The Gershwins' 'Porgy and Bess'

Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis in Porgy and Bess.

I think what I'll remember most about the recent A.R.T. production of The Gershwins' 'Porgy and Bess' (henceforth just Porgy and Bess, btw) was the show that surrounded the show. The production itself proved pretty forgettable, aside from its vocals (from the great Audra McDonald, of course, but also from Philip Boykin, Bryonha Marie Parham, and Natasha Yvette Williams). Diane Paulus's direction was competent but a bit pedestrian, the choreography ditto, and the set design was weirdly grandiose - in fact it looked like something from Bayreuth circa 1976, amusingly enough.  Meanwhile Suzan-Lori Parks' controversial adaptation was streamlined, but clumsily so, and was thematically hamstrung by its political correctness.  And while the singers sounded pretty good (even though they were miked), the orchestra most definitely did not - its natural timbres were all but drowned out by amplification in the modernist barn that is the Loeb.

So the production was at best mediocre.  Yet local reviewers generally fell over themselves in their praise, because (hallelujah), it wasn't outright terrible, and because - of course - it had been designed to align with, and amplify, a middlebrow progressive politics that all our theatre critics feel they must kow-tow to.  (Tellingly, when I saw it, virtually everyone in the audience, aside from a school group, was a crunchy 70-year-old white Cantabridgian.)

The trouble with this kind of obeisance, however, crops up whenever a work's artistic content comes into conflict with the prejudices of its reformers.  For the "reform" of Porgy was bluntly posited as a chief motivator behind its revival; we were often told (in the New York Times, and elsewhere) by director Diane Paulus and her team of "excavators" that the opera traded in stereotypes that were now offensive.  When this proved controversial to those who love the original work (including Stephen Sondheim), and understand its place in history as a trail-blazing anti-racist piece of theatre, Paulus & Co. began an elaborate dance of back-tracking.  No, the show wasn't racist, no, not really, there were just "failures of understanding" in it, Suzan-Lori Parks babbled.  There were things, Paulus insisted, that a Broadway audience just would no longer tolerate!  NOT "racist" things, just "things!"

You get the idea. Basically, Porgy and Bess was racist, only it wasn't really, only it was in a way, unintentionally, only it kind of wasn't, not actually.

What this back-and-forth obscured, of course, was a simple discomfort with the abjection of the opera's characters. Porgy is a cripple, who gets around in a cart drawn by a goat (a metaphor for lost potency that is almost too intense in its pathos).  Meanwhile Bess is a "fallen woman" fighting a drug habit, who submits pathetically to the abuses of her lover, Crown.  To Paulus & Co., this was all offensive; they wanted to "empower" characters whose powerlessness was central to their being.  So Porgy got canes instead of a cart, and staggered off on his own two feet at the play's finale.  Bess was restyled even more radically - she threw away her "happy dust" in disgust, and seemed to "choose," rather than succumb to, her sexual abuse.

The trouble is, these decisions played hacky-sack with the themes, emotional trajectory, and even tragic dimension of the opera.  They turned a great, disturbing work of art into a "teaching moment" about, well, something, but I've no idea what; this Porgy and Bess was completely at odds with itself.  Because if the abjection of the characters was what offended, then why make them only a little less abject?  What was the artistic point of that?  And if you were going to really transform Dubose and Dorothy Heyward's Bess (note the Heyward name was not included in the project's marquee title), into an angry, totally-together Power Grrl, then how could you also hope to hang onto the Heyward plot, which depends completely on Bess's weakness?  To make good on such a re-conception, you'd  have to thoroughly rewrite the second half of the opera - something Suzan-Lori Parks simply didn't do.

What we were left with, then, was an oddity: an opera "reformed" of a racism it didn't "really have," by means of interventions which rendered it as crippled thematically as its lead character was physically.

But let's be honest - in the view of the revival's admirers, the opera had to be racist, because without a veneer of reform, Paulus's direction generally looks denuded of any significance (and Suzan-Lori Parks' playwriting doesn't fare much better).  I know, I know - Diane Paulus knows how to engineer an "event" (the publicity prior to Porgy was her real masterpiece), and thus she gets not only buzz, but butts in seats - the production quickly sold out at the A.R.T.  But once my butt is in that seat, I can't help but notice that as a director Diane Paulus is . . . well, she's okay, but no great shakes.  I keep trying to think of something particular to say about her style or sense of interpretation - but honestly, not much comes to mind.  She is dutiful; she attends to details; she has a good sense of pace.  (She was obviously once a Harvard student.)  She directs the traffic of her stage fairly well, and every now and then has a striking visual idea.  This only puts her, however, in the solid middle of the lowest tier of national-level directors.  She has no real interpretive profile; beneath her publicity-driven "brand" of pop-political activism, there is something close to an artistic void.

And please, don't write in to tell me I feel this way because she's a woman.  Would everyone stop making that kind of excuse for her?  I feel this way because I see a lot of great direction.  And even if Diane Paulus suddenly grew testicles she wouldn't be a patch on the ass of a director like, say, Mary Zimmerman.  Even locally, we have Melia Bensussen, who's clearly smarter and more imaginative than Paulus.  We have plenty of better female directors than Diane Paulus; her career is held in place by her politics, her connections, and the success of Hair.  That's it.  (And honestly, how interesting is Hair?  Seriously, people, catch a grip.)

What made this production even weirder was that basically all its racial stereotypes were still firmly in place (at left), just rendered in a warmly sappy, aw-shucks! idiom that made Cabin in the Sky look sophisticated; and it certainly still sported the unspoken frame of deracinated white folks watching the antics of earthy, free-spirited "Negroes."  Sassy, oversized mamas still clucked after randy, sexist bucks, just as I remembered from earlier productions of Porgy and Bess - and as I remember from The Color Purple, by the way, and all of Tyler Perry's movies, too.  Yeah, I know, Parks deleted the vulture scene, and Porgy's fear that a corpse might bleed afresh in the morgue, because these tropes were seen (by her) as too "superstitious."  Which makes no sense to me whatsoever, by the way.  Superstition is a mainstay of grand opera, and of Shakespeare, too.  Nobody ever thought any less of an opera character because he or she was superstitious.  (And oddly, one left this production more convinced than ever that Porgy and Bess is indeed an opera, not a musical - the lurches from recitative into dialogue were always abrupt and disconcerting.)

So if affectionate, but condescending, stereotype rattles your political cage, then I can't see how you wouldn't be staggered by this Porgy and Bess.  As for me, I put this kind of thing in the same category as O'Neill's parody of Irish poverty in Moon for the Misbegotten - I'm Irish, but I'm not offended.  Art may be rooted in stereotype, for all we know, and at any rate, Tobacco Road ain't so far from Catfish Row; there's plenty of Caucasian abjection out there, too.

I am offended, however, by productions that pretend they have conjured drama where instead they've only put up After-school Special talking points. (Like "Nice girls can be sluts, but they don't do drugs!") And as I've noted, this Porgy and Bess made no dramatic sense whatsoever.  The whole point of the opera is the fragility of its lovers' relationship, how their mutual frailty both allows their romance to blossom (Bess has always been overwhelmed by more powerful men), and also threatens to destroy it.  Its theme is the vexed condition of human weakness, and I'll be honest - the dilemma of these heroes always makes me cry; they are titanic, two of the truly tragic heroes of the twentieth-century theatre.

So rather obviously, turning them into avatars of empowerment pretty much drains them of their actual artistic power.  Plus it inevitably led this production into odd non-sequiturs.  Audra McDonald sang like an angel, it's true, but she only connected with Norm Lewis' Porgy musically - because the restyled script obviated the tender basis of their relationship.  Likewise, when attacked by Crown in the second act, she mysteriously strode off to her own rape with an irritated, "Come on, let's get it over with!" authority.  Then, once Porgy had been detained by police, she was seduced by Sportin' Life to abandon her lover because - well, because WHAT?  In the original version, of course, the spectre of "happy dust" reclaiming her desperate soul arises, and Porgy's journey to New York becomes one of redemption.  Here, however, Bess spurned Sportin' Life's offers of cocaine . . . and yet decided to run off with him anyway.  And how many drug-free Power Grrls would decide to run off with a pusher?  My guess is not many.  Clearly this was one moment that required a little extra inspiration from Suzan-Lori Parks, but so far she has come up with zip.

But by the end of the production I had long since understood that this was no longer a work of drama, music, or opera, at all, but merely a vehicle for an obviously muddled and pretentious politics.  Not even a politics, actually - just an etiquette.  And let's not forget it's a financial vehicle, too - a possible gold mine, I'd guess, for Paulus and the Gershwin estate.  Paulus by now has made a career from eking a profit out of white guilt - she's like some New Age "P.C." Barnum.  Which wouldn't be so bad, I suppose, if she weren't perverting the purpose of her non-profit theatre in the process.  By now, of course, the A.R.T.'s second stage is a lost cause; Paulus's personal moneymaker, The Donkey Show, has run there for over two years, and what productions the space offers in addition must inevitably be styled around its requirements.  Thus a space that used to house truly challenging and original new work is programmed with rock "operas" or the likes of Cabaret and The Rocky Horror Show.  And the main stage Paulus clearly views as a launching pad for her own Broadway projects, like Porgy, which was obviously streamlined for purely commercial purposes.  That's right - the goal of this particular "nonprofit" theatre has become the commercialization of art into more politically-palatable pop entertainment.  It's doing precisely the opposite of what it was founded to do.   But then as several of the smarter critics have already pointed out, P.C. pop entertainment is what the PBS and NPR crowd now considers "art."   So why, I sometimes wonder, do I even mourn the mauling of a great work like Porgy and Bess?  Diane Paulus is probably right; there's no audience left to appreciate it anyway.

Two contrasting tales of racism and renovation

The screwball subtext of the original His Girl Friday?

Recently I've been mulling the role of race in our theatre (again!) as I've pondered two local productions, Porgy and Bess, or rather The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess (closing this weekend, but sold out anyway) at the A.R.T., and His Girl Friday down at Trinity Rep (up through next weekend, and worth a visit).

I'm still not sure what to make of the apparent contrast between these two productions, frankly.  Or perhaps I'm more puzzled by the contrast between their press receptions.  Porgy and Bess - which I caught earlier this week - was, of course, the middlebrow cause célèbre of the season, ever since director Diane Paulus and adaptor Suzan-Lori Parks announced, in a pre-show puff piece in the New York Times, that they were renovating the Gershwin classic with the insinuation that the original opera was racist.  Soon a hilarious, and deadly-accurate, sneer from Stephen Sondheim followed in that same paper (with a raft of outraged support attached to its comments section), and the usual suspects began to scurry and scuttle; by the time the show opened, the rumored "happy ending" had been dropped, the "renovations" mostly amounted to streamlining for commercial purposes, and Parks and Paulus - now faced with the scorn of an artist of far greater prestige and talent than their own - were babbling about "fleshing out the characters" and "failures of understanding."

And once it opened here in Boston, the fact that the resulting production wasn't nearly as bad as expected caused most of the critics to fall to their knees and kiss the ground in gratitude (sucking up to Paulus wasn't going to be nearly as painful this time as it had been so many times before).  The New York reviewers who saw the show, however - and who of course are much less under Harvard's thumb - told a different, more disappointed story, although everyone praised Audra McDonald's stand-out performance as Bess.  I'd disagree with that, actually - vocally MacDonald is indeed stunning, as expected.  Dramatically, however, her work is a mixed bag - because the one major, misguided renovation that survived the Sondheim imbroglio turned Bess from a recovering addict into a Power Grrl, which in many ways ripped the tragic heart right out of the opera.

But I'll go into that failure of misunderstanding in a full post-mortem later this week.  What I want to talk about now is the contrasting reception to His Girl Friday in the press.

For while I cannot agree that Porgy and Bess is, or ever was, racist - in fact I think the idea is ridiculous on its face - I'm afraid I think the original His Girl Friday, and the play on which it's based, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page, are actually kind of racist.  Indeed, obviously racist.  So it's no surprise the adaptation, by John Guare, directed by Curt Columbus (both at left), that has unfurled at Trinity Rep over the past few weeks, has amounted to a renovation far more radical than anything Diane Paulus and Suzan-Lori Parks attempted (or could attempt) with Gershwin.

And yet the press has kept almost completely mum about this fact.  Perhaps because the original works in question cast an unseemly light on the racism the press long tolerated in both its readership and itself.

First let's take a look at the rather over-written The Front Page, and the sleeker, superior adaptation, His Girl Friday.  The central difference between the two, of course, is that in Howard Hawks's screwball comedy, the central character of "Hildy" Johnson has been transformed from a man (Hildebrand) to a woman (Hildegard) - and thus the "bromance" between Hildy and editor Walter Burns becomes a straightforward heterosexual seduction.  (I've often wondered whether the original text could be tweaked into gay comedy, but that's a question for another day.)

What Hawks didn't change, however, is that the headline story Hildy is chasing is one in which a white man has shot a "colored" policeman.  There are a lot of extenuating circumstances to the crime, but the perp (who has also been smeared as a Communist) is going to swing regardless because the political establishment "needs the colored vote."

I know.  Isn't that interesting.  This issue has always "colored," if you will, my reaction to the Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell confection, delightful as it often, but not always, is.  (There's also a crude reference to a "pickaninny" later in the film.)   It seems somehow - well, suggestive that the script, written by white men for a white audience, should portray a white man who killed a black man as a figure of sympathy, and that "the colored vote" should worry the lady with the Teutonic name as a corrupting influence. [And it's perhaps worth noting that in an earlier Hawks movie, Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant says to Katharine Hepburn, "That's mighty white of you."]

Such issues (and cultural framing) are far more troubling than anything in Porgy and Bess, it seems to me.  And so it's no surprise that adaptor John Guare has completely expunged them from his revised version, which conflates Page and Friday, but more importantly reverses their political spin.  In Guare's take, the perp is Jewish - he's even Czech - and he has been convicted of shooting a Nazi sympathizer (probably straight out of Germantown).  Guare also sets the action the day before Hitler invaded Poland!  In one fell swoop, he precisely flips the text's political overtones.

Although as you may guess from those details, Guare's liberal politics are a bit more heavy-handed than the original's racist ones were; it's as if he wants, understandably enough, to stamp out their very memory.  And in my full review I'll have a few caveats about how easily this new political frame - and its critique of 30's America - sits with the breezy screwball romance (although it certainly sits more easily than the original racism did!).

What I want to pause to ponder, however, is the press silence regarding this "renovation."  Reviewers seem to avoid discussing it directly, in fact.  The Globe's Don Aucoin, always a stickler for every plot point, did mention that "The man whose execution the reporters are awaiting is now a Jewish immigrant," but he avoids any contemplation of the character's original identity, or what the change in that identity means. Scanning other reviews for the show on the web, I couldn't find anyone who went into the issue, either - although one or two praised the show's new political spin, none discussed the racial history of the text.  [Update!  Don Aucoin suddenly returns to this topic in an article in the Globe today, but typically enough for this writer, he still can't bring himself to state clearly what the issues really are with The Front Page.]

I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, I think it's hard for the press to face its own racism directly - particularly the racism of the "swashbuckling," romanticized era that The Front Page represents. (In a way, Guare has recast the press of the past as the crusading heroes today's critics would like to imagine they were.) It's also difficult for a reviewer (other than me) to confront his or her readers with unpleasant facts about a movie as beloved as His Girl Friday. On the other hand, however, you could interpret the press silence on the true nature of these originals as a tacit admission that yes, they were obviously racist, and required renovation.

Which makes all the ballyhoo over Porgy and Bess all the more amusing. Yes, I know the original staging included the "n-word," and that Catfish Row is portrayed as abject, and that the book and music were written by white guys - but does anyone really believe that Porgy and Bess actually objectifies and demeans its characters? I mean seriously, really - does even Diane Paulus believe that? It's just not possible. Not even Suzan-Lori Parks could be so blindered by political correctness as to lose all contact with human and dramatic reality. And at any rate, if in the end she and Paulus didn't change anything substantial about Porgy and Bess - as people like Ed Siegel, Don Aucoin, and Carolyn Clay insisted - then it's still racist, right? I mean, am I missing something? If you don't change something's essential nature, if you're "true to its spirit," then it still is that thing.

Or was the brouhaha around Porgy and Bess really just a subtler kind of social stand-off, a sort of publicity stunt based on generational political vanity, a kind of diluted theatrical form of radical chic? I'll ponder these issues further in reviews of both shows later this week on the Hub Review.

Guess who else hates Diane Paulus?

The arts blog at the Times has printed a letter Stephen Sondheim (left) has sent to the editor regarding its fawning coverage of Diane Paulus's "updating" of Porgy and Bess. And boy, does our leading musical-theatre genius ever nail Harvard's leading theatrical poseur to the wall.  The text of the letter is below (go to the blog to read the 95 comments, almost all of which echo Sondheim's concerns). Of course I've been railing about Paulus's upcoming molestation of Porgy and Bess since I first heard about it, months ago (indeed, my comments regarding it played a part in my resignation from the IRNEs). But it's nice to have such high profile back-up! I'm not sure which organization Harvard can force Stephen Sondheim to resign from, but I'm sure some such effort is now afoot . . .

But without further ado, on to the letter itself:

The article by Mr. Healy about the coming revival of “Porgy and Bess” is dismaying on many levels. To begin with, the title of the show is now “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” I assume that’s in case anyone was worried it was the Rodgers and Hart “Porgy and Bess” that was coming to town. But what happened to DuBose Heyward? Most of the lyrics (and all of the good ones) are his alone (“Summertime,” “My Man’s Gone Now”) or co-written with Ira Gershwin (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”). If this billing is at the insistence of the Gershwin estate, they should be ashamed of themselves. If it’s the producers’ idea, it’s just dumb. More dismaying is the disdain that Diane Paulus, Audra McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks feel toward the opera itself.

Ms. Paulus says that in the opera you don’t get to know the characters as people. Putting it kindly, that’s willful ignorance. These characters are as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater, as has been proved over and over in productions that may have cut some dialogue and musical passages but didn’t rewrite and distort them.

What Ms. Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stories for the characters. For example she (or, rather, Ms. Parks) is supplying Porgy with dialogue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in “realistic” details is likely to reduce them to line drawings. It makes you speculate about what would happen if she ever got her hands on “Tosca” and ‘Don Giovanni.” How would we get to know them? Ms. Paulus would probably want to add an aria or two to explain how Tosca got to be a star, and she would certainly want some additional material about Don Giovanni’s unhappy childhood to explain what made him such an unconscionable lecher.

Then there is Ms. Paulus’s condescension toward the audience. She says, “I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.” I don’t know what she’s sorry about, but I’m glad she can speak for all of us restless theatergoers. If she doesn’t understand Bess and feels she has to “excavate” the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the problem be her lack of understanding, not Heyward’s?

She is joined heartily in this sentiment by Ms. McDonald, who says that Bess is “often more of a plot device than a full-blooded character.” Often? Meaning sometimes she’s full-blooded and other times not? She’s always full-blooded when she’s acted full-bloodedly, as she was by, among others, Clamma Dale and Leontyne Price. Ms. McDonald goes on to say, “The opera has the makings of a great love story … that I think we’re bringing to life.” Wow, who’d have thought there was a love story hiding in “Porgy and Bess” that just needed a group of visionaries to bring it out?

Among the ways in which Ms. Parks defends the excavation work is this: “I wanted to flesh out the two main characters so that they are not cardboard cutout characters” and goes on to say, “I think that’s what George Gershwin wanted, and if he had lived longer he would have gone back to the story of ‘Porgy and Bess’ and made changes, including the ending.”

It’s reassuring that Ms. Parks has a direct pipeline to Gershwin and is just carrying out his work for him, and that she thinks he would have taken one of the most moving moments in musical theater history — Porgy’s demand, “Bring my goat!” — and thrown it out. Ms. Parks (or Ms. Paulus) has taken away Porgy’s goat cart in favor of a cane. So now he can demand, “Bring my cane!” Perhaps someone will bring him a straw hat too, so he can buck-and-wing his way to New York.

Or perhaps in order to have her happy ending, she’ll have Bess turn around when she gets as far as Philadelphia and return to Catfish Row in time for the finale, thus saving Porgy the trouble of his heroic journey to New York. It will kill “I’m on My Way,” but who cares?

Ms. McDonald immediately dismisses any possible criticism by labeling anyone who might have objections to what Ms. Paulus and her colleagues are doing as “Gershwin purists” — clearly a group, all of whom think alike, and we all know what a “purist” is, don’t we? An inflexible, academic reactionary fuddy-duddy who lacks the imagination to see beyond the author’s intentions, who doesn’t recognize all “the holes and issues” that Ms. Paulus and Ms. McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks do. Never fear, though. They confidently claim that they know how to fix this dreadfully flawed work.

I can hear the outraged cries now about stifling creativity and discouraging directors who want to reinterpret plays and musicals in order to bring “fresh perspectives,” as they are wont to say, but there is a difference between reinterpretation and wholesale rewriting. Nor am I judging this production in advance, only the attitude of its creators toward the piece and the audience. Perhaps it will be wonderful. Certainly I can think of no better Porgy than Norm Lewis nor a better Bess than Audra McDonald, whose voice is one of the glories of the American theater. Perhaps Ms. Paulus and company will have earned their arrogance.

Which brings me back to my opening point. In the interest of truth in advertising, let it not be called “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” nor even “The Gershwin-Heyward Porgy and Bess.” Advertise it honestly as “Diane Paulus’s Porgy and Bess.” And the hell with the real one.