Porgy and Bess Program [pdf] - American Repertory Theater

egretted doing it. But Parks has talked about the
script’s flirtations with minstrelsy and “noble savage”
cliches as a “shortcoming of understanding.”
While the creative team has altered material in
the book, always with a careful hand, Paulus says
the stereotyping usually stems from the lack of
dramaturgical purpose.
“‘I Got Plenty of Nuthin’’ can have a bad
rap, because here it is, this African-American
man singing how he’s happy with nothing. What
Suzan-Lori was interested in, even more than
[the derogatory stereotyping], is the context of
the song in the show. So she has written a few
lines that give it a purpose that relates to the specific
action of the story at that moment. We’re
looking at anything in the script that sticks out as
dramaturgically questionable, because usually the
problem is that the characters are incomplete.
Therefore, you can look at them as cliches.”
Paulus may be striving to make Porgy and Bess
resonate today, but she certainly has a reverence
for the work’s rich history. After all, she taught a
course on Porgy at Harvard last spring with
renowned cultural historian Marjorie Garber.
Indeed, Paulus’ grasp of Porgy’s roots are impressive.
She mentions how George Gershwin and
his associates famously walked Boston Common
the night after the show’s premiere and decided
to make major cuts to the show. She talks
passionately about Porgy’s complex social and
racial history and its evolution over the decades
in various mediums. She points out that Porgy
had its real breakthrough and solidified its status
in the canon when it was revived on Broadway
in 1942 as a musical under the auspices of
Cheryl Crawford, ran for nine months, then
toured the country.
In the 1950s, it became a main diplomatic
export of the U.S. State Department, she says,
and the cast (including a young Maya Angelou)
were some of the first American artists to perform
behind the Iron Curtain. When the 1960s
hit, with the rise of the Civil Rights and black
power movements, few wanted to touch Porgy
and Bess because of its stereotypes and perceived
racism. But at that time, the music exploded into
the popular consciousness, as jazz and blues
artists, from Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday to
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