Native Son - Richard Wright

For my review I read the play Native Son written by Richard Wright and Paul Green that was based on and published one year after Wrights original novel. This struck me as odd because although the story is the same there are some major differences in characters. I read the novel Native Son in High school so when I saw that there was a play i just scanned through it refreshing myself on the story; instead I realized that this play was in fact a new interpretation of the novel and I decided to examine it more deeply.
Although the play itself is shorter than the novel it offers something that the novel does not, stage direction. The play focuses on Bigger Thomas and his actions, when Bigger kills Mary Dalton, or even his girlfriend Clara (who is called Bessie in the novel) the stage direction sets up the image of what happened clearly. The stage direction describes the action of Bigger himself so that the reader gets a clear image of how that character is reacting to the situation. I think that this is different in the novel, you can get into Bigger's head but it is harder to imagine how he is physically reacting to the world around him, which is important to the story.
I think that the play also drives home the lifestyle that people who live in the ghettos of major cities live through every day. at the end of the play when Bigger Thomas is on trial for the murder of Mary Dalton his lawyer Max admits that Bigger may be responsible for the murder of Mary Dalton but he was also not responsible because of the way he grew up. Max blames everyone, white or black, for the death of Mary Dalton because they allowed places like the ghetto to exist and don't do anything to improve the lives of the the people who live there, like Bigger. I think that Wright is trying to clearly describe the social condition that he hinted at in his novel.
I also think there was one more theme in this play that wright was trying to highlight because it was not as clear in the novel. that is why Bigger killed Mary and Clara. I don't mean why he killed them in the sense of his reasons at the moment they actually died, because both were accidents but i mean the big why, why he was there. Bigger wanted to be free, he was trapped in the ghetto and desperately wanted out. All through the play Bigger and his friends were constantly talking about airplanes, and flying away to some exotic destination. they wanted to get as far away from their situation in life as they could. much like Paul Laurence Dunbar's caged bird or even the folktales ad spirituals of slaves that we have read in class Bigger wanted to escape the cage of the ghetto and fly as far away into freedom that he could. he saw his job with the Dalton's as a way to escape, when the risk of being caught in Mary's bedroom in the middle of the night was imminent he ended up killing Mary. when he was running from the police and Clara was in the way of the police's bullets she too died. both women died as a result of bigger trying to free himself from his cage, which is what Max's main argument was to the judge.