June 14--Seventy-five years ago, Richard Wright published a novel portraying the Black Belt on the city's South Side as a kind of prison, its residents trapped amid poverty, violence, death and despair.
Today, each weekend's tally of those killed by gunfire in Chicago suggests that Wright's words in "Native Son" were not only accurate but prescient. For as much as Chicago and the rest of America have changed since 1940, so much remains the same.
Which is why Chicago composer-drummer Dana Hall has created an evening-length, multimedia opus inspired by "Native Son," the work receiving its world premiere Friday night at Symphony Center. Its title is "a mouthful," Hall concedes, but it gives you an idea of Hall's perspective: "The Hypocrisy of Justice: Sights and Sounds from the Black Metropolis (Riffin' and Signifyin(g) on Richard Wright's 'Native Son')."
By joining forces with visual artist Kerry James Marshall and Marshall's wife, writer-actor Cheryl Lynn Bruce, and enlisting the services of the eminent actor Wendell Pierce ("The Wire," "Treme"), Hall has conceived a re-examination of Wright's world and an investigation of ours. Moreover, he will tell the story through a musical language forged in significant measure on the South Side of Chicago: jazz.
"The Hypocrisy of Justice," commissioned by Symphony Center, comes after another important jazz work that had its world premiere there last year, Jason Moran's "Looks of a Lot," which dealt with Chicago's street violence. Hall attended that performance, another Symphony Center commission, and took into account its message.
As Hall watched Moran and the Kenwood Academy Jazz Band perform "Looks of a Lot," "I thought about what could I do in my presentation that would add to what we're seeing here," Hall recalls. "They're different works, different players. But how can I -- what do I need to do to explore the ideas that I want to explore in my own work that would add to what I'm seeing?"
It's not coincidental that so many large-scale jazz works have taken on searing social issues, for the music is inextricably bound up with American and African-American histories. Major statements such as Wynton Marsalis' "Blood on the Fields" (1994) and Max Roach and Chicagoan Oscar Brown Jr.'s "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite" (1960) unflinchingly have addressed America's tragic racial past.
At the heart of Hall's effort, which has been a year-and-a-half in the making, stands "Native Son," a novel that poses many quandaries. For starters, its protagonist might be viewed as an unredeemed, unredeemable sociopath. Bigger Thomas commits murder twice, and lesser crimes more often, provoking a media frenzy and urban panic by the heinous way he disposes of the body of his rich, young, beautiful white victim.
And yet Wright has positioned this troubling character as the logical, if extreme, outcome of dire oppression of a people. How are we, the readers, to identify or sympathize with such a person? In effect, Wright in "Native Son" challenges Chicago, and the rest of America, to face up to the consequences of the social strictures and historic racism that produced Bigger Thomas.
The book is tough to read, Thomas' actions are impossible to accept, and yet the circumstances of his awful life -- many of which prevail today -- are inarguable. Hall and his collaborators all have struggled, and continue to struggle, with this paradox.
"I started to read that book in 1986, as I sat in my dorm room at Iowa State University," recalls Hall, director of jazz studies at DePaul University and a nationally admired percussionist-educator.
"I read with the sense of: Why does the character Bigger Thomas have to be a victim? Why are his actions reconciled ... to the ways in which he might feel victimized as a society member?
"I guess I had a stance as: Is this really applicable? Is this real? ... I just looked at is as: Bigger Thomas is this victim who makes poor choices, and those choices are born out of the ways that society treats him. And that can't be the whole story."
Bruce, who has penned the text for "The Hypocrisy of Justice," similarly grappled with Wright's portrait of the protagonist when she first read the book decades ago.
"I could not understand why Bigger behaved the way he did," Bruce says. "He seemed unlikable and unlovable."
But the passage of time enabled both Bruce and Hall to see something deeper in "Native Son." For Hall, who estimates he has read the book nearly a dozen times, personal experience helped him realize there was more to the novel than simply the story of an impoverished young man striking out hysterically against his world.
"You have conversations at the dinner table with family, you have discussions with your peers and you start to read the newspaper," says Hall, in tracing how his relationship to the book developed. "And you also begin to have different experiences that might mirror or echo experiences in the novel. So all those things happened for me.
"I experienced, in a way that was eye-opening, some sort of discrimination. I experienced environments where you felt like you were around people that were better off than I imagined people could be," adds Hall, voicing a sentiment Bigger Thomas' often expresses.
"So I guess the way I'm viewing the novel now is in these layers: I see issues of race, class, religion, politics -- this invisibleness" of people like Thomas, says Hall, referencing Ralph Ellison's landmark "Invisible Man."
Ellison, says Hall, "wouldn't have been able to write 'Invisible Man' had he not been exposed to 'Native Son,' even if he was critical of it at first."
Writer Bruce, too, came to see the anti-hero of "Native Son" in human terms that once had eluded her.
"I think it was a combination of living and learning and having experienced (events) myself that allowed me to more deeply understand how a Bigger could become what he did," says Bruce, who re-immersed herself in the book to prepare for this project. "He may behave in ways we assume, we think, we hope we would not. But it seemed more fathomable, his actions, this go-round. I couldn't condone them, but I could not condemn them as easily as I had in the past. And I think it's because I lived more, and I was more open this time to hearing Bigger's side. ...
"I was more conscious of the way Richard Wright allows the reader to, I guess, run alongside Bigger's brain, and not judge."
You don't have to approve of Thomas' horrible actions, in other words, to acknowledge the circumstances that made them possible.
As Thomas' defense lawyer argues in the book: "Consider, Your Honor, the peculiar position of this boy. He comes of a people who have lived under queer conditions of life, conditions thrust outside the normal circle of our civilization. But even in living outside of our lives, he has not had a full life of his own. We have seen to that. It was convenient to keep him close to us; it was nice and cheap. We told him what to do; where to live; how much schooling he could get; where he could eat; where and what kind of work he could do. We marked up the earth and said, 'Stay there!'"
The question, though, was how Hall and his colleagues would transform their increased empathy for "Native Son" into a work for the stage. How do you take a novel so brooding, provocative and notorious and make something new from it?
Hall's approach was to avoid anything resembling opera or anything else suggesting a dramatization of "Native Son," he says. The book certainly has had plenty of those, including film versions starring Oprah Winfrey and Matt Dillon (1986), author Wright himself (1951) and various stage adaptations, including one last year at Court Theatre.
Hall has taken a different path, as his expansive title suggests, the musician riffing on a text of already searing dramatic power.
Thus his jazz quintet will be at the center of the action, music driving the progress of the piece. Actor Pierce will deliver the narrative, which writer Bruce says references some of Wright's language.
And visual artist Marshall has created a set that is "like a maze, a labyrinth, in which you can get lost," he says. At the same time, "it's a structure that contains. So it can be both a place of confinement, and it could be, in domestic terms, a space of security. ... The band sort of occupies some of those spaces. ...
"There's a large, monolithic wall, a kind of backdrop, which sort of suggests some of the difficulties of breaking through and penetrating those spaces." Presumably that's a metaphor for the world in which Bigger Thomas finds himself cornered.
Marshall hastens to add, however, that his own evolution of thought on "Native Son" has led him to feel hope where he once saw futility. He finds himself "having to come to terms with the reality that, on some level, in every situation, you have more choices than you think you do."
"One of the problems with the book is that Bigger Thomas' character seems to have few choices, that everything seems to be over-determined. So once he gets on a kind of trajectory, it all goes downhill. I can't read that as reality so much now because I know better. ... We still have to recognize that, of course, everything is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface. And even in these situations, choices got made."
All the creators of the new work see links between "Native Son" and protests that have erupted across the country in the aftermaths of the killings of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and others. Hence the first four words of the title to Hall's piece.
"The hypocrisy of justice is a central idea in Wright's 'Native Son,'" writes Hall in an email. "The serious inequality of our American judiciary remains, as it was in the novel's 1930s Chicago setting, a sad and ongoing issue. Whether we look at the penal system and the number of black and brown people incarcerated for long, sometimes life terms (particularly for nonviolent crimes); the repeated incidents of police brutality and overreach, especially of note here in Chicago (i.e. Jon Burge, recent photos of former officers with a black suspect in antlers, etc.); ... I could go on. Our system has a very serious problem. It did in the 1930s. It still does."
But none of the artists behind "The Hypocrisy of Justice" wanted the work to "just collapse into total despair," says visual artist Marshall.
Adds Hall: "We didn't want to position the work as this bleak story that doesn't have any sunlight and also leaves people just leaving (the concert hall) and not feeling some sort of call to action."
Exactly how they will attempt to achieve this delicate balance between a sober look at the truth and a ray of hope for the future won't be known until Friday night.
But if Hall and friends can capture the fear that drives both Bigger Thomas and those out to kill him, if "The Hypocrisy of Justice" can evoke humanity's apparently ingrained desire to destroy those who are different -- or, as Hall puts it, our "desire to wipe out the other" -- then the new piece will have catapulted Wright's themes into 21st century art.
They've never been more timely.
"The Hypocrisy of Justice: Sights and Sounds From the Black Metropolis (Riffin' and Signifyin(g) on Richard Wright's 'Native Son')" premieres 8 p.m. Friday at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; $24-$54 at 312-294-3000 or http://www.cso.org.
Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@tribpub.com
