Porgy and Bess Program [pdf] - American Repertory Theater

Miles Davis and Nina Simone, popularized
many of its songs. In the ’70s, Porgy and Bess
reentered the culture as an opera (thanks to the
famous 1976 Houston Grand Opera production),
and the fashion was to perform it uncut.
Today, that’s the medium where most people experience
the show.
Paulus relishes sharing one anecdote in particular
about Porgy’s history that most people
don’t know. Following the show’s run on
Broadway in 1936, it went on a four-city tour,
including a stop in Washington, D.C. Todd
Duncan, who played Porgy, discovered that the
National Theatre, where they were scheduled to
play in D.C., was segregated. He said he would
refuse to perform the show there if the theater
was not desegregated, and the cast, including
Anne Brown as Bess, rallied to his side. The theater
offered to open up the top half of the balcony
and to hold specific “blacks only”
performances, says Paulus. The musicians’ union
even threatened to fine the performers, yet the
cast would not relent. Finally, the National
Theatre management acquiesced, and the venue
was desegregated for the run of the show.
“This is all because Todd Duncan said, ‘I will
not perform this unless anybody can sit anywhere—regardless
of the color of your skin.’ This
is March 1936—like 20 years before Rosa Parks
and the birth of the Civil Rights movement. Who
knows that this man did this? Here’s an artist who
stood up for his rights politically, who made this
social action through this piece of work. It’s sort
of reprehensible that we as a country, or certainly
as artists, don’t even know the history that goes
back only 76 years—that we don’t own that action
and that story and teach people about it.”
Considering Porgy’s lofty status as such a bold
work for its time, Paulus says she and her creative
team are trying to honor, embrace and tap into
the same daring spirit in which the show was created.
“Gershwin was a hybrid artist, this mash-up
artist who was way ahead of his time,” Paulus
says. “So our goal is to get in touch with those
original impulses and to transfer all those impulses
out of the opera house and onto a musical
stage, where we can create a more intimate, theatrical,
visceral experience that is putting as much
emphasis on the words and the story as the music.
That’s the radical step for Porgy and Bess now.”
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THE GERSHWINS’ PORGY AND BESS 11