Native Son is the first important work of both black American literature and black American philosophy. The first part of the book, the narrative (about a black man who accidentally kills a white woman), is the ground of literature; the second part, the exposition (about all black men and the fate of America), is the ground of philosophy. The narrative is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (it is structurally identical to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"); the philosophy is inspired by The Communist Manifesto.
The year after the book was published in 1940, it appeared as a Broadway play directed by Orson Welles, who had just completed shooting Citizen Kane. The play, adapted by John Houseman from the novel by Richard Wright, was a spectacular success and made Canada Lee an instant (though short-lived) star. Native Son not only gave black America its first serious novel and work of philosophy, it also gave the stage Bigger Thomas, its first serious black American role.
Welles and Houseman understood that the three essentials that make Native Son a powerful novel—Bigger's animalism, the urgency of the plot, the defense attorney's plea for Bigger's life—are precisely the essentials that make a powerful play. Oprah Winfrey's 1986 film version failed utterly because all three of the essentials were absent; Intiman's Native Son totally succeeds because all are present.
The first and biggest decision that confronts any production of Native Son is about Bigger—how to play him? The right Bigger must be on the verge of explosion. A single word, the slightest movement—a leaf falling on a land mine—is enough to detonate him. Bigger not only makes whites uncomfortable but also blacks, who would prefer to see a positive image of a black man. It is no accident on Wright's part that Bigger stuffs his dead girlfriend up an elevator shaft; it is a direct reference to the "Ourang-Outang" that stuffs a dead body of a young woman up a chimney shaft in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Bigger is an animal who discovers his humanity only at the very end, just before he is executed.
Ato Essandoh as Bigger is the right choice. He has a disturbing laugh, far from happy or jovial. When a man laughs like that—all gums and teeth—you don't want to laugh with him, but run away. The director, Kent Gash, emphasizes Bigger's inhumanity (it's hard to tell whether the other characters are calling him "Bigger" or "nigger"), the color of his skin (which is very black), and his raw physicality—a body that invades white space in much the same way the rat invades the black space of Bigger's one-room slum apartment.
Like Welles, Gash runs the entire play without a break. This, the second important decision, not only gives the play the heat of urgency, but knocks it out of the safety of historical distance and gives its problems, its dangers, its suffering characters the force of the present. It isn't that we recognize the racial problems of yesterday as the racial problems of today (a weak and unrewarding recognition since American racism has changed considerably), but that economic oppression is real, its consequences are real, and its effects are constant. Bigger, as an individual, disappears, but the system of exploitation remains.
The third important decision is to give space and weight to the defense made by Max (Richard Kline), Bigger's Jewish-American lawyer. If the first part of Native Son concerns the "green" of action (to use an expression by Goethe), the second part concerns the "gray in gray" of philosophy. Max is the Owl of Minerva, the thinker who takes flight after the event is completed. The play gives a good 10 minutes to the lawyer's defense, which articulates Bigger's particular crimes into an institutionalized system of violence and repression.
But Gash does not stop there: Max, the Jewish-American lawyer, has a German accent. This is important because at the time that the novel was written, 1938 to 1939, Germany had begun what would become the Holocaust. Max's defense is not just about the black American condition but also the human condition. What this society has done to Bigger, it can do to any man. That is the final message—to truncate this speech aggressively is to dilute the humanity of the play and the philosophy that has its essence in humanism.
