Photo: Bruce Glikas/Getty
Sara Porkalobis making a splash with their Broadway debut, both onstage and off.
The1776star, who uses she/they pronouns, has Broadway Twitter abuzz with their recent Vulture interview in which they criticized the show’s leadership while admitting to only giving “75 percent” onstage in their performance as Edward Rutledge.
“Giving 100 percent of myself to everything all the time is a recipe for disaster,” they explained. “How am I going to have time for myself, for my partner, or for my family? I want to choose when I do that.”
“I’m giving 75 percent. When I do ‘Molasses to Rum,’ I’m giving 90 percent,” Porkalob added of their character’s poignant act II song.
A rep for1776did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
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“At the end of the day, if I’m compromising my desire to do my own work, but the resources are there, it really just comes down to labor,” Porkalob said. “If I’m compromising, I’d better be getting paid a lot more money, honey. I have to ask, ‘Do I want to give 100 percent of myself to this?'”
Porkalob has received mixed reactions from their theater peers on social media, with some praising the candor about their ambitions and their current show, while others — including the show’s leadership — have called them “ungrateful” for biting the hand that feeds them.
Although he didn’t name Porkalob directly, Jeffrey L. Page, who co-directs the1776revival alongside Diane Paulus, did not hold back in his response to the actor’s interview.
“Dear nameless person, I know that you feel good about that thing you said… I didn’t feel good about it,” he wrote in asince-deleted Facebook post. “I know you feel like it is now your time in the sun. You ain’t put in the time and you ain’t done the work. You are ungrateful and unwise.”
“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. You are fake-woke, rotten to the core, and stuck in the matrix; I hope that you get that increased IG following that you so desperately thirst,” Page added.
Porkalob confessed in the interview that they hope the show will lead to “more Instagram followers and more community” in New York City, where they recently relocated from Seattle for the show, in addition to “a Tony nomination, good reviews, and a smart, personable, hard-working agency that’s ready to rep me.”
Bruce Glikas/Getty
“I don’t want just a career. I could make a career just being in commercial Broadway musicals,” Porkalob said, noting that acting is just “30 percent of what I do.”
Although they feel “privileged” that Paulus discovered them throughDragon Cycle, a trilogy of plays honoring three generations of Porkalob’s Filipino-American family, and that Paulus and Page “had a lot of respect for me as a collaborator, not just as an actor,” Porkalob said of not having any creative control over1776: “It’s horrible. I hate it.”
“When it came to contributing in the room, people would stop and listen to me, which is fantastic,” they said. “But it’s hard because I’m not the director. If I don’t agree with something, I have to say,Oh, not today. What I want to do with my time is make new works with collaborators.”
Paulus and Page’s revival of1776opened this month at the Roundabout Theatre, featuring female, trans and non-binary performers in the historically cisgender, heterosexual white male roles. The musical that originally premiered on Broadway in 1969 follows the Founding Fathers in the events leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
source: people.com
