The 4,000 attendees of the Metropolitan Opera's latest production completely ignored the tragic romance at the center of the Gershwin masterpiece, opting instead to weep openly at the profound, devastating grace with which a 59-year-old mezzo-soprano handled a prop cleaver in the background of Catfish Row.
When the curtain rose for the closing matinee of "Porgy and Bess" in January, the boos that typically accompany the entrance of the show’s villains were reduced to a mere, pathetic murmur; they were drowned out entirely by an infantile, rapturous adoration for a supporting character simply standing near a barrel. The audience, largely comprised of upper-crust Philistines who would likely struggle to distinguish a diminished seventh chord from a pothole on the West Side Highway, stood on their feet for three and a half hours, not out of reverence for the sweeping score, but solely due to the sheer gravitational pull of Denyce Graves merely existing in the periphery. Thirty-one years after her debut as "Carmen", the mezzo-soprano has returned to the Met to play Maria, the matriarch of the working-class settlement, and in doing so, has completely obliterated the narrative arc of the primary cast through the sheer, terrifying force of her posture.
It is a phenomenon one rarely sees outside the dying embers of true high art. To witness Graves wipe down a stage-prop wooden counter is to be inexorably thrust into the suffocating existential despair of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther"; her wrist movements possess the same chilling, spectral minimalism of Zeami Motokiyo’s 15th-century Noh drama "Atsumori", though, frankly, the crowd’s feral, hooting response to her entrance bore a far more depressing, sociological resemblance to the fan-cam hysteria surrounding the 2001 DreamWorks animated film "Shrek". The tragedy of "Porgy and Bess" was entirely lost, eclipsed by the far greater tragedy of an audience too simple to realize they were witnessing the total subjugation of the American theater by a woman who scarcely needed to project her voice to render the surrounding tenor functionally obsolete.
It is a profound tragedy of the modern era that we have reduced a mezzo-soprano of her titanic, world-historical consequence to a mere vessel for nostalgic shrieking; though I suppose one must admit she chops that prop catfish with the brutal, unrelenting existential dread of a young Callas.
Graves, for her part, seems acutely aware that she is a diva in the original, operatic sense—a world-renowned performer whose name alone is enough to draw crowds, and who now wields that power to quietly humiliate her younger colleagues simply by out-acting them while ostensibly scrubbing a pan. The 175 standing-room ticket holders who packed the capacity space were not observing a narrative about a disabled beggar and his lover; they were participating in a grim, collective acknowledgment that a true master requires only a damp rag and three lines of dialogue to remind everyone else in the room that they are entirely disposable.