SUZAN-LORI PARKS' 'WHITE NOISE' - 40 DAYS A SLAVE

Zoë Winters and Daveed Diggs

BY HENRY EDWARDS - NEW YORK - April 10, 2019

In 2018, The New York Times declared Suzan-Lori Parks’ 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning two-hander, “Top/Dog,” the best play of the last 25 years, and its prolific author “the most consistently inventive and venturesome American dramatist working today."

Parks is first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer in Drama (no biography of her lets you forget it).

She regularly applies rich language, symbols, metaphor and an ever-changing stylistic lens (symbolist fever dream; Brechtian fable; Homeric epic) to the troubled subject of racial and sexual identities, resulting in a body of work of striking originality.

Parks’ 19^th play, “White Noise,” recently made its debut at the Public Theater, and it just might be the writer’s first venture into the realistic genre – at least during its first half.  The realism takes on surrealist overtones as the three-hour-long play charges to its conclusion.

But it is not all that easy to apply the label of “surreal” to Parks’ acute dramatization of the impossibility of blacks and whites achieving a legitimate friendship And we happen to living in a time so surreal that the current administration chalked up more than 200 examples of racism in the first 19 months of its existence and appears to have an ideological commitment to enabling white supremacists.

Credit a new classification system renders for rendering it impossible for the public or even elected officials to know whether the FBI is dedicating resources to investigating the very real threat of white supremacist terror or if those resources are going toward the harassment of Black Lives Matter and civil rights workers.

“White Noise” is fascinating and disturbing, and it inspired a journalist to ask the author if she was “conscious of the fact much of the audience at your plays is white?”

Parks had the perfect answer: “Yes, but they’re ready to do the work. It might still freak them out, but they are excited by the engagement that I’m asking of them . . . My job, to quote James Baldwin [her former teacher], is to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

I was ready.

The play revolves around two interracial couples who are best friends, Leo (Daveed Diggs) and Dawn (Zoë Winters), and Ralph (Thomas Sadoski) and Misha (Sheria Irving), with the narrative threaded through the character of Leo.

Leo is a black visual artist; Dawn, an ambitious criminal defense lawyer; Ralph, a wealthy unpublished novelist and part-time college writing professor; and Misha the host a live-streamed, call-in web show accurately titled “Ask a Black.”

Leo previously dated Misha and Ralph dated Dawn.

 “And then we all broke up and … got reconfigured in different ways,” explains Leo.

The “reconfiguration” includes three years of Dawn and Misha sharing a secret sexual involvement and a continuation of Ralph’s incurable cheating habit.

The foursome exudes a cool and contemporary, thirty-something urban hipster vibe. From a distance, they seem to be inhabitants of a real-life version of a fantasy post-racial America free from racial preference, discrimination and prejudice where color does not matter.

Looking closer tells another story.

Parks provides each member of the quartet with a potent monologue. Leo’s soliloquy launches the play.

 He tells the audience he has suffered from insomnia since the age of five and “the shortage of sleep has made me, you could say, edgier, than most people.  And angry. And so, I’m the fractured and angry and edgy black visual artist.”

Ralph and he “love” each other, and Ralph has gifted Leo with a white-noise machine.  Leo used the device for a year and it helped. But the white noise clouded his brain and he could not paint.

For that reason, he jettisoned the apparatus. Yet the sound of white noise remains embedded in his brain, stressing and exhausting him.

When Leo can’t sleep, he walks. On the previous night, he walked to the white neighborhood he’d love to live in someday and was accosted by cops who smashed his face into the ground. Leo genuinely thought he was going to be shot just like he always sees happening to black men on the news.

Now he’s in really terrible shape.  He is an artist without a gallery which makes him feel like a failure. He has lost his creative inspiration. And his experience with the cops has unleashed his deepest fears about the racist world he inhabits.

Leo desperately wants to inoculate his mind against the steady accumulation of white noise from both the white noise machine and the pain and injustice a black man experiences in a racist white society.

In another part of town, buddy Ralph is facing his own crisis.

Normally, he operates the camera while Misha “acts black” on her web show.  But the normally jocular and supportive boyfriend is so upset and angry he interrupts the taping in order to vocalize his distress.

Ralph is a writer who has never published, never been loved by his father, raised poor and never has felt he was good enough.

Even though he has inherited “a robust chain of bowling alleys coast to coast” worth millions from his absentee father, he continues to feel powerless.

The one thing that was going to make him feel whole was a tenure-track promotion he was “promised” at his college day job.

But Ralph was passed over. Even worse, the position went to a candidate who writes sonnets, comes from Sri Lanka, has dark skin and identifies as black.

The “betrayal” haunts him. “A second-rate person has my job just because that second-rate person is black,” bellows the infuriated victim of reverse discrimination.

Even though Masha refuses to cut him any slack, he refuses to let up.

The four friends often go bowling after hours in their traditional hangout, an empty alley and one of the many owned by Ralph.

Clint Ramos’ extremely spare stage design has the wit to include two little dug-out channels that deliver bowling balls to the players,  Xavier Pierce’s flashing lights amplify the illusion of a bowling alley, and screens mounted around deliver the scores of the competitors.

Zoë Winters, Thomas Sadoski, Daveed Diggs and Sheria Irving

During a break, Leo proposes a “totally far-out idea that could solve everything.”

“I would like to be owned,” he tells Ralph. “Make me your property.”

In the old days, when a slave had a master and he was a good slave, he was protected by the master. Leo has a desperate need to feel safe, protected and respected, racism has exhausted him, and he has run out of options, leading him to the conclusion only his best friend’s wealth and skin color can protect him.

He is so serious he has brought along a contract. For 40 days he’ll be Ralph’s “Enslaved Person,” in exchange for the “protection” that a “Big Somebody” like Ralph can offer from “the man.”

In return, he will be paid $89,000 he will use to eliminate his credit card debt and college loans.

Leo adds that the experience will allow him to explore his heritage and his anger, and serve as a means of “showing the world how far we’ve not come.”

Initially, the women and Ralph are horrified by the idea – it is awful idea and doomed to backfire and fail - but it is hard to say no to Leo.

There also is the sense that something about the venture has an enigmatical appeal to both men. They are players and Leo has come up with a tempting brand new game.

The second half of “White Noise” dramatizes the real-life, real-time 40-day experiment.

Almost immediately (and surprisingly), Ralph becomes intoxicated with his power over Leo and the master-slave relationship allows him to act out the white resentment that turns out always to have been lurking in him.

One uncomfortable tableau follows another.

In one appalling sequence, Ralph brings Leo a slave collar and insists that he wear it. As Leo puts on the hideous and sadistic fetish device, I gasped out loud.

And I was not the only one.

The shock of the revolting image is still with me.

Ralph also cultivates a terrifying group of “new friends,” an upper-class white supremacist group that gets together to talk about how they “don’t want to be passed over or excluded or disenfranchised.”

 “We’re just a little sore. It’s kind of a big sore, actually. Festering,” explains Ralph.

Misha and Dawn are compelled to come to grips with the truth about their respective backgrounds.

In her monologue, Misha explains she is the daughter of two fiercely loving, academically high-pressure “very black” mothers and was raised by the lesbian professors in a mostly-white college town.  Her upbringing has left her with a perpetually exhausting black identity crisis, oscillating between the way she was raised and the elf-created street” character she plays on “Ask a Black.”

Dawn’s monologue deals with how she was raised to devote her life to social justice, and how she has compromised herself by successfully defending a young black man she knew was guilty because of her own white-savior complex.

As “White Noise” hurtles toward its conclusion, it comes down to two men, master and slave, alone in a bowling alley and seemingly destined to destroy each other.

But it’s a standoff. The affection between them? Over. Their seemingly happy history? Erased.

Racism and power relations have taken care of that.

But in a burst of irony, Leo starts drawing again. Misha’s show takes off. Dawn ends up with a better job. Ralph gets published in The New Yorker.

I have listened and I was left wondering whether there is a master-slave relationship buried in each of us and what exactly do we wrap ourselves in order to keep from hearing the lies that we live by?

“White Noise” is a provocative play.

Thomas Sadoski, Daveed Diggs, Zoë Winters, and Sheria Irving
 

ELAINE MAY TRIUMPHS IN 'THE WAVERLY GALLERY'

Elaine May

HENRY EDWARDS - NEW YORK - October 30, 2018

Talk about surprises!

The news that the notoriously brilliant and rarely if ever seen Elaine May was returning to Broadway for the first time in more than 50 years in Kenneth Lonergan’s “The Waverly Gallery” triggered monumental disbelief.

Check out the liner notes to peerless comedy duo Nichols and May’s 1959 album, “Improvisations to Music,” and you will discover May’s famously terse bio: “Miss May does not exist.”

Not much has changed since then. The illustrious writer-screenwriter-film director-actress-comedienne was - is and seemingly will always be - elusive and reclusive.

Yet unimaginably as it may seem, at the age of 86, the legendary outlier has chosen to perform on Broadway for the second time in a career of 62 years.

May’s sole appearance on the Great White Way occurred in 1960 when then-comedy partner Mike Nichols and she brought “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May” to the John Golden Theatre for an antic 306 performances. (Coincidentally, the Golden currently houses “The Waverly Gallery.”)

Nichols and May were hailed as the freshest, most inventive, and most influential social satirists of their day. And they were!

A year later, despite famous and popularity, the independent, headstrong - and perhaps heedless - duo terminated an astonishingly successful four-year partnership.

Countless comedians since then have been influenced by the bite and sophistication of their comedic inventiveness.

Nichols went on to become, as a director, a colossus of the stage and screen, earning nine Tony awards along the way; as a performer, writer, and director, May created her own idiosyncratic and indelible body of work while (no surprise there) largely staying out of the public eye.

May wrote seven screenplays, including the Oscar-nominated “Heaven Can Wait” and “Primary Colors”; wrote and directed the offbeat movie comedies “A New Leaf,” “Mikey & Nicky,” “The Heartbreak Kid,” and fabled disaster “Ishtar” – May was the first woman since Ida Lupino in the 1950s to direct a studio film; and became one of Hollywood’s most prolific and respected uncredited script doctors (“Tootsie”, “Reds,” “Wolf”).

In the early 1950s, May studied acting with the Russian-born character actress and teacher Maria Ouspenskaya, one of the original members of Stanislavski’s company.  

That May is Method trained and delivered stealthily funny performances in such films as “A New Leaf,” “Enter Laughing,” “California Suite,” and “Small Time Crooks” perhaps provides a clue to the genius of her performance in “The Waverly Galley.”

The character she portrays in Lonergan’s play, 85-year-old Gladys Green is a retired lawyer, old-time, rabble-rousing leftie, widow, mother and grandmother.

Gladys’s life revolves around the neighborhood art gallery she manages in a tiny rented space on Waverly Place in the West Village.

The octogenarian is also waging war against her descent into dementia.  

Gladys has always been a great talker.  Now misunderstandings, constant repetitions, confusions, bewilderment and fear-inducing dead silences punctuate her conversations. No matter what happens and despite a hearing aid that never cooperates, she ends each conversation with a broad smile in the hope it will smooth over the agonizing situation.

Lonergan’s play is a memory play based on the final years of his own grandmother.

The writer’s uncannily specific recollections issue forth from the mouth of Gladys’s grandson Daniel Reed (Lucas Hedges, nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea,” and making his Broadway debut).

Daniel is in his 20s, and a speechwriter for the EPA.

“This really happened to her,” he tells the audience, “and it seems like somebody should remember it.”

His recollections trace Gladys’s step-by-step descent as she loses her grip on reality and her sense of self fades to nothing.

At the same time, Daniel characterizes the overwhelming confusion and wrenching desperation overtakes his family of “liberal Upper West Side atheistic Jewish intellectuals” as Gladys worsens.

Her decline and the dread that accompanies it threatens the sanity of his exhausted mother (Joan Allen), stepfather Howard Fine (David Cromer) and visiting artist Don Bowman (Michael Cera), transforming their everyday lives into waking nightmares.

“The Waverly Gallery” received its original production Off-Broadway in 2001 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Despite the pain of revisiting the story, playwright Lonergan is thrilled to see his effort finally make its Broadway bow nearly 20 years after its Off Broadway premiere.

“In a funny way, it was nice to see my family again, as they were then, and it was nice to see my grandmother again, in a way. But that was a rough time. The material is very difficult for me and for anyone who’s been through anything like what the characters in the play are going through,” says the Oscar-winning writer and director of the searing 2016 film “Manchester by the Sea.”

Last year, Lonergan’s 2001 Off Broadway success, “Lobby Hero,” also made the move to the Main Stem, where it had the privilege of inaugurating Second Stage’s Broadway home, the renovated Helen Hayes Theatre and received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

Both endeavors are highly realistic, emphasize character and situation over plot and display Lonergan’s devotion to the accurate representation of the language and experience of his characters.

And there is plenty of poignancy in the writing.  

“The Waverly Gallery” arrives on Broadway with director Lila Neugebauer making her Main Stem debut.

It’s been my point of the view that the director’s Off Broadway record has been spotty.

I was not a fan of her treatment of the Edward Albee classic, “The Zoo Story,” Tracey Letts’s “Mary Page Marlowe” or Lily Thorne’s deadly “Peace for Mary Frances”; on the other hand, Neugebauer’s staging of Sarah DeLappe’s uncompromising take on a teenage girls soccer team, “The Wolves,” was undiluted perfection.

And so is her direction of “The Waverly Gallery.”

From the outset that Gladys is doomed is no secret and the audience is there to pay witness the chronicle of chronicle of a witness the progression of her breakdown that is recalled with seeming tape recorder specificity.

It is a tragic situation and one that must never be perceived as maudlin and a tearjerker.

Thankfully, Neugebauer and her cast have the great good sense never to overplay their hands or resort to sentimentality.

And May's remarkably detailed, yet extraordinarily subtle performance is gently overpowering. She is sweet and helpless, always smart and a fighter at war with her loss of memory and comprehension. What winds up being left is merely the essence of what once was and even that is fading.

Lucas Hedges’s Daniel, lives in the same Greenwich Village building as his grandmother and Gladys rings his doorbell three times a night in succession, crying out in a deepening state of confusion and despair unable to remember what he does for a living or where she put her keys or sometimes even who he is.

May and Hedges prove to be exquisite scene partners with wondrous timing, so funny and so awfully sad all at the same time.

Lucas Hedges

Joan Allen’s Ellen does everything she can to cope with her mother, before exploding in a fit of heartbreaking rage. At every turn, her performance radiates heartfelt humanity.

David Cromer (yes, the brilliant director of “Our Town” and “The Band’s Visit”) is perfect as the insensitive psychoanalyst who gets caught up in an exasperating dialogue with Gladys.

Michael Cera, a veteran of Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth” and “Lobby Hero,” generates enormous laughter when the out-of-towner’s car is vandalized and he squawks: “I gotta admit I’m very, very discouraged by this city.”

David Zinn's designs bring to life Ellen’s West Side apartment, Gladys’s Village apartment, and her miniscule Waverly Place gallery.

Tal Yarden's vintage films of New York street life in decades past are projected on a big gray wall that descends in front of the set during each scene change.

“I tried to get the details right,” says Cera’s Don, “because that’s what you remember when you think about something, so I tried like hell to get them the way they are.”

“The Waverly Gallery” is a theatrical gem that captures the details with noteworthy perfection.

There is no way it will not bring tears to your eyes.

Talk about surprises! Here is one for the record books!

Michael Cera, Lucas Hedges, Elaine May