The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess — Dramaturg’s Dispatch #1

Blogging from afar (soon to be near— the cast and crew arrive in Cambridge on Monday), production dramaturg Jenna Clark Embrey sounds off from behind the rehearsal room door…

Earlier in the week, director Diane Paulus asked that each member of the cast prepare a five-minute “character presentation.” This exercise was guided by a series of ground rules: use music, transform your appearance, reveal an object, and include a kiss and a slap. Each exercise also required the actors to share (in character) their name, their greatest strength, their greatest weakness, a secret, and a dream for their future.

This rehearsal exercise went to the heart of the vision for this production. Diane and Suzan-Lori Parks have talked extensively about the intimate nature of this Porgy and Bess— shrinking the epic scale of the opera into a musical that investigates the personal lives of the individual inhabitants of Catfish Row. During the character presentations, we learned about Josiah Frazier, the quick-witted lawyer with a childhood stutter and penchant for harmonica. Nikki Renee Daniels’s presentation of the young mother Clara, anxiously awaiting her husband’s return from sea, brought everyone to tears. Phillip Boykin’s presentation of Crown not only left us all in stitches (“One thing that people don’t know about me is…when I was born…my head was already this big.”) but also showed the complicated humanity behind the town brute.

After the presentations, the actors went back into the rehearsal room with a new sense of their characters’ connections with one another. The community of Catfish Row is a tight-knit group of people with a common history, and each actor has suffused their character with a creative backstory.

When Catfish Row is brought to life in the Loeb Drama Center next month, it sounds like audiences will be treated to a real neighborhood populated by real people with individual dreams, struggles and daily epiphanies.

Check back for more from Jenna Clark Embrey.

(The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is officially on-sale, btw. Got your tickets yet?)

Author:  Brendan Shea

Publication date:  July 15, 2011

Featured Comment: Production dramaturg Jenna Clark Embrey sounds off from behind the rehearsal room door with observations, comments and insights into the process of creating The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess. Her first contribution describes a fascinating character exercise that Diane Paulus led with the ensemble.

Events: The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess

Venue: Loeb Drama Center