White People stars John Dossett, Rebecca Brooksher and Michael Shulman
Barak Obama’s election as President said to millions of Americans that the issue of race was over, that now, at last, all of us could proceed with our lives together free of hatred, fear, bigotry and suspicion of others and the psychological poison inflicted generation to generation. Which makes the arrival of J.T. Rogers’ mordant play, White People, even stranger than it might have been in less happy times when it mirrored the raw ugliness underlying American lives. But now, all that is over. Done with. Finished. Isn’t it?
John McDermott’s interesting set is three sets in one: Mara Lynn Doddson’s kitchen corner, stage right, Martin Bahmueller’s lavish office sector stage center and left, and Alan Harris’s favorite park benches, all across the front of the stage, spattered in pigeon droppings. In the park, Alan (the splendidly good Michael Shulman) needs to talk to us, which he does extremely well; he’s a young, devoted professor in love with opening young minds, passionately fond of intellectual challenges, endlessly questioned daily by his brightest student, a black girl. He loves their arguments, their intellectual sparring.
In the kitchen, carefully, tenderly folding a child’s clothing, Mara Lynn (Rebecca Brooksher, intense, wonderful) skirts as long as she can her suffering heart over her child’s crushing illness but cannot stop herself from revealing her white trash life and the scorns and slights she bitterly bears from blacks and yellows, by rights, beneath her. After all, she’s white. The shame of having to slink away from a black, former school mate, now so uppity in Mara Lynn’s own bank! And the Chinese girl with whom her husband is cheating. And that Indian doctor who sees her child as a problem to be solved, not even human? Her own flesh and blood? That not only hurts, that burns, deep.
Martin (strong, fine John Dossett) knows the game. He’s come up the hard way. It still hangs around in his speech but his custom fitted clothes are absolutely correct for projecting the white power elite he’s finally joined by working his ass off, making all the right moves, climbing up to Boss. So why don’t his children listen to him, dress like him, think like him? He’s fought to get his piece of the pie and he’ll fight tooth and nail anybody who tries to take it away. Everybody’s the enemy who isn’t a member of the white club he’s finally joined. And his damned son listens to that black, screeching trash they call music? Listen to white music! It’s all part of the game, the very deadly, serious game!
Then, things happen. And the young liberal, the middle aged conservative and the beset redneck bigot all react the same way to their different provocations: outright hatred, fear, suspicion, bigotry for bigotry. Playwright Rogers has constructed his play in simplest, most difficult terms: each character talks directly to us. They do not interact, they do not even know each other. We, the audience, are their common denominator. Rogers has to construct them as people with unique problems or he has only a polemic but their problems do not fit neatly into his thesis, that we are saturated with a history of racial fear, hatred, suspicion of anyone different from us. Of course, replacing, reversing his basic premise of whites fearful of non-whites is just as true. Blacks hate, fear whites. Yellows fear, hate blacks and whites, and browns? Trapped in the middle of the morass of learned hatred, learned fear, learned bigotry. Where will it all end? Will it end? Director Gus Reyes is meticulous and honest; he has to allow each character’s history to be expounded in order to build the author’s argument but that becomes more lecture than drama, very dangerous in the theater. This play is still finding its way, but leaves its mark on your psyche. I hope it gets there. Obama has enough on his plate.
Atlantic 2 Theater, 330 West 16th Street. Ticket: $45. Mon,Tue, Thu, Fri, Sat 8 pm, Mats, Sat,Sun 3 pm.