Hear a discussion of the opera and the people who inspired it during a Spoleto Festival USA presentation
While the storyline of Porgy and Bess, the Charleston-based opera of redemptive love and loss, may be known over the world, much of its true grandeur has yet to find an audience until now. A documentary, to be previewed during Spoleto Festival USA this month, focuses not on DuBose and Dorothy Heyward or Ira and George Gershwin, the work’s librettists, lyricists, and composer, but on its real origins—the local Gullah culture that inspired them. In When Porgy Came Home, executive producer and director Lauren Waring Douglas explains that it’s her aim to not just make a film but to “return these memories to the community.”
Douglas acknowledges that she was not familiar with the full story until she was approached to produce a film on artist Jonathan Green and his inspired designs for the opera’s 2016 Spoleto production. Through her research, Douglas discovered an equally enmeshed earlier history. In 1969, Charleston was under martial law with mass protests over the unjust treatment and firing of mostly Black, female hospital workers. The conflict brought international attention to the Lowcountry just before the city was to celebrate its 300th anniversary in 1970. That year’s staging of Porgy and Bess, which was in itself a redemptive act of love and loss (and of memory), is the focus of the documentary.
It’s a tale full of echoes and ironies: until she started, Douglas did not realize she knew, and was even related to, many in the community who had been in that production, the first staged here, despite its 35 years of world-wide acclaim. The 1970 production—featuring the Charleston Symphony, local singers, and the musical group the Choraliers—made history, beginning an end of segregation and segregated seating. It also brought people to applaud the performers who had the lived or inherited experience to make this Porgy and Bess more than an artistic success, but also one of authenticity. The world took notice that the place that had inspired the opera was being changed by it.
But years after the last curtain call, memories of these unsung actors faded, obscuring their impact on history. Along with filmmakers Emily Harrold and award-winning scriptwriter Robert Rapley, Douglas is determined to shine a light on how the Gullah people inspired the popular opera and ultimately reclaimed it. Thanks to a Spoleto panel, featuring film clips, on June 2, the 1970 staging of Porgy and Bess will receive renewed attention and build anticipation for the documentary’s release.
