What 'Porgy and Bess' can reveal to us in 2026
The meaning of the classic work changes with the times
Earlier this month my wife and I attended a performance of the operatic version of “Porgy and Bess” produced by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City.
(The graphic here is the cover of the Lyric Opera’s recent program.)
I remember, sort of, seeing it years ago but the deeper I got into the performance the less I remembered about that earlier performance (if any) and the more I was made open to a more 2026 meaning.
In her “Director’s Notes” in the play bulletin, Francesca Zambello wrote this: “. . .the fears and hopes of the Catfish Row community often seemed to mirror the emotions we were experiencing in real life in our rapidly changing societal landscape.”
She’s right about that, but I found something deeper and older worthy of exploration.
What I found were Black people living through and living out the many deep wounds and traumas (sometimes generational in scope) visited upon them by what they and their ancestors had experienced in the United State, beginning with slavery.
Almost every single character in the play struck me as profoundly wounded and unwell in some way — even those whose admirable strengths were being used to overcome those wounds and the sickness that white supremacy visited upon America’s culture and psyche.
Play watchers saw characters deeply embedded in a wider culture that had limited their potential and that had created social structures that kept them stuck. So they coped by gambling, by singing, by loving, by committing crimes, by dreaming impossible dreams and by doing whatever it took to survive, including relying on a one-shade religion that their slave ancestors were taught — partly as a way to keep them captive — after they were shipped to the American continent.
“Porgy and Bess” was first performed in the fall of 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, when many Americans — of any color and from any state — might have felt pinned down by social forces the same way the opera’s character’s felt those forces locking them up.
But to have this play be set in a poor and black section of Charleston, S.C., was to say something immediate and poignant before a word was spoken or a song sung because Charleston’s harbor is where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.
(This map of the Charleston Harbor area came from this site.)
Maybe it’s because I’ve been focused a lot recently on the work of the Kansas City Mayor’s Commission on Reparations that I see these connections so clearly, but it seemed obvious to me as I watched the opera that in some way each of the characters was not whole, not healthy, not feeling accepted by the larger society, no matter how much a part of the Catfish Row family he or she felt.
A similar insight eventually occurred to Mark Twain between the time he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 and the time he published the U.S. version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885.
As Ron Chernow explains in his new biography called simply Mark Twain, “If Tom Sawyer offered a sunlit view of antebellum Hannibal, in Huck Finn Twain delved into the shadows. As he dredged up memories anew, he now perceived a town embroiled in slavery. People who seemed wholesome and innocent in Tom Sawyer now conspired in a monstrous system of inequality. . .
“With Huck Finn, he gave voice to the buried portion of the population, the commoners unheard and unseen in the polite, East Coast precincts of Hartford and Boston. He would revolutionize the American novel by scrapping the omniscient, third-person narrator and allowing the unlettered Huck to tell the tale in his own voice, showing how expressive colloquial language could be.”
Similarly, in “Porgy and Bess” we also get street language from the heart of Charleston’s Black community. And it’s through that language that the audience is allowed not just to see but to share both the pain and the endless hopes — despite that ancient pain — of Porgy, Bess and others in the cast.
“In Huck Finn,” Chernow writes, “Twain wanted to show how slavery could warp an entire community, down to Huck and his father, at the bottom of the social heap.” In many ways, that’s what George Gershwin has done with “Porgy and Bess.”
And it’s a welcome and useful microscope through which to look.
All of which raises the question of whether, nearly a century after “Porgy and Bess” debuted, our society still has unhealthy, unwell people suffering the many after effects of slavery and other products of white supremacy. Of course we do. And until we fix that, we simply cannot be a whole and healthy culture or nation.
Religious freedom around the world is in trouble
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s just-released annual report comes as a necessary reminder of how many people across the globe don’t have the crucially important right to worship (or not) as they see fit.
The report begins its narrative with Nigeria, which, the commission says, “is facing a terrifying crisis of religious violence.”
Then it reminds readers that Nigeria is far from being the only problem nation: “Nigeria’s religious freedom environment is contextually unique in terms of its violent and complex perfect storm of religious, political, social and economic factors, but it is representative of the alarming persistence of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) violations that continue to plague millions of people across the globe.”
Both the commission and the U.S. Department of State issue annual reports on religious freedom around the world, and it’s well worth it to pay attention to them. For one thing, they are reminders that, on the whole, religious freedom is broad and generally well protected in the U.S., despite silly complaints that we’re not allowed to say “Merry Christmas” in public any more.
As this news story notes, India, too, gets lots of criticism for its failure to guarantee religious freedom for all its citizens.