it ain’t necessarily so
by Douglas Messerli
George Gershwin (music), DuBose Heyward and
Ira Gershwin (libretto and lyrics, based on the fiction by Dorothy and DuBose
Heyward’s Porgy) Porgy and Bess / Howard Fox and I attended the
HD-Met Performance presentation on February 1, 2020.
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
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).
