the elitist (and naively idealist) view (and believe me I know
how
naïve; I could tell you stories…) that theatre holds everybody to
a higher
standard.
Let’s
get one thing out of the way first: You cannot deny the pleasure of an
audience. Certain kinds of audience reactions are unequivocal, and at the
current revival of Porgy and Bess, the
audience is ecstatic. That’s a fact and—I mean this—more power to
everybody because of it. I’m going to suggest, though, that the audience
reaction is at least as much
due to the strength of the source story, the preserved score and the
performances as anything else. Because another audience—a Broadway
musical theatre audience at that—went nuts in the ‘70s when the Houston
Grand Opera reclaimed the opera by simply doing the opera. All of it. And the notion of whittling
the piece down to a more manageable musical theatre length and style for a
successful commercial run is hardly new either; that goes back to 1942.
But
what distinguishes this version
from all others is the addition of ambivalence and self-awareness in the
character portrayals. And the reduction of superstition and ignorance as
factors determining their behavior. These are poverty-stricken blacks, and few
of them are complex individuals—but they’re not in any way child-like.
They have a certain limited sense of the world beyond Catfish Row…news gets
through.
Thus, for example…Bess’s
addictions are choices—as in the original, she reverts to them out of
despair, but never out of an absolute certainty of hopelessness. Nowhere is
this more in evidence than after Porgy kills Crown and gets arrested (though
without incriminating evidence to convict him). Everyone’s fear is that Porgy will crack under the pressure of
seeing Crown’s body laid out in the morgue. With that as a pretext, Sportin’
Life endeavors to lure Bess back to the dark side. In the original, he
essentially tells her the case is closed, that she has nothing left. But here,
in his seduction he also utters these words to Bess: “Even if Porgy beats the rap…” No matter that
Sportin’ Life poisons the possibility with his next phrase, it has still been
offered; and to go with Sportin’ Life, knowing that Porgy just might beat the rap, she has to actively shun the notion
that hope, even compromised hope, is worthwhile.
Similarly,
there’s Porgy. In the original a youngish man, at his oldest in this early 30s, with useless legs, who gets around on a wheeled
pallet he propels with his arms, giving him unusual upper body strength (he
also has a wagon he hooks up to a goat). When he returns from the holding cells to find
Bess gone, he collapses in grief; but then he decides he will go to New York
and find her. In the original version, “legless” Porgy bellows, “Bring me my
goat!” And when nobody rises to the command, he adds juice to it: “Won’t
nobody bring me my goat?” And the
goat is brought. He has no idea where New York is; all anyone can tell him is
that it’s “a thousand miles from here,” “way up North past de Custom House.”
But he takes off anyway, with naïve determination. He will not, of course, get
anywhere near New York. Which
adds an ineffable sweetness to the tragedy.
In
the Diane Paulus version, though, Porgy's physical ailment is someewhat altered. This is a walking Porgy: a fellow with a deformed, twisted leg
who limps along as best he can using a cane. He’s a strapping, hairy chested man
of middle-age too; minus the leg, he might not look out of place on the cover
of a Harlequin Kimani Romance Novel. And this Porgy, when he wants to get up, doesn’t bellow. He pleads, “Bring me my
cane.” And when no one does, he cries, even more plaintively, “Oh, won’t nobody bring me my caaaaane?” And in that plaintiveness there is an absolutely
clear subtext: This Porgy knows
how far New York is! This Porgy
understands that the odds are
against him. He knows what he’s asking. And as this Porgy
leaves Catfish Row, you have serious reason to believe that somehow, somehow, he’ll get to New York, find
Bess and beat the crap out of Sportin’ Life for good measure. Which means we’re
going out on a note of hope. However small that note is, as insufficient as the
same iota was for Bess to maintain her faith, it’s enough to keep Porgy’s faith
burning bright; and it resonates with the audience as the possibility of
triumph. And that can be just as moving…but it sure is different.
Now
let’s leave Porgy and Bess aside
for a moment. Let’s examine the business of reclaiming a story. For reasons I
won’t delineate here, I’ve spent much of the last half-year or more steeped in
Russian literature from the first half of the 20th Century, and the latter-half-century-into-new-millennium cinematic
adaptations of same. What’s fascinating about Russian adaptations of their own
classics is their degree of faithfulness, something which the West only reaches
for occasionally. In terms of novels, any dialogue there is to be lifted will
be lifted; any structure that can be preserved will be preserved; any structure
that won’t translate directly from prose to film is reframed to approximate translation. Movie adaptations are long and split
into two parts; miniseries take as long as they need to complete their stories.
This becomes even more serious business when the
story in question has first been dramatized in the West, especially by way of
Hollywood. Let’s take Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. Basis of a big hit David Lean film of 1965. But
also the basis of an 11-part, eight hour 2006 Russian miniseries. Here’s the
miniseries director Alexandr Proshkin on the subject. “Please understand, I
have great respect for David Lean's film. But it is of its time. And it is
American.” Mr. Proshkin said that David Lean sought an idealized Slavic beauty
for Lara and thus missed an essential point: in Pasternak's book, she has a
Belgian father and French mother, making her an exotic in her own land. “This
is a nuance that you can see only from within. That's why Lara's beauty is not
a fair Russian beauty. She's a European free person, absolutely free, with no
Russian complexes.” A director named Ivan Dykhovychny wrote of the Lean
version, “If it is possible to make a film about Russia that would have nothing
in common with Russia, or with the revolution, or with our passion, it is Doctor
Zhivago.” The most amusing
comment came from the miniseries star, Oleg Menshikov, who played the title
role (assayed by Omar Sharif in the David Lean film). He said that he found the
Lean film “a bit funny,” but admitted to humming “Lara’s Theme” (the
filmscore’s signature melody) throughout the miniseries filming. (These quotes come from a February 2006 New York Times story about the mimiseries called Time to Come Home, Zhivago reported by Steven Lee Myers.)
So
here’s the thesis. White people don’t know the black experience from the inside
(unless they’re John Howard Griffin). Western people don’t know the Russian
experience from the inside. Rich WASPs don’t connect to the essence of Borscht
Belt Jews. Nobody who hasn’t breathed the air of common experience, culture,
ancestry and sensibility can truly replicate what it’s like inside somewhere else. It’s not even a question of
empathy, sensitivity or humanism. It’s the nuances that insiders take for
granted because they’re organically linked to a fine web of constant, daily
associations…that outsiders can’t even see, or don’t register as consequential.
But
here’s the conundrum.
When
the Russians reclaim Doctor Zhivago, what they’re saying in effect is, We’ve gone back to the source.
The source is ours. This is how the book was written. Therefore this is how the
dramatization should be done.
However,
when an African American creative team reclaims a work like Porgy and Bess, the message becomes, We deem the source
inadequate. How it was written no longer holds. It matters not that it wasn’t
ours, it purports to speak for us, therefore we are making it our own. This is
how the dramatization ought to be.
That’s
really the issue. How valid is that argument? How valid is the ownership on
either side of the line? (And not incidentally, why is the controversy so much
hotter with Porgy and Bess when
another creative team wrought similarly motivated changes to Flower Drum
Song?)
I
certainly have my feelings about it, and as feelings, they’re pretty definite.
But what I don’t have is a definitive answer. I don't think there is one.
How
purely American it all seems, though.
Consideration
now over.
Discuss
amongst yourselves…
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