The Detective’s scenes come at crucial plot points. They are important. Still, it’s a short role,  and as such, like a number of others in the opera, susceptible to lazy convention. There is no way, however, that one can take in the words, music, and dramatic functions of any of the more prominent characters and label them stereotypes. They’re fleshed-out, living people. Nonetheless, they have been vulnerable to attack from the not-good-for-African-Americans p.o.v., which from its more extreme angles objects to the very presence of unpleasant or even morally conflicted characters. It’s tantamount to saying you can’t represent black people, disadvantaged people, poor people, unless it’s to ennoble them, as in a patriotic pageant or on a valorizing mural. That’s not a valid artistic principle.

5. The Community and the Characters. Of all the operas that approach canonical status, I can think of only two others—both 20th-Century operas set among working people, one avant la lettre and the other après where Porgy‘s concerned—in which the relationship of the principal characters and the onstage community is so central to the work. One is Charpentier’s Louise, with its scenes in the working-class home, the workplace, and the streets, its calls of the vendors (strikingly similar), and its issues of belonging; and the other is Britten’s Peter Grimes, set in a close-knit town of fisherfolk, with the sea as constant presence and threat, and with community acceptance (or not) as fate. It is worth noting, though, that this representation of the individual in the community, with major choral numbers and choral backup of solos, is an almost constant feature of the American musical.

Catfish Row is a community of hardworking, God-fearing folk. It is racially segregated from the wealth and elegance of white Charleston, with memory of the slave culture fresh. Its men fish or vend; its women raise the babies, hold the homes together, and try to enforce the proprieties. It’s a tough life for all, and community togetherness is of utmost importance.  Porgy cannot fish or vend, so in addition to being a cripple, he is a beggar, though we never see him beg. He has no life companion, for as he tells us in lines whose beautiful setting draws us to him from the beginning, “When Gawd make cripple, He mean him to be lonely.” So he is in many ways at once an outsider and a dependent. Yet he is fully embraced by the community,  has full dignity and, indeed, is beloved within it. He has a home, minimal as it may be. He even has stature, as his first entrance and its musical theme, one of stability and optimism, with a suggestion of command, establishes. He exudes goodness.

Bess exudes something else. She is a highly sexualized woman who lives by exploiting her allure, and she struggles with a drug problem. She’s a disturbance to the community. Fortunately, she has a protector.^(I) That is Crown, a violent and defiant stevedore, and one of our two antagonists. Bess has been with Crown for five years, on and off, and despite his abuse and disloyalty she always returns to him, and not only for protection and maintenance—there’s a erotic pull that she finds irresistible. As we discover, though, Bess also has in her a longing for “un serio amore,” for going clean, and for acceptance by the community. With Porgy, she briefly grasps all that and fights for it, too. But faced with the insecurity of his absence, she loses the battle. It was this weakness, this tragic flaw (so it’s not chemistry, after all?) that led Diane Paulus and Susan Lori Parks, substituting their perceptions for the creators’ in now-all-too-familiar fashion, to perpetrate their travesty of a few seasons back.