Porgy and Bess
Feb. 28 at TPAC’s Polk Theater
After a weather-imposed one-night delay, a traveling production of Porgy and Bess arrived last Friday at TPAC’s Polk Theater. Presented by Nashville Opera Association, the performance opened a lot of eyes and ears. Listeners who knew this George and Ira Gershwin opus only through the golden oldie “Summertime” may have imagined the opera as a kind of African American South Pacific. Instead, it proved to be an updating of Tosca or Rigoletto translated into the African American Gullah dialect.
This is the only time Nashville Opera has imported a complete production—sets, actors, orchestra, everything. NOA had asked patrons what operas they would most like to see, and Porgy was high on the list. But the Gershwin estate demands that all English-speaking productions use an African American cast, making a locally mounted staging hugely costly. (The large cast requires that a significant number of actors be imported from other cities.) Instead, NOA brought in the Peter Klein production that since 1992 has been performing the world over to clamorous acclaim.
It was a good fit for the Polk, more intimate than Jackson Hall. James Fouchard’s set was a minimalist ideogram of Catfish Row, a maze of shanties where African Americans subsist beneath grand mansions. Here swarms a de facto dysfunctional family just getting by. Several narrative threads tightly interweave around the axial twist of Porgy, Bess, Crown and Sportin’ Life, each trying to stay alive in a barren soil.
The cast’s visual impact was forceful, with short obese elders, lean muscular laboring males and some uncommonly beautiful women. So too the music, marked by expressionistic worksong heterophony and a nervous tension throughout. When that tension is momentarily relieved by an arioso lullaby or love song—“Summertime,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”—the tenderness and sweetness are ironized by their context. “Summertime” opens the drama and recurs twice, its soaring affirmative loveliness sounding bitterer each time. Nothing it alleges can be witnessed on the stage.
Porgy (Brian Gibson) is an icon for the whole: His powerful arms and torso are a bit paunchy, his face rough-hewn, his strong expressive voice unvarnished. A “cripple,” he is literally always on his knees. His two rivals for Bess’ love, Crown and Sportin’ Life, are analogues as well as foils. Crown (Stephen B. Finch), with a brawny basso voice and muscular body, is crippled by violent drunken aggressiveness. Sportin’ Life (Duane Moody) is a suavely cunning predator, with a seductive serpentine tenor. In a moment of comic relief, he sings the sardonically witty “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” a song that points up the tension between the characters’ frequent expressions of religious feeling and their otherwise secular, often squalid existence.
Bess is the center all three men orbit around. It’s hard to imagine a better casting for this role than La Rose Saxion, who plays off the Marilyn Monroe archetype, revealing Bess as both charismatic and vulnerable. She is drawn to each man for a different reason: Crown gives her carnal satisfaction, Sportin’ Life feeds her cocaine addition, while Porgy showers her with love and affection.
As envisioned by the Peter Klein production, Porgy and Bess offers a grittily compelling image of a Southern black ghetto in the 1930s or, for that matter, today—one racked with poverty, drugs and violence, yet unified by a genuine sense of community. Just as black slaves metabolized Old Testament stories into fables about their own lives, this opera turns America’s racially divided society into a timeless fable about life-giving hope and love.
Even so, as consistently fantastic as this production was, the final scene, in which Porgy vows to find his wayward Bess, seemed a kind of wishful thinking postscript—pastel in contrast with the cruel vividness of the scenes that preceded it. Porgy’s hopeful response to Bess’ departure, though thematically right, felt dramatically soft-headed. Leaving the theater, deeply stirred by the drama, I kept thinking of Nashville Opera’s recent Traviata and the visionary archetypal mirror hanging at an angle above the stage—an image that drove home that opera’s theme in an undeniably powerful way. It made me wonder what NOA artistic director John Hoomes would have done if he’d undertaken Porgy and Bess himself.
