April 25, 2019
I come within inches of recusing
myself from reviewing White Noise, the latest from Suzan-Lori
Parks, not because I have any conflict of interest, but because it leaves me so conflicted. But upon
rumination, that may be part of the intended experience. Before I go into
detail, I’ll add that it’s a four-character play, it clocks in at three hours,
including ‘mish, it favors moving back and forth between long asides to the
audience (each character gets one) and heightened realism…and it isn’t dull for
a minute.
It
is of course basic dramaturgy that if you start with a group of four very
close-knit and dedicated friends, thirtysomethings who’ve known each other
since college and before, who have become two committed mixed-race couples…the
play is going to chronicle the dissolution of that bond.
And
here’s the triggering incident.
In the
wake of a kind of post-traumatic stress reaction to having been beaten to a
pulp by bigots, young black writer Leo (Daveed Diggs)
decides that his way toward liberation is to quite literally be a slave; if
he’s the property of a white man, he has a pass to go where he pleases. He
turns to his best bro bud Ralph (Thomas
Sadoski) to be his master for a contracted experiment that will last 40
days. Ralph agrees. This of course appalls their respective partners, crusading
liberal defense lawyer Dawn (Zoë Winters)
and internet podcast personality—hostess of Ask
a Black—Misha (Sheira Irving).
Now of
course it is also basic dramaturgy
that this understanding between bros must
become strained, as the white master begins to explore the full range of
his power over his new, human acquisition. And indeed it does.
On the
one hand: No character’s hands are completely clean in this scenario: Leo’s in
denial about the stress and self-delusion he’s under. Ralph, when we meet him,
establishes himself as not quite liberal enough not to resent it on a systemic
level when he is unfairly passed over for a job he was promised by a
far-less-qualified colleague of darker ethnicity. Dawn is a champion for the oppressed,
but when it’s in her brief to defend a client she knows to be guilty because
she knows she has the goods for the win, she makes the bargain with her
conscience. And Misha’s podcast is a product of calculated blacksploitation,
ethnicity and culture as salable commodity.
But the
very title of the play, White Noise also
suggests, as part of the premise, that white privilege is a corrosive,
insidious enough to invade even the most well-intended liberal-minded
relationships. (Though the term has a
double meaning here; in the play the term only literally refers to continuous
aural hiss; but the sound comes to represent something symbolic.) And I found
myself wondering if the play’s examination of systemic dysfunction doesn’t
itself stack the deck. All four of these characters are ticking time
bombs—pretty much from the go, in retrospect, though Ms. Parks doesn’t give
that away all at once—so if the takeaway is supposed to be about inevitable
breakdown as long as white privilege is a trigger, how are we to take this
group of people as axiomatic examples? And if that’s not the intended takeaway…then what are we learning? I can even put
these questions aside, because over and above all this, there was something
else on my mind: I felt the characters being manipulated by the author. Because
the lines of breakdown and compromised loyalty in the play are not merely
societal, social, ethical and philosophical…they’re sexual. Like, potboiler
paperback partner-change juxtaposition sexual. It makes for racy storytelling
(pun not at first blush intended) but it tends to blur the point of the game.
All this
said, I repeat, the material is pretty gripping stuff, and tremendously well acted, under the direction of Oskar Eustis. And, biggest irony of all…White Noise, not just despite
the debates that can be fired up by its ambiguities, but because of them…may be Ms. Parks’ best
play. I’m just coming to that as I type the words, so I’m surprising myself as
much as I may be surprising you.
And I’ll
leave it at that.
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