Porgy into Opera

On the bare, dusty stage of Manhattan's Guild Theatre last week 75 Negroes sang, swayed, rolled their dice, exultantly prayed to "de Lawd." In the darkened pit lean Rouben Mamoulian, cinema director, tapped on an old-fashioned schoolteacher's bell, interrupted them constantly with "All right, children. . . ." His stage pictures grew steadily in beauty while the tempo of the acting rose to fever pitch.

Five blocks away in Carnegie Hall orchestramen in shirtsleeves rehearsed so relentlessly that a sore-lipped trumpeter had to beg off from a high shrill B. Conducting the players fiercely was Alexander Smallens. Occasionally illustrating a passage at the piano, occasionally clapping his hands to clarify a rhythm, was Composer George Gershwin. Commissioned by the Theatre Guild, he had written the score for what may prove to be the finest attempt yet at a real U. S. opera.

Composer Gershwin took his subject from DuBose Heyward's play Porgy, persuaded Heyward to prepare a libretto which would cleave to the original plot, yet suit the structure of continuous music. Ira Gershwin, Brother George's collaborator in many a Broadway show, was called in to supply special lyrics. Director Mamoulian, who made his name with the original play, was willing to leave Holly wood. Mamoulian liked working with Negroes, had a steadfast admiration for the primitive tragedy of Charleston's Catfish Row. This time, though, his problem was harder. His actors had to be singers, trained to time themselves to the subtlest beat. To match the Gershwin counter point, Mamoulian planned counterpoint in movement which would have the effect of a dramatic ballet. Porgy was to start one song simply, with: "I got a plenty o' nuthin' and nuthin's plenty for me." As the tempo mounted and the crowd joined in, chairs were to rock faster, one old black woman was to take to sharpening her carving-knife, another to whisking her dustcloth up & down like a crazy baton.

"To depict a U. S. scene in a purely U. S. way," George Gershwin worked earnestly for two years, visited Charleston, for local atmosphere, closeted himself in his penthouse apartment for five hours a day, composed steadily in town throughout the summer, clad in beach shorts and shirt. From the beginning he was determined to have his opera indigenous to the U. S. He was fascinated by the beauty of Negro singing, the spontaneity of Negro acting. Said he: "They've tried the Indian dozens of times but unfortunately with little success."

Irreverent operagoers will always giggle to see fat, formal singers decked with feathers and emitting feeble whoops. Nor were many impressed with the Metropolitan's stiff, loud-lunged "Puritans" who choired in Howard Hanson's Merry Mount. In Boston next week and in Manhattan nine days later audiences will at least see and hear something different.

Porgy and Bess, so named to prevent prospective customers from regarding it as a revival of the play, begins with droning "Do-doo-da's" interspersed with "wawa, wa-wa." Catfish Row will be on view, with its dilapidated tenement fronts, its old street lamps, its "Gawd-fearin women" and its "Gawd-damnin' men.'' As in the play, the crippled beggar Porgy drives his ribby goat, hunched in a cart made of packing box labeled "Wild Rose Soap, Pure & Fragrant." The whoring Bess again finds shelter and love with Porgy after the bullying Crown commits his drunken murder.

The women of Catfish Row lull their babies, keen over their dead. The men have their fishing, their crap games Saturday nights. Both cringe before the white folks' laws, the ill-omened buzzards, the lashing hurricane which provides the play's great climax. There are such numbers as A Woman is a Sometime Thing, Bess, You is My Woman Now, A Redheaded Woman Makes a Choo-Choo-Jump its Tracks, It Ain't Necessarily So.

Production difficulties for the Gershwin opera have been to teach the Harlem Negroes a Southern accent, to drill by ear those who were unable to read a note, to help some members of the cast decide on names which will look imposing in the program. Great advantage has been the fact that none of the singers was handicapped at the start by having real grand opera ways. The principals, Porgy and Bess, have never sung on the stage before. Bess is one Anne Browne, a product of the Juilliard School of Music. Porgy is Todd Duncan, a Gershwin discovery from Howard University in Washington, D. C.

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