Message of ‘Porgy and Bess’ still relevant

Friday, Feb. 1, 2002 | 9:31 a.m.

When: 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday.

Where: Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts.

Tickets: $35, $55, $75.

Information: 785-5000.

More than 1,000 times Brian Gibson has played a crippled beggar on his knees, in love with a woman addicted to "happy dust."

Each time he's endured the hope and heartaches of a character whose life appears to be only working against him.

Gibson is the emotionally invincible and ever-saintly Porgy in the touring production of George Gershwin's American opera "Porgy and Bess."

The New York company Living Arts Inc. brings the production to the Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts Saturday for two performances.

The production has been on the road nationally and internationally since 1992, interchanging its principal characters. Gibson, who first played Porgy nearly 30 years ago, joined the Living Arts Inc. production nine years ago.

Though his resume includes performances in Puccini's "Tosca" and Verdi's "Aida" and "Rigoletto," as well as the Shakespeare tragedy "Romeo and Juliet," the role of Porgy, Gibson said, is by far one of his favorites.

"He has such inner courage and power of change," Gibson, 54, said of Porgy. "He never gives up. He never says, 'It is too late, there is nothing else I can do.'

"He is a totally honorable man with a great warmth, wisdom, love and compassion."

Gibson added with a hearty laugh, "He's my best friend."

Based on the Dubose Heyward novel and play "Porgy," the opera follows the love story of Porgy and Bess and the community of Catfish Row, an impoverished housing tenement on the Charleston, S.C., waterfront in the 1920s.

After witnessing a murder during a dice game, Porgy takes in Bess (played by Jerris Cates), the troubled girlfriend of the murderer.

Despite strong opposition from the community the two fall in love only to face an uncertain future when the murderer returns to town looking for Bess.

"Porgy and Bess" was written by Gershwin and premiered in 1935. At the time it brought new elements to opera -- jazz, spirituality, superstition and drugs -- while creating controversy over the way it portrayed a black community.

Dubose was a white Southerner and Gershwin and his brother, Ira, who also worked on the opera, were Jewish New Yorkers.

Today audiences are still divided over whether the story is a condescending and stereotypical portrayal of blacks, or a great love story and accurate reflection of the Gullah culture (n community that retained much of its African culture on the isolated Sea Islands of South Carolina) living in difficult times.

"Some people in the African-American community are shocked (by the opera) because they don't want to relive unpleasant memories," Gibson said. "To think that it is somehow demeaning or condescending is not really accurate. It shows how things used to be, not how things are now. We lived in a totally different world then."

The story's messages, however, are still relevant, he said.

"It shows the innermost workings of a real community of people and how they interact to everything that comes their way," Gibson said. "It's really no different than what people experience in 2002.

"People will find something in this that they can translate over into their own individual lives.""