[See our review of Porgy and Bess here.]
“What struck me very strongly is that it’s a well-made play,” says Chris Alexander, stage director for the upcoming Porgy and Bess for Seattle Opera (at McCaw Hall from July 30 to August 20; tickets $25-$241: 206-389-7676). Alexander saw the opera live for the first time in Dayton, Ohio, last year.
He has been working with theater all his adult life. “Coming from stage theater, it’s like a home game to direct Porgy. It’s remarkable how much of the original well-made play (by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward) is here,” he says.
Alexander has returned to Seattle for his twelfth stint as stage director in the past eleven years, beginning with Boris Godunov in 2000, and including such highlights as The Tales of Hoffman, Don Giovanni, Electra, and the recent Magic Flute.
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is different. Alexander says he is learning as much from the cast as it is learning from him. Porgy and Bess is set in a poor black enclave of 1920s Charleston, South Carolina, called Catfish Row. Gershwin requested, was adamant, that the entire cast of Porgy be African-American, bar two small speaking parts. Alexander has never directed the opera before, but virtually all of the principals have performed it at least several times.
“It’s a collaboration. I give them input from the standpoint of putting on a well-made play. They have to teach me about their rituals, at church, burials, a parade. They say: I think they’d behave like this. I ask: What’s the wailing all about? How individual is it? How long does it go on? How do bodies sway? I’m playing it by ear.”
He is grateful and pleased that the cast is as eager to hear his directions as he is to get their feedback.
Alexander has respect and admiration for the experienced group of singers general director Speight Jenkins has brought in for this opera, which opens for eight performances Saturday, July 30, at McCaw Hall. He’s also thrilled by the chorus. So many of the songs from Porgy are familiar to almost everybody, whether their backgrounds are in classical music, jazz, pop, gospel, even rap.
Seattle Opera’s regular chorus has been mostly white. For this opera, it went into the community to find an all-black chorus. Auditions, last November, brought in a group which amazed chorus master Beth Kirchhoff and assistant conductor Philip Kelsey both with its youth and its talent.
Some have come from local choruses, some have worked in theater, at least one was a child supernumary in a production of the opera. Although Porgy has been seen here twice in the past 20 years, both times they were touring productions: This is the first time Seattle Opera has mounted it.
“I gave every inhabitant of Catfish Row an occupation, a family and a name. They all have identities,” says Alexander. “The way they found out is when they went for costume fittings, before I got here. For instance, Mice is older and blind. He is led around by News, who always carries a newspaper. Mice is frightened in the hurricane, holding onto News. The chorus was fascinated; they weren’t just singing bodies on stage.”
Heyward wrote the dialect in Gullah, a local patois native to an island off Charleston, South Carolina. It’s a speech which has pretty well gone by the wayside now, and the singers each, as do we all, have variants in our speech according to where we were raised. Seattle Opera has brought in a dialect coach, Judith Shahn of the University of Washington, to help make sure everyone is on the same page.
”Judy made everyone aware of how certain vowels and consonants differ in the black south and the black north, and the ensemble is listening to her,” says Alexander.”What we are trying to do is to see that the sounds of vowels in the ensemble are together but the challenge is to get the words across to the audience so they don’t necessarily need to look at the supertitles.”
Working with Lisa Daltirus as Bess and Gordon Hawkins as Porgy, veterans in these roles, Alexander’s challenge has been to give them a fresh view. He is seeing the opera through a different set of eyes which looks for new layers of depth to their characterizations.
Bess, to Alexander, is a troubled woman with a difficult background. “She is addicted to a dominant male and sexual submission and hates herself for it. She tries to rise out of it, with Porgy, battling her own personality, but when she is tempted, she loses the battle. It’s tragic. My feeling for her is one of compassion, and I wish she had more backbone.”
Porgy’s story–in Hawkins’ and Alexander’s minds–is that of a stevedore who was disabled in a terrible accident, lost his job, turned to begging, now embittered. “Gordon plays him as a grumpy beggar at the start, marked by his own fate. What makes the difference is this encounter with Bess. When she comes into his life, Porgy changes.”
Alexander has both of them playing their own ages, not meeting in the first stage of life. “This opera has nothing to do with age.”
Alexander, who though American-born grew up in Germany where his parents were opera singers, had never been to the South until last month. He went to a wedding, and then from there to Charleston for 48 hours, as he says, to sniff the air, have conversations with people there, trying to get an understanding of the comunity. He found the original for Catfish Row, called Cabbage Row, though it’s very different now from 70 years ago.
“I think Porgy and Bess is about a community, and having these characters presented so lovingly to the audience, that is how DuBose Heyward wanted it to be.”