Bigger and Bessie on Nambi E. Kelley’s Stage: Adapting Native Son ’s Genre and Gender for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Bigger and Bessie on Nambi E. Kelley’s StageAdapting Native Son’s Genre and Gender for the Twenty-First Century Florian Bousquet (bio) When, in the final line of her poem “Black Art Now,”1 Nambi E. Kelley claims “I AM NOT NEW,” something about the literary lineage to which she feels indebted is revealed. As is clear from the intertextual foregrounding of their titles, Kelley’s plays are as much concerned with the African American literary tradition and the ancestors who “paved the way, kicked down doors, said what needed to be said”2 as with the present moment she inhabits. Dwelling on the adaptation process in an interview, Kelley conceived herself as being a “vessel” for the ancestors whose works or lives she remediates in stage form: “I try not to put myself on to it, just allow it and what it’s supposed to be, God, universe, spirit and those ancestors working through me, will work through me, I only have to decide what it is.”3 What the adapted or remediated work is through Kelley’s artistry is precisely what I want to interrogate in this essay, which focuses on her adaptation4 of Richard Wright’s Native Son and specifically addresses the playwriting challenges of adapting, in and for the twenty-first century, a novel problematic for its notoriously misogynistic treatment of women, Black and white. The product, I argue, is a complex experimental tragedy that answers to and negotiates the antagonistic constraints of “staying true”5 to Wright’s text while having it speak to contemporary audiences. By strategically and subversively rewriting its genre as well as the gender(ed) dynamics of the characters, Kelley participates in the revitalization of a novel, which, James Baldwin contended in 1951, “could not be written today.”6 [End Page 66] After it premiered in 2014 at Chicago’s Court Theatre in a co-production with the American Blues Theater with Seret Scott as director—the highest-grossing production in the theater’s sixty-year history—Nambi Kelley’s Native Son was performed in theaters across the United States, signaling contemporary audiences’ willingness to see this classic of African American literature on stage. Reacting to a staging of the play at the Antaeus Theatre Company in 2018 with Andi Chapman as director, artistic director Kitty Swink underlined the gender politics surrounding the novel’s dramatization, something commentators and reviewers of the play have failed to observe overall: “an adaptation by a woman, directed by a woman, of such a male world.”7 Dramatizations of Wright’s novel are not new, whether on stage or in film, but they have indeed been, until now, an exclusively male activity8 that have included Wright himself as writer of the first stage adaptation with Paul Green in 1941 and as actor playing Bigger’s part in Pierre Chenal’s 1951 film adaptation. Kelley’s play is therefore the creative product of a feminist re-reading and reshaping of Richard Wright’s novel. Cheryl Wall’s notion of “worrying the line,”9 which she borrows from Stephen Henderson, helps me consider Kelley’s refiguration as a worrying of the novel’s “lines” and its lineage. In Kelley’s adaptation, time is not linear, Bigger’s lines are redoubled by the invention of a new character who tells Bigger how he should act and perform, and Bessie’s often-criticized submissiveness is replaced by her stepping “out of (her) line(s).” However, Kelley’s “worrying” is not restricted to her source material. As we will see, Kelley’s remediation, for modern eyes, of a young Black man’s feminicides (though one is accidental, the other is not) paradoxically involves going back to earlier texts such as the unexpurgated edition of Native Son,10 W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,11 and even the tragic genre to better transport Bigger’s and the female characters’ fate into the twenty-first century. An African American Drama The remediation of a novel to stage form necessarily implies a reflection on how easily the source material lends itself to this new media and which (sub)genre...