I said in my Porgy essay that I believe a closed, fixed, realistic setting for the Catfish Row courtyard is preferable to the more open, mobile, and semi-abstract kind created by Michael Yeargan for the ENO/Met production, because I think it conditions the action more effectively. It forces the life of the community into the space and holds it there, as in real life, and compels the director to sequence the daily activities, the comings and goings that would naturally occur in the courtyard. Many stages are cramped in one or more dimensions to convincingly present this, but that is certainly not the case with the Met or any other major opera house. Whereas the first scene of the opera showed us Catfish Row in the evening, after the end of the work day, when the men drink and shoot craps and the women sing lullabies, in Act 2, Scene 1 it’s early morning, the start of the work day. Jake and the other fishermen sing their rowing song as they mend net, Maria has her table set up, the other families pursue their domestic chores and prepare for the parade and departure for the picnic. The more this life is established in detail, and the singing of a song as a natural part of it, the more plausible it will seem for Porgy (at his window, according to the script), to sing his smash hit banjo song, with Maria, Serena, and the others (a highly individuated chorus) commenting on the change that’s come over him.

Now follows a highly problematic sequence. It comprises Maria’s “I Hates Yo’ Struttin’ Style”; the scene with Frazier, peddling his divorce scam; the one with Archdale, which pursues a flavorsome subplot concerning Peter, the Honey Man; and the Buzzard Song. In the Met production, Frazier is retained, but Archdale and the Buzzard Song are omitted. Given the objectives outlined above, what might be the most rewarding treatment of this troublesome stretch? And why troublesome? Artistically, because it gives rise, at some length, to the uneasy relationship between the spoken and the sung, in pursuit of genre scenes not essential to the spine of the opera. Sociopolitically, because it depicts the nobility-deficient aspects of life on Catfish Row: Sportin’ Life with his happy dust, a shady black “lawyer” with extremely gullible  clients, a magnanimous white man, and a prevailing superstition about a scary bird. The best artistic decisions are not necessarily the easiest sociopolitical ones, especially in a climate that holds the latter more important than the former. Here, on paper (as it were), we are free to privilege the artistic side.

As I indicated last time out, I don’t think Maria’s song is successful. It lands us smack in the middle of the speaking/singing dilemma, and only exacerbates it. I think it’s the weakest “song” in the show. Sometimes, though, it can be wise to retain a weak number if it serves a dramatic need. That’s not the case here. Maria, a secondary character, does have a dramatic function, along with Serena, as antagonist to Sportin’ Life and upholder of community decency. But that’s well established without the song, which only elaborates on it while giving Maria her own applause-seeking struttin’ style. So we cut from the end of the little confrontation (Maria picking up her knife and saying “Frien’ wid you low-life, hell, no!”) directly to ‘”I sooner cuts mah own throat ‘fore I calls you a frien’ of mine’ (Sportin’ Life runs off).“