Gershwin Revisted

I must be on a kick for Hurricane-Katrina-inspired theatre, but I discovered today another production worth looking into. Opening last weekend was Porgy and Bess at the Zach Scott Theater in Austin, Texas. Dave Steakley, the artistic director for the theatre, applied for a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to provide funding for this project, and in the first weekend of the production, they made $100,000 in ticket sales!

This project, as with the production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, began with someone seeing the plight of those victims of Hurricane Katrina and feeling the need to respond. Unlike Paul Chan's concept, however, this production of Porgy and Bess desired to celebrate those resilient survivors of that tragedy instead of dwelling on governmental incompetence.

Dave Steakley says in a recent article in the New York Times that his inspiration for this production began with the recordings of songs from Porgy and Bess done by Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Ray Charles. Listening to these singers perform in more in the genre of blues and jazz instead of opera, led to a re-orchestration of the score to bring out musical themes to remind the audience of the music of New Orleans.

The staging, furthermore, highlights the plight of those victims, setting the singers on rooftops, surrounded by "water." While the city of New Orleans is never officially mentioned in the production, it is certainly obvious what sense the directors desired to bring out. With an all-star cast of performers, this theatre has shown us again the ability of the arts to celebrate the resilience of people.

This kind of theatre is exciting to read about, and it brings the arts to the center of our society. Visual art, music, theatre, dance, these should all reflect what is going on in our world now. The arts don't exist as museum pieces to be examined in the context of their original time only. They are to be revisited, reshaped, made into new creations that force us to examine our own lives, our place in society, and those around us.