Porgy and Bess – A hopeful tragedy

Who doesn’t know the song Summertime?  If you can’t conjure up a feeling state just by thinking about that song, click the link above or below to a Youtube rendition and sit back and relax into a kind of lassitude that is right next to delirium.  My gosh, the Gershwin brothers could craft a tune.  I remember hearing a story about George losing a trunk full of their songs when they were travelling.  Someone asked him about the magnitude of the loss.  He said something like, “Not to worry, there’s a thousand more where those came from.”  Wow. 

Though I have known that song, and a couple of others – I Got Plenty of Nothing – and Bess You is My Woman Now – for as long as I can remember, I have never seen Porgy and Bess, the opera.  The reluctant wife was travelling for business and not excited about seeing it, so I called up an enthusiastic opera loving friend whose partner eschews opera and tagged along with him.  Wow. 

I was afraid that an opera about an African American community in Charleston in the twenties would be dated – and racist.  Would that it were dated.  Oh, the language was dated.  But the themes were current.  Including the power imbalance between the white police and the black public and the power imbalance between men and women.  As a white male, I don’t know that I can speak to the racism and sexism as a member of either club, but I didn’t find that the cringeworthy moments were because of outdated or passé attitudes.  Instead I found they were uncomfortably current.  I also found a story of individuals, a community, and of feelings that feel as timeless and intimate and immediate as opera should feel.  And the music.  Wow.

The music was operatic – this was an opera.  But the songs, as written, were intended to mirror folk songs and spirituals.  Justas Edelweiss is not actually an Austrian folk song, so Summertime is not actually a spiritual, but gosh it feels like it when Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong sing it.  Not so much when opera stars do.  The familiar music is filled with trills and enunciations that Jazz and Folk versions do not contain.  And it takes a little while to get used to folk-like songs getting so gussied up.  But it is a treat to hear an unamplified voice fill a hall with beautiful sounds.  Bring on the gussiness. 

It also feels at moments less like an opera and more like a Broadway show (which it has also been) because the chorus and minor characters have significant parts and there are dance parts that the opera stars look a bit uncomfortable doing.  But the inclusion of more of the company makes it, I think, true to the subject.  Unlike most operas, this is not about the ruling class, but about the lower class.  The king’s or the duke’s chorus are the people – people whose off stage and unacknowledged work allows for the king’s or duke’s life to be one that is apparently self-determined.  

The members of the lower classes are tangibly dependent on each other to survive.  And their collective grief allows them as a group to bear what no one of them could individually bear.  They ante up to pay for each other’s funerals – and they gather together in times of threat- they don’t retreat into the inner sanctum or to the highest vantage point while their minions secure the gates or fight under their direction.  That said, some of these were the moments that felt closest to a potentially racist experience of the play – I think because blacks have been ridiculed for their interdependence.  I think the ridicule is based in fear.  It is threatening to the ruling class to see the connections between the oppressed because it creates strength in a group they maintain power over.  But when this is viewed from a position of connection – when, despite the fourth wall, I was able to experience it not as voyeuristically as I feared I might – I, at least, felt allied with the players in their lives - though I was also aware of the ability to see them as objects - not fellow subjects.

This also doesn’t feel like an opera in the way that the plot is laid out.  Porgy and Bess have enough clock time to actually fall in love.  The emergence of stage romance is frequently incredibly compressed.  This is true not just in opera (I found the speed limit of love to have been violated in the opera Romeo and Juliet earlier this summer, but I think that is the case in the play as well), but also in films (Love Actually condenses a lot of love into a very few weeks before Christmas).  I found myself idly wondering, as I noticed that this opera allows time – not enough, but more than usual – for love to develop, to what extent the quick flowering of love (sometimes in the middle of a song) is a result of the compressed format (though at four hours this opera is not super compressed), and to what extent it mirrors the dramatic culture – groups come together to create magic on tight schedules – they accomplish this – and they manage to deeply engage with each other very quickly as they are doing it (and not infrequently to fall in love with each other while doing it).

In any case, on Catfish row, after Bess is left without a man because Crown, her tough guy, fast talking boyfriend has, in a drunken brawl, killed a man and gone into hiding, she turns – not to Sportin’ Life, who offers to take her in and provide magic dust (heroin or cocaine?) to boot – but to Porgy, the big crippled man who is kind to her and who had never expected to be loved by anyone.  It isn’t necessarily romantic at first, but after a couple of weeks, which is not portrayed, but passes in the context of the play, it has taken a turn in that direction, and Bess, You Is My Woman Now becomes a heartfelt expression of their growing love for and commitment to each other.

At this point, we could have a lovely romantic comedy – but this is opera.  It is also a play about sex, gender and power and how all those things impact love and self-esteem.    We have seen, with the song I Got Plenty of Nothing, how love transforms Porgy’s self-esteem.  He is now proud and happy in a life that was dark and all that has changed is that he is in love.  But Bess’s love is much more complicated.  Though she is clearly smitten with Porgy and their parting before the picnic is laden with the sweet sorrow of their shared and genuine love, she is cornered by Crown on the island where the picnic takes place.  He demands that she return to him, she demurs, he insists – and then he rapes her.  She spends two days in the jungles of South Carolina before returning, delirious, to Porgy, who divines what has happened after Bess is returned to her senses through a group invoking "Dr. Jesus" to help her.

The version of what has happened that passes between Porgy and Bess is at odds with what we have seen.  Bess sings of wanting Porgy to protect her – not from Crown, but from her desire for Crown.  Wait.  Didn’t we just see him rape her?  What the heck is going on?  Well, I think a lot.  First of all, there is an implicit support of a rape culture.  What does a woman find attractive?  A man who is strong and uses his strength not just for a woman’s protection, but against her.  That is the male version of the interaction.  The “Me Tarzan, you Jane” version that is so frequently central to the portrayal of love on the screen in the last century. 

There is a female version of this primitive mating ritual that seems dated in our post-feminist world.  It goes something like, I don’t like being taken, but I am in need of protection – if Crown won’t care for me, should I rely on Porgy or on Sportin’ Life – because being on my own is not an option.  This would seem quaint, except that #metoo movement has exposed the number of women in the show business world who have been dependent on casting directors and producers to support their careers and the behavior that they have had to put up with in order to have those careers develop (and the secrets they have had to keep to avoid losing their status).  And, of course, the independence of women and girls is recent - and far from absolute – so the #metoo movement extends far beyond the bastions of vast power to the places where everyday power imbalances exist – which is pretty much all over the place, especially including Catfish Row.  We could then see Bess’s behavior as a kind of cruel calculus.  Who will protect me best?

This calculus, though, seems to apply later in the plot.  At the moment when she is with Porgy after having been with Crown again, she wants his help in stemming her desire for Crown.  That is coming from a different and, to our post-feminist ear, foreign place.  I think that place has to do with a desire to be loved in a particular way – a way that feels very different from the loving that she gets from Porgy.  I think that she feels herself to have a different kind of power in her relationship with Crown – the power to excite him – the power to elicit desire.  This is, I think, a masochistic love – which is a complex and multiply determined love – and one aspect of that love can be the sense of power that the love provides.

I think that the visceral power that Bess feels in the arms of Crown is like an antidote – in much the same way that the magic dust is - to the powerlessnees of her life as a Negress (as she would have been referred to then) in the deep south in the 1920s, but also – and here I am wildly speculating – we have no backstory on Bess – as a child who did not feel loved – who did not feel herself to be part of the community that is portrayed on stage.  Here her sense of belonging and being cared for by Crown – even when he cruelly cared, feels good.  She became a member of the outcast but superior subculture of drug users, alcohol drinkers, and bar denizens – scathingly portrayed in Sportin’ Life’s song It Ain’t Necessarily so – that disdains the dominant and life giving subculture of Catfish Row that embraced a much more family oriented and deeply spiritually based approach to life. 

The last paragraph suggests a deep division between these two cultures (and within Bess), but the opera clarifies that they are deeply entangled.  Porgy is a master crap shooter.  The most upstanding men tear themselves away from their wives to go to the crap games – and probably the bars – and then they go to church on Sunday and help prepare for and enjoy the picnics.  Though the leads represent white hats and black hats, the chorus helps us see that we are all torn between wanting to lead a life of nurturance and caring, connected to those we care about, and that we also want to express our independence, as it were, from everything – church, state, and even our mortality, by grabbing onto something that will allow us to transcend the tawdriness of our everyday lives.

Bess finds with Porgy something different from that power – she finds a caring relationship (though the idea of belonging – being the property of – Porgy is still very much a part of that) and a different kind of joy – a joy that is not illusory, like the joy of the happy dust, but one that allows her to become generative.  She and Porgy take in a newly orphaned infant and become a family together – a family that gets ripped apart when Crown returns to claim his Bess – only to have Porgy and Bess unite to fight him- with Porgy killing him.  For the second time, the white law man from Charleston comes into Catfish row to root out a murderer, and Porgy is hauled off to identify the body of Crown, but he knows that if he does he that he will be found out as his murderer, so he refuses, and then he is jailed for contempt.

So Bess, once again, does not have a man.  Into this vacuum steps Sportin’ Life, still ready to snatch Bess up and now he plans to take her to New York.  He tempts her with visions of the apartment he can secure on Fifth Avenue with her on his arm, and with happy dust, which she is vulnerable to now that Porgy is not supplying the kind of love that has staved off that desire.  She sashays off with Sportin' Life to New York, leaving the infant, and Porgy, to be cared for by others.  Porgy is able to get out of jail shortly after she leaves (not in the ten years that Sportin’ Life suggested was likely) and he returns to a community that is loath to tell him that Bess has gone.  Once he finds out that she is gone to New York, he wants to hear where it is.  When he discovers it us up north, he heads out to get there, to win his Bess back.

The tragedy of the human condition that seemingly every opera portrays are the ways in which we each butt up against our own limitations in ways that are particular to each of the characters – and the characters are able to sing about their individual and collective grief at this state of affairs.  The tragic endings resonate with the audience members because we are, in fact, infinitely more complicated than any character portrayed on stage, and we have threads that connect with each of the players and we feel their individual and collective grief simultaneously and their grief resonates deeply with our grief – the grief of being human. 

Freud is an uneasy bedfellow for me in part because of his tragic view of life.  Gershwin’s tragic view is subtly and not so subtly undermining of a tragic world view while simultaneously acknowledging it.  Catfish row could not be a more tragic spot.  And yet, it is possible to enjoy Strawberries, Crabs and honey on Catfish row, and to luxuriate in the joy of summer time, when the living is, indeed, easy.  This easy living will inevitably be followed, when the water temperature rises about the air temperature, with hurricanes.  And living in Catfish row is hardly edenic – or is it?  Everyone’s life there is hard – but the strawberries! 

Bess’s external tragedy – like that of the community – is her powerlessness – as a woman and as an African American.  Her gifts include her joi de vivre, her sultry beauty, and her consequent ability to attract men, each of whom wants to take care of her in their own way.  She chooses three different paths at three different moments.  We admire her ability to overcome her “desire” to be dominated by Crown.  We admire her affectionate relationship with Porgy, but we never are quite convinced by it.  We cringe when she is seduced by Sportin’ Life, but I, at least, don’t judge her too harshly – even though I wish it were otherwise.  Her tragedy is that she is vulnerable to the illusion of power and doesn't have the strength to hold out for the real thing when the real thing isn't there to support her.

Porgy is a tragic hero who somehow gets a pass.  He is crippled.  He is a beggar.  He is the bottom rung at the bottom of the heap – but he finds love, and this makes him richer than the richest man.  He has this love pulled out from under him, but this does not cause him to despair – this opera leaves us not knowing his – or Bess’s – fate.  We fear that his quest it quixotic – but he was able to connect with Bess before – will he again?  Will Sportin’ Life’s promises pale in the neon lights of Broadway?  Will Porgy be able to find Bess?  We leave this opera not feeling the despair of the limits of life, but feeling its possibilities, without quite knowing what those might be, even when the deck is stacked against us.

Yes, our life is limited.  But within the limits of that life, we can follow a path that offers much – not just the sweetness of strawberries and honey, but of love.  It may not last – it may not protect us from all the winds that blow – but even if we are at the bottom of the heap, life can be a gift, and we live for the promise of that.

All that said, I feel a much more jaundiced taste in my mouth after writing about this opera than I did walking away from it humming Bess, You is My Woman Now.  I think that there is a divide within our culture - one that mirrors the divide in Catfish Row.  The movie industry - the dream factory - appears to be reflecting back to us what life could be like, but it is, underneath, run by a system that reinforces brute strength over nuance and appearance over substance.  We have, again, a creature of that culture at the head of our country, and I think he is portraying, in code, the forces that are present in this play - and jeering at the citizens that he is governing as objects, and avoiding engaging with them as subjects.  I think he is very much like the producers and the casting directors of the industry that he comes from - and his vision, like that of the entertainment industry generally, is suffused with the not so hidden agenda of subjugation and division while he mouths words that appeal, on the surface, to the spiritual sides of ourselves, while also, in the code, appealing to our darkest angels.  Would that his being crippled in the ways that he has been had led him to Porgy's path, but I fear that it is much more frequent that crippling factors lead us to vindictive and mean paths - paths where we look out for ourselves - and don't connect with those around us.  That is the true tragedy that lurks in the shadows of this uplifting opera.  Despite Gershwin encouraging us to hear our better angels - well, if we are Porgy and we are going off in search of a life that is better because we believe it will be that way, well, it ain't necessarily so...

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