The Intiman Theatre tackles "Native Son," the classic novel of race and rage

"The birth of Bigger Thomas goes back to my childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them, more than I could count and more than you suspect."

— Richard Wright, "How Bigger Was Born"

Few figures in American literature command as much attention, and trigger as much alarm, as Bigger Thomas.

The protagonist in Richard Wright's incendiary novel "Native Son," Bigger is urban, male, scared, angry and African American.

We meet this so-called "brute Negro" when he leaves the confines of his tough Chicago ghetto for the first time and enters an entirely unfamiliar world of white privilege. Soon after, he brutally kills two young women and becomes, in short, the all-American nightmare.

But Bigger is a complex figure, with a Lazarus-like longevity. He emerged full-blown in 1940, when "Native Son" was first published and became a best seller. Since then, he has been totemized, dissected, deconstructed, repudiated, embraced.

Bigger also has been dramatized a few times, though not memorably. Now Intiman Theatre is taking a crack at bringing him to three-dimensional life in a new stage version of "Native Son."

Director-adapter Kent Gash observes that in a time when the high-school dropout and incarceration rates for young, black inner-city males are rising, Bigger's story remains "sadly, alarmingly contemporary."

And he talks of wanting to capture the essence of a work that boldly looks at the intersecting forces of race, class and violence in America — sticky subjects to address, even now.

It is no accident, for example, that one unconscious agent of Bigger's destructiveness is not a raving white Southern bigot but the progressive daughter of a rich, liberal Chicago clan.

Says award-winning Seattle novelist and UW professor Charles Johnson, "When the book first came out, it caught the attention of white readers who thought, 'Is this what black people really feel about us?' Before that, you had only happy blacks on stage, happy slaves, maids and porters. 'Native Son' just said a huge 'No!' to all that."

Another inspiration for staging Wright's book is, simply put, that it's a gripping page-turner that lands you in Bigger's scuffed, worn-down shoes from Page 1.

As a reader, you witness his dead-end poverty up close. You feel his terror, entering the alien milieu of the Dalton clan, who hire him as a driver. You share his deep discomfort, when young Mary Dalton treats him with a familiarity and respect that's well-meant but also patronizing and perplexing to him.

In vivid scenes that bring to mind Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" and Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," you are also privy to the horror, exhilaration and suspense of Bigger's acts of violence, and his frantic flight from the law.

Far less engrossing, but intriguing historically, is the novel's last section: an account of Bigger's murder trial, and his lawyer's rhetorical Marxist analysis of the social forces that molded him.

Wright's journey

One cannot peruse "Native Son" today without marveling at its unsparing candor circa 1940. At the time, lynchings of black men in the South still occurred, and systemic racial inequality persisted throughout the country.

In his essay "How Bigger Was Born," Wright wrote that as a grandson of black slaves he knew many Biggers in his native Mississippi, and in Chicago, where he later lived.

Like Bigger, Wright had to drop out of school to work. But unlike him, he read voraciously, began to write and immersed himself in politics.

After moving to Chicago in the 1920s, Wright joined the Communist Party, believing (as did many other artists at the time) that Marxist socialism could help African Americans achieve equality. (Years later, disillusioned, he left the party.)

By the late 1930s, Wright had published well-received short stories, essays and a novel, "Uncle Tom's Children." But it was "Native Son" (followed by a fine memoir, "Black Boy") that established him as a major American writer.

According to Wright, his goal in "Native Son" was to depict an unschooled, underclass protagonist who would tragically claim his identity through violence, and "loom as a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within him the prophecy of our future."

Despite its graphic violence, harsh naturalism and empathy for a murderer, the book sold 250,000 copies in hardcover. It also drew criticism from some black intellectuals (including James Baldwin), who viewed Bigger as a dangerous stereotype, and the book as a didactic, melodramatic tract.

Wright died at age 52, in 1960. But Johnson says it took until the black power movement, a decade later, for this "electrifying" novel to be reassessed. Today, Johnson states, Wright is "regarded as the father of modern African-American fiction. He's a towering figure, a genius."

Johnson has participated in citywide readings and discussions of "Native Son" sponsored by Intiman, including one event held at his daughter's Faire Cafe on Capitol Hill. He's been struck by the passionate response to the novel.

"It's a book we have to touch bases with as a culture, and it gets people thinking," he suggests. "It also opens up to those who are not aware of it, the extraordinary complexity of race and class in America. We need to talk about that, even though it's difficult."

A dramatic curse?

A new, restored edition of "Native Son" (with material excised from the 1940 text) is also raising the book's profile.

One wonders, though, if there's a curse on dramatizations of "Native Son." The 1941 Broadway play based on the novel, co-written by Wright and Paul Green, is choppy, dated and rarely performed. A now-obscure, low-budget 1951 film of it, starring Wright as Bigger, was botched in the editing room.

And a tepid 1986 movie version toned down the book by omitting Bigger's second murder (of a black character) to Johnson's dismay. "Wright put it there for a reason, and you have to be true to his story," he says. "[The majority] of black crimes are committed against other black people. That's an uncomfortable reality, but there it is."

Intiman's version, part of its American Cycle of literary classics, has also had a bumpy ride. Due to a flap over the stage rights, Seattle playwright Cheryl Wright withdrew her adaptation, and Gash assembled a new script in a few weeks. (See accompanying story.)

Such haste in adapting a literary classic is clearly risky, but Intiman artistic director Bartlett Sher said he considers "Native Son" too important and timely a project to abandon.

Though Johnson sees parallels between Bigger's world and today's "prison-based male culture," which romanticizes violence and sexism through gangsta rap and other means, he also wonders if rap might have saved Bigger. "If he had come up in the late 1980s and early '90s, he might have found his way into rap," suggests the novelist. "He might have found a constructive outlet, and not had to kill."

Gash knows that making Bigger compelling without excusing his crimes is a tricky order. "The challenges in telling a story like this are in trying not to mute what is potentially unlikable or offensive about him," says the Atlanta-based, African-American director.

"Wright doesn't tell us what to think about Bigger — he simply presents who he is. But somehow the book connects to the deepest, most primal things we all feel [about] finding our authentic selves — and what happens when the world is not welcoming who you are."

Gash hopes many teens see the show, and discuss it later. "If we don't want any more Bigger Thomases filling up our jails," he observes, "we'd better wake up and really look at him."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com