NYT for MDH - For Broadway’s ‘1776’ Revival, the Drama Is Offstage
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A cast member criticized the consciously progressive revival for its handling of race in rehearsals, saying there had been “harm done.” She later apologized for her comments.
By Michael Paulson and Jennifer Schuessler
Oct. 18, 2022
The current Broadway revival of “1776” was hoping to spark a conversation about power and representation. And it has, if not quite in the way it intended.
It assembled a diverse cast of women, nonbinary and transgender actors to play the white men who signed the Declaration of Independence, as a way of highlighting those whose perspectives were not considered.
The show, which has been in the works for several years, made adjustments after the police murder of George Floyd prompted intense debates over race, justice and hierarchy in the theater business. A new co-director, Jeffrey L. Page, who is Black, was added to shape the work alongside its original director, Diane Paulus, who is Asian American.
But now, just two weeks after opening on Broadway to mixed reviews and soft sales, “1776” has become the talk of the industry — not because of its contemporary dramaturgy, but because of a cast member’s criticisms.
One of the show’s standout performers, Sara Porkalob, who is making her Broadway debut, was quoted in an interview with Vulture on Friday saying “there was harm done” during the rehearsal process, and calling some of the staging decisions “cringey.”
She was referring to her big second-act number, “Molasses to Rum,” in which her character, a South Carolina delegate named Edward Rutledge, calls out the “hypocrisy” of Northern delegates who criticized slavery while their states profited from it.
Porkalob, who is Filipino American, told Vulture that during the rehearsal process the directors had sought “consent from the Black folks in the play” to carry out its vision for the staging, which includes an evocation of a slave auction — but not from the rest of the cast, including the non-Black actors of color. This decision, she said, using an acronym for people of color, “unconsciously held up a false narrative by assimilating non-Black POC folks into whiteness.”
Porkalob said that while she liked her fellow cast members, the experience was artistically unsatisfying, and that she was giving the show “75 percent.”
“The social aspect and the salary aspect are fulfilling,” she said. “The creative aspect, not so much.”
The interview quickly drew attention on social media, where some hailed Porkalob for speaking her truth while others denounced her for undermining her own collaborators.
Page, who is the show’s choreographer as well as one of its directors, posted an apparent rejoinder on Facebook, which he addressed to a “nameless person” whom he called “fake-woke” and “rotten to the core.”
“You are ungrateful and unwise,” Page wrote in the post, which was later taken down. “You claim that you want to dismantle white supremacist ideology … I think that you are the very example of the thing that you claim to be most interested in dismantling.”
Page, Paulus and Porkalob all declined to comment. But over the weekend, Porkalob emailed an apology to the show’s company, writing that she was “reaching out in an attempt to repair harm I’ve caused.”
“I see how my opinions and the tone of the article have hurt, offended and upset some of the folks internal to this process,” she wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times. “I’m sorry for that.”
In the email she apologized for violating what she described as the “‘What’s said in the room, stays in the room’ agreement.”
“My intention was to share an important moment of learning I had in the piece, specifically how I was proud to be a part of an ensemble that was able to deftly handle these complex issues, rather than not saying anything and pretending things didn’t happen,” she wrote. “But it is clear that the impact was me breaking the above community agreement and I’m sorry.”
Reviving “1776,” with its dated humor and all-white cast of historical characters, was always going to be a delicate task, even before the 2020 racial justice protests. (The show is a joint production of two nonprofits, New York’s Roundabout Theater Company and the American Repertory Theater of Cambridge, Mass.)
In an interview with The Times in August, Paulus said one of the things that drew her to the 1969 show was the startling bluntness of “Molasses to Rum,” which might surprise anyone who assumed the musical (by Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone) was a whitewashed Bicentennial-era relic.
Performing that song is emotionally taxing, particularly for Black cast members, even after the show’s team created a Black “affinity space” to help guide the show’s explorations of race.
“There’s not a night where it doesn’t hit me,” Crystal Lucas-Perry, who plays John Adams, told The Times before the production opened. (Lucas-Perry is leaving the show on Sunday to join the cast of a new Broadway play “Ain’t No Mo’.”)
Porkalob is a fixture of the Seattle theater scene, known for “Dragon Cycle,” her trilogy about three generations of her family. Paulus, who won a Tony Award directing the 2013 revival of “Pippin,” saw Porkalob in a production of one of the installments at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, where Paulus is artistic director, and cast her in “1776.” Porkalob chose the role of Rutledge, a baddie with a big number.
In the interview with Vulture, Porkalob described the in-between position of actors of color who are not Black. “I have certain privileges that Black folks don’t have, but I’m also not white, so I don’t have certain privileges that other people have,” she said.
But she criticized the directors’ “binary” approach to race, which she said caused harm.
After the show’s initial run in Cambridge, she said, there had been an affinity group for the non-Black performers of color “to talk more about what that harm felt like, and to give our consent to the enactment.”
Porkalob, who uses she/they pronouns, also said the directors had paid insufficient attention to gender identity, considering it secondary to questions of race. “When we were all in the room together, there wasn’t any conversation about how we marry our queer identities with these characters, which is disappointing,” she said.
The interview drew strong criticism, including from some Black performers and writers. Among those who responded to her on Twitter was the playwright Douglas Lyons, whose “Chicken & Biscuits” was staged on Broadway last year. He asked to talk with Porkalob, saying: “BIPOC artists were hurt by that article. Harm has now inflicted harm. But we can heal.”
Ashley Blanchet, an actor whose Broadway credits include “Frozen,” “Beautiful” and “Memphis,” also said Porkalob had harmed colleagues. “Being a person of color does not excuse you from arrogance,” she wrote on Twitter. Porkalob, she suggested, was “messing with the livelihood of your peers to get ur 15 minutes of fame.”
In a Twitter thread early Monday morning, Porkalob publicly apologized for “the pain I’ve caused my team.”
But Porkalob also stood by the substance of her comments. “I’m not afraid of the great White Way,” she wrote. “I’d be sad to lose the job but my termination would only be further proof of this industry’s inability to adapt & change for the better. The work I care about can be done on Broadway or off.”
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter. He previously covered religion, and was part of the Boston Globe team whose coverage of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. @MichaelPaulson
Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. @jennyschuessler
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