Porgy Begins
Porgy lived in the Golden Age. Not the Golden Age of a remote and legendary past; nor yet the chimerical era treasured by every man past middle life, that never existed except in the heart of youth; but an age when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgot- ten before it destroyed…
…No one knew Porgy’s age. No one remem- bered when he first made his appearance among the ranks of the local beggars. A woman who had married twenty years be- fore remembered him because he had been seated on the church steps, and had given her a turn when she went in.
Once a child saw Porgy, and said suddenly, “What is he waiting for?” That expressed him better than anything else. He was wait- ing, waiting with the concentrating intensity of a burning glass.
As consistent in the practice of his profes- sion as any of the business and professional men who were his most valued customers, Porgy was to be found any morning, by the first arrival in the financial district, against the wall of the old apothecary shop that stands at the corner of King Charles Street and The Meeting House Road. Long cus- tom, reinforced by an eye for the beautiful, had endeared that spot to him. He would sit there in the cool of the early hours and look across the narrow thoroughfare into the green freshness of Jasper Square, where the children flew their kites, and played hide- and-seek among the shrubs. Then, when the morning advanced, and the sun poured its semitropical heat between the twin rows of brick, to lie impounded there, like a stagnant pool of flame, he would experi- ence a pleasant atavistic calm, and would doze lightly under the terrific heat, as only a full-blooded negro can. Toward afternoon a slender blue shadow would commence to grow about him that would broaden with great rapidity, cool the baking flags, and
turn the tide of customers home before his empty cup.
But Porgy best loved the late afternoons, when the street was quiet again, and the sunlight, deep with color, shot level over the low roof of the apothecary shop to paint the cream stucco on the opposite dwelling a ruddy gold and turn the old rain-washed tiles on the roof to burnished copper. Then the slender, white-clad lady who lived in the house would throw open the deep French windows of the second story drawing-room, and sitting at the piano, where Porgy could see her dimly, she would play on through the dusk until old Peter drove by with his wagon to carry him home.
Adapting Porgy
The dialogue between the residents of Cat- fish Row was written by DuBose Heyward as an attempt to capture the Gullah language of African-Americans in 1920’s South Caro- lina. The word Gullah was used to describe the culture of the Carolina coast, which was a mix of African and American Southern cultures. DuBose Heyward’s attempt at writing Gullah, which he heard often while growing up in Charleston, was very closely replicated in Dorothy Heyward’s play, Porgy.
On the following pages, compare excerpts from the various iterations of the story— see if you can track how the language and storytelling evolved over time.
The last excerpt is from the production you are about to see, the musical adapta- tion The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess. What has Suzan-Lori Parks done to (in the words of co-adaptor Diedre Murray) “modernize without disturbing” Porgy and Bess?
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