The characters in 'Porgy and Bess' are comfortable in their skins; we should be, too

CULTURE SHOCK:IMAGINE A radical new production of The Playboy of the Western World. The director decides that some of the critics of the play in 1907 were right after all. They maintained that Synge was an outsider to the rural culture he purported to depict, and ended up dealing, however brilliantly, in romantic archetypes of an exotic peasantry. Our director takes up their implicit challenge and hires a Mayo writer to revise Synge's work so that it will be more realistic and authentic.

The parallel is far from exact, but something roughly like this has happened with a work that’s as seminal to American theatre as The Playboy is to the Irish tradition: George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. For the production currently on Broadway, the director Diane Paulus brought in the acclaimed African-American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks to rewrite the original book. With strong support from Audra McDonald, who plays Bess, Parks radically revised the script with the intention of making the characters fuller, more rounded and less archetypal.

In a programme note for an earlier version of the production at the American Repertory Theater (not included in the Broadway playbill), Parks somewhat hedged her bets as to whether the original book, by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, with additional lyrics by Ira Gershwin, could be considered racist: “I’ve got love and respect for their work, but in some ways I feel it falls short in the creation of fully realised characters. Now, one could see their depiction of African-American culture as racist, or one could see it as I see it: as a problem of dramaturgy.” The implication, nonetheless, is that these two problems are in fact linked, that the failure to produce “fully realised characters” is an unconscious effect of a racist urge to create exotic stereotypes.

Paulus’s and Parks’s decision to give the characters what they see as a deeper human reality drew a stinging public rebuke from the doyen of the American musical, Stephen Sondheim. In a long letter to the New York Times he accused Paulus of showing “disdain” for an American classic and of entirely missing its point: “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 . . . 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.”

But Sondheim managed to avoid the unavoidable question: race. All the major characters in Porgy and Bess are black and its setting, Catfish Row, is an enclosed African-American ghetto in Charleston, South Carolina.

But these are blacks as imagined by whites: both the Gershwins and the Heywards looked at the characters from the privileged side of a great and viciously maintained divide: the South in 1935, when the opera was first performed, was still structured by apartheid.

It is true that, in the context of its time, Porgy and Bess was relatively respectful. Gershwin’s magnificent score is one of the high points of his fusion of African-American and classical musical traditions.

To any suggestion that he was guilty of merely exploiting black music, the best answer is Miles Davis’s thrilling 1958 recording Porgy and Bess, a landmark in the career of one of the greatest African-American artists. Gershwin certainly took a great deal from black music, but he also gave something back.

The lyrics, even when they’re in jolly, colourful mode (Summertime, I Got Plenty of Nothin’, It Ain’t Necessarily So) are witty and charming and far beyond the grotesque “happy darkies” caricatures that still prevailed.

There is real dignity in the great love songs, especially Bess, You is My Woman, Now. If the characters are drawn with big brush-strokes, they are given songs of rare vividness, poignancy and compassion.

EVEN SO, THERE is no doubt that, in the original, those characters are treated as anthropological specimens. On its premiere, the critic and composer Virgil Thomson wrote: “Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself, which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935.” This is not a clinching argument (it would apply just as well to Synge) but it is a powerful one – all the more so when race is still the great fault-line in American culture. African-Americans can speak for themselves and have a right not to be passive objects in anyone else’s gaze.

One of the great things about the theatre is that arguments like these actually get resolved: in performance. If the revisions produced a dull, politically correct version of the opera, Sondheim would be right. In fact, they provide a foundation for a passionate, engaged and deeply moving production. It really does matter that McDonald as Bess and Norm Lewis as Porgy, along with the rest of the overwhelmingly African-American cast, feel entirely at ease with the roles they have to play. Instead of being weighed down, as Sondheim feared, with a false and pedantic realism, the performances are free to soar. No violence is done to the wonderful songs by making the singers more complex and recognisably human. On the contrary, performers who are (in this case literally) comfortable in their own skin are free to inhabit the music without anxiety.

And this is the big difference between Porgy and Bess and The Playboy. No Irish actor feels demeaned by playing Synge’s characters, who were created, after all, as part of a project of Irish cultural self-assertion.

African-American performers, on the other hand, clearly have felt some anxiety about being, in Sondheim’s words, “larger than life”. Liberated from that anxiety, they can be as large as life itself.