Porgy

Porgy (1927), a play by Dorothy and Dubose Heyward. [Guild Theatre, 217 perf.] The African‐American Porgy ( Frank Wilson) is a crippled beggar who lives and works in the Charleston tenement district called Catfish Row. He loves the beautiful but weak‐willed Bess ( Evelyn Ellis), who is the mistress of the vicious Crown ( Jack Carter), but when Crown flees after murdering a man, she goes to live with Porgy. On Crown's return Porgy fights with him and kills him. He is taken to jail, and while he is there Bess is lured away by the drug peddler Sportin' Life ( Percy Verwayne). Released from jail and finding Bess gone, Porgy leaves Catfish Row to seek her. The Theatre Guild offering was a bold and powerful work, and the script, while overshadowed by the later musical version Porgy and Bess, remains one of the greatest of all American folk dramas. [Edwin] Dubose HEYWARD (1885–1940), the South Carolina novelist and poet, worked as an insurance agent before publishing his first poems and short stories in the early 1920s. He and his wife, the former Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns (1890–1961), dramatized two of his novels of black life: Porgy and Mamba's Daughters (1939). Heyward wrote an unsuccessful original drama, Brass Ankle (1931), and collaborated on the musical Porgy and Bess (1935). Biography: Dubose Heyward, the Man Who Wrote Porgy, Frank Durham, 1954.