White Noise is a 2019 play by Suzan-Lori Parks. It premiered at The Public Theater in New York. [1] [2]
White Noise is a 2019 play by Suzan-Lori Parks. It premiered at The Public Theater in New York. [1] [2]
The central characters are two woke interracial couples, good friends since college. [3] [4]
Leo, out walking one night, is assaulted by police. To regain a sense of safety, he asks his friend Ralph to buy him as a slave for forty days, positing that he will be safer as a white man's property. Ralph, initially terrified of being white, male and straight, agrees. Their new relationship corrupts Ralph and releases his inner "whitey", and he joins a club exclusively for whites. [8] [1] In the second act, Ralph makes Leo wear a slave collar. [6] [5]
The 2019 debut at The Public Theater in New York was directed by Oskar Eustis, and included Daveed Diggs as Leo, Zoe Winters as Dawn, Thomas Sadoski as Ralph and Sheria Irving as Misha. [9] [10]
A 2021 London production at the Bridge Theatre was directed by Polly Findlay, and included Ken Nwosu as Leo, Helena Wilson as Dawn, James Corrigan as Ralph and Faith Omole as Misha. [3]
One change between the New York and London productions is that while in the 2019 production the characters hang out in a bowling alley, their hang out is a shooting range in 2021. [11] 2021 reviewers have noted that the play brings to mind the 2020 murder of George Floyd, though it premiered the year before. [7] [2]
An early 2022 production at the Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C. was directed by Reginald L. Douglas. It included RJ Brown as Leo, Katie Kleiger as Dawn, Quinn Franzen as Ralph and Tatiana Williams as Misha. There were significant changes made from the 2019 production; more than 20 minutes were cut. [12]
Theater critic Ben Brantley said "Though White Noise runs a full three hours, and skids on some of its plot twists, it doesn’t feel long. By its end, you may marvel at how many forms, faces and exploitative uses of racial identity it has covered. ... In burrowing deep into what one character calls “the worm hole” of how we talk — and think — about race, Ms. Parks isn’t cutting anyone any slack. Herself included." [13] The Guardian's reviewer gave the play four out of five stars, saying it "finds [Parks] at her most realistic, which is fun in some ways and frustrating in others. It’s a pleasure to hear her vital, playful intelligence shoved into the mouths of contemporary, recognizable characters and then exasperating when those characters behave implausibly." [9]
Theater critic Hilton Als, in a mostly negative review, found the play lacking compared to some of Parks' earlier work. [5]
The Independent and The Daily Telegraph gave the play four out of five stars. [3] [8] The Independent said that while the scenario is massively implausible, the play "is undercut with a fatalism about a culturally required wokeness that only goes surface-deep, that’s rapidly shrugged off like a heavy coat when things get too heated. It’s grim, brilliantly perceptive, and lets no one off the hook." [8] According to The Daily Telegraph, "its ambitious scope of ideas ensures that the play is funny, challenging, audacious and profoundly unsettling. Three hours seldom passed so quickly." [3]
The Guardian, the newspaper i and the Evening Standard gave the play three out of five stars, The Guardian's reviewer saying that "even when neither the story nor the characters are believable, this is still a propulsive drama with pace, plotting and a deadly magnetism, and its greatest triumph lies in the virtuosity and vigour of its astonishing cast." [14] [11] [7]
The Times gave the play two out of five stars. The reviewer said that while the play is extremely well acted, "Parks demands three hours of your time, and in return offers a rambling piece constructed around a ludicrous premise." [1]
Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002; Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the award for drama. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Topdog/Underdog is a play by American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks which premiered in 2001 off-Broadway in New York City. The next year it opened on Broadway, at the Ambassador Theatre, where it played for several months. In 2002, Parks received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Outer Critics Circle Award for the play; it received other awards for the director and cast. In 2023, it won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.
The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World is a play by Suzan-Lori Parks. It premiered in 1990 in Brooklyn, New York and was produced Off-Broadway in 2016.
Oskar Eustis has been the Artistic Director at the Public Theater in New York City since 2005. He has worked as a director, dramaturg, and artistic director for theaters around the United States.
In The Blood is a play written by Suzan-Lori Parks which premiered at The Joseph Papp Public Theater in 1999. Parks borrowed many aspects from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, and wanted to create a play based on the novel. She originally wanted to call the play Fucking A, but scrapped the idea. She later wrote the story based on the main character from The Scarlet Letter, and turned the story into more modern era, and changed the title to In The Blood. She later wrote a different play that she did title Fucking A.
Thomas Christian Sadoski is an American actor. He is best known for his roles as Don Keefer in the HBO series The Newsroom (2012-14) and as Matt Short in the CBS sitcom Life in Pieces (2015-19).
Jenny Jules is an English actress. She started her acting career as a member of the youth theatre programme at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, London. Her career has been closely linked with the Tricycle Theatre where she has acted numerous times; her credits there include two plays by August Wilson, both directed by Paulette Randall: Two Trains Running and Gem of the Ocean, Walk Hard by Abram Hill, Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress, the dramatic reconstruction of the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, The Colour of Justice, and Lynn Nottage's Fabulation, directed by Indhu Rubasingham. In 1992, she won a Time Out Award for her portrayal of Mediyah in Pecong at the Tricycle Theatre. That same year, she appeared with Helen Mirren on the second installment of Prime Suspect for Granada Television/ITV.
Polly Findlay is a British theatre director, who won the Olivier for Best Entertainment in 2011 for Derren Brown's Svengali. She has directed seven productions for the National Theatre, and four for the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she is an associate artist.
Carlos López Estrada is a Mexican-American filmmaker, music video director, commercial director, theatre director, and actor. Born in Mexico, he moved to the United States when he was 12 and later enrolled at Chapman University.
4000 Miles is a dramatic comedy play by Amy Herzog. The play ran Off-Broadway in 2011, and again in 2012. The play was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Venus is a 1996 play written by American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks about the life of Khoekhoe woman Sarah Baartman. Set during the 19th century, the play opens in South Africa where Baartman was born, before transitioning to Europe as Baartman begins to perform in freak shows in London. The play then transitions to Paris where she continues her freak show act before dying in 1815 after being under the study of a group of French scientists led by Georges Cuvier. Her deceased body becomes the subject of a pseudoscientific autopsy that focuses on Baartman's steatopygia– a condition which Cuvier, uses to his academic advantage. Parks' work is not intended to be historically accurate, but rather uses the concept of Baartman's career to explore colonialism, racialization, and the historical sexualization of Black women; as Parks explains, "most of it's fabricated... It's questioning the history of history... It embraces the unrecorded truth." Venus won 2 OBIE Awards in 1995-1996.
Daveed Daniele Diggs is an American actor, rapper, and singer-songwriter. He is the vocalist of the experimental hip hop group Clipping, and in 2015, he originated the dual roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the musical Hamilton, for which he won a 2016 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical. Along with the main cast of Hamilton, he was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album in the same year.
The Bridge Theatre is a commercial theatre near Tower Bridge in London that opened in October 2017. It was developed by Nick Starr and Nicholas Hytner as the home of the London Theatre Company, which they founded following their tenancy as executive director and artistic director, respectively, at the National Theatre.
Blindspotting is a 2018 American comedy-drama film written and produced by Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. The film is directed by Carlos López Estrada, and Diggs and Casal star alongside Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Ethan Embry, Tisha Campbell-Martin, Utkarsh Ambudkar, and Wayne Knight. The plot follows a parolee with three days left on his sentence, only to have him witness a police shooting that threatens to ruin a lifelong friendship.
The Inheritance is a play by Matthew López that is inspired by the 1910 novel Howards End by E. M. Forster. The play premiered in London at the Young Vic in March 2018, before transferring to Broadway in November 2019.
Native Son is a 2019 American drama film directed by Rashid Johnson from a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks. It is based on the novel of the same name by Richard Wright. The film stars Ashton Sanders, Margaret Qualley, Nick Robinson, KiKi Layne, Bill Camp and Sanaa Lathan.
Emmy Raver-Lampman is an American actress and singer. She began her career working in musical theater, and has performed in various Broadway and national touring productions such as Hair, Jekyll & Hyde, Wicked, and Hamilton. She has played Allison Hargreeves in the Netflix series The Umbrella Academy since 2019.
Chelsea Marcantel is an American playwright and director. She has written over thirty plays. She won the American Theatre Critics Association's M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award in 2018 for her play Airness, and a Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theatre from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her musical The Monster.
Zainab Jah is a British award-winning theater, television and film actress of Sierra Leonean descent. She is mostly known for her theater performances as Maima in Danai Gurira's Broadway play Eclipsed, Venus, and School Girls, among others.
Ken Nwosu is a British actor.