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FOR BROADWAY’S ‘1776’ REVIVAL, THE DRAMA IS OFFSTAGE

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.

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Sara Porkalob, center, as the South Carolina delegate Edward Rutledge in the
musical “1776.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

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 the 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. More about Michael
Paulson

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the
world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New
York edition with the headline: Dispute Over Race Rattles ‘1776’. Order Reprints
| Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: Diane Paulus
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