Native Son Review

           

The play Native Son, now showing at the Court Theater, is an intriguing story about a black man named Bigger who lives in Chicago in the 1930s. Life for him is very hard, as he struggles with a new job as a servant to a wealthy white family and racism towards him and his family. He ends up accidentally killing the family’s drunken daughter and he panics. Later on the run from this crime, he ends up doing more and more bad things and is overwhelmed by everything.

I think this play really captured what it was like to be black in the 1930s, and you felt what they felt and had the same concerns and worries, even though it was just a play. Bigger did a great job of portraying these emotions and reacted to his situations realistically. But he also had big aspirations in life, but his friends only shot him down because there was no way “a black man” could do anything besides provide for the white. These stereotypes influenced everyone in this era, and nobody really questioned it much, they just kind of accepted it as the normal way of life.

Part of the reason Bigger killed the girl, was because he didn’t wanna be caught with a white girl, he knew he would be fired and even killed. These stereotypes were incredibly influential to Bigger’s behavior and scared him, which was a reoccurring theme in the play. I think this was a persuasive play in the terms of racism and how African Americans were affected in the US, and the great acting made it even more believable and impressive.