Richard Wright opens his engrossing, traumatizing 1940 novel Native Son in a run-down one-room kitchenette. Bigger Thomas, the story’s murderous 20-year-old protagonist, lives there with his mother, brother, and sister—and a marauding rat. For Wright this cramped apartment in Chicago’s black belt, the only neighborhood where African-Americans are allowed to live, epitomized the prevailing conditions in urban black America. As he wrote the following year in 12 Million Black Voices, “The kitchenette throws desperate and unhappy people together into an unbearable closeness . . . producing warped personalities.” Personalities, Wright added, that were already “blasted with two hundred years of slavery.”
Even when things turn decidedly serious in the second half, the social world that smothers Bigger and gives the novel its crushing scope remains as indistinct as his kitchenette. For Wright, white America in a thousand insidious ways deems black men always already guilty. So when Bigger accidentally murders a young white woman—in order to avoid being falsely accused of raping her—Wright suggests, among many other things, that Bigger is performing the role white America prescribes for him. Wright asks to what extent the singularly oppressive conditions in black America help delimit Bigger’s fate.
Through 10/12: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, 2:30 and 7:30 PM Court Theatre 5535 S. Ellis 773-753-4472courttheatre.org $45-$55
