Porgy and Bess Program [pdf] - American Repertory Theater

A Note from Suzan-Lori Parks
When Diane Paulus called me on the phone and said, “I’m thinking about doing a
revival of Porgy and Bess, do you want to help revive the book?” My first question was,
how many other writers are you talking to? She said, “Just you.” And I said, “I’m in.”
Was I familiar with the book of Porgy and Bess? Not at all. But I felt a gut thing: I was
literally called on the phone, and I felt that I’d also been “called” in a spiritual sense. This
project feels right up my alley; an organic next-step in the kind of writing I’ve been doing
for years. Whether riffing on The Scarlet Letter, or “dancing” with Abraham Lincoln
throughout my plays, or entering the world of Porgy and Bess to help give it a new life—
throughout my work, shaped by the aesthetic of “repetition and revision,” I’m continually
called (and re-called) to create an understanding between the past and the present.
Porgy and Bess was written by white authors attempting to replicate an “authentic”
black voice and, while the original opera triumphs on so many levels, I feel the writing
sometimes suffers from what I call “a shortcoming of understanding.” There are times in all
of our lives when, regardless of who we are, we experience shortcomings of understanding.
In DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and the Gershwins’ original, there’s a lot of love and a lot
of effort made to understand the people of Catfish Row. In turn, I’ve got love and respect
for their work, but in some ways I feel it falls short in the creation of fully realized
characters. Now, one could see their depiction of African-American culture as racist, or one
could see it as I see it: as a problem of dramaturgy. It’s very important and very liberating
to my writing process that I continually make that distinction and that I allowed myself to
see Porgy and Bess as a piece of writing that, while not morally flawed, very much needed
to be fleshed out.
When I wrote Topdog/Underdog, and we premiered it downtown, the rapper Mos Def,
before he was cast in the Broadway version, attended the off-Broadway production
countless times. Once he ran backstage wanting to meet “the guy who wrote the play.”
Ah! He hadn’t read the program! He thought some dude wrote Topdog—he was having a
shortcoming of understanding. As a writer, you’re constantly extending yourself; and if,
like DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, like George and Ira Gershwin, and like myself now
with Porgy and Bess, if you’re a writer going into new and important territory, you’ve got
to be much more than badass. You’ve got to be bold.
Diedre Murray, Diane Paulus and Suzan-Lori Parks
20 AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER