Is there any playwright as daring as Suzan-Lori Parks? This is the woman who wrote a year’s worth of plays every day for an entire year (365 Days/365 Plays). Her Pulitzer Prize–winning Topdog/Underdog centered on a pair of African-American brothers named Booth and Lincoln; you can guess how that ended. Her lyrical one-act The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire world, aka the Negro Book of the Dead, given a beautifully timely revival in 2016 by the Signature Theatre, features such characters as Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork, Black Woman With Fried Drumstick, and Black Man With Watermelon. Her Civil War–set epic Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) offers a slave his freedom—if he’ll join his master in fighting for the Confederacy.
Yet in some ways, White Noise, which just opened at the Public Theater, might be her most wildly ambitious work yet—a modern-day exploration of race, culture, and identity filtered through the lens of slavery. But this is no era-appropriate reenactment or academic treatise. Rather, Parks dares to explore the practicalities of slavery in contemporary society, in a way you surely never, ever imagined: What happens when self-described “fractured and angry and edgy black visual artist” Leo (Hamilton’s Tony-winning breakout star Daveed Diggs) asks his moneyed white college-professor best friend, Ralph (Thomas Sadoski, who’s perfected the sympathetic A-hole role), to “buy” him?
The sheer ridiculousness practically floors Ralph, not to mention their respective girlfriends: Misha (the spectacular Sheria Irving), star of her own livestreamed weekly show called Ask a Black (tagline: “where someone like you can feel free to ask something of someone like me”), who’s with Ralph but used to be with Leo; and do-gooder lawyer Dawn (Zoë Winters), who’s with Leo but used to be with Ralph.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★★ review here.]
But Leo, who’s just been roughed up by the cops, presents a pretty reasonable explanation for his unreasonable proposal: “Black folks out there every day are falling prey to the anger, the unarticulated self-loathing, the unfathomable despair—so under the pressure, they end up doing a crime and getting locked up and then, what, then they’re slaves to the system. Boom.” And he needs this, he says, in order to overcome the ordeal of having his head pounded into the pavement. “The pain and rage need to get worked out of my system. I’ll take myself to the lowest place and know for ever after, that if I can bear it, then I can bear anything.” (This level-headed line of reasoning is outlined, incidentally, in a bowling alley, a regular meeting spot for the quartet of friends. Leo and Ralph lettered in the sport—yes, friends, bowling is a sport—in college, and celebrate strikes like NFL players dancing in the end zone.)
Parks makes such a sound argument, and Diggs is so persuasive—he’s a spectacular actor (for even further proof, check out the recent film Blindspotting, which he headlined and cowrote with Rafael Casal)—that this ludicrous-in-theory notion starts to actually sound workable. Yes, you find yourself nodding. If it helps Leo, why not? And since Ralph will cut him a check for $89,000—to pay off Leo’s credit cards and student loans—all the better, right?
Er…wrong. The genius of White Noise isn’t simply in the idea; it’s in where Parks—and her tight-knit cast, guided by Public artistic director Oskar Eustis—takes it, and she takes it to some very, very disturbing places. Let’s just say that Ralph, who brags that his students call him “Righteous Ralph,” quickly devolves into Self-Righteous Ralph, and becomes less concerned with doing the right thing (i.e., helping his friend) than doing the white thing.
As Ralph says in a particularly crass moment: “This slave shit don’t have an expiration date.” He’s ostensibly quoting his agent, but, sadly, no—it doesn’t. “This is an endless goldmine. And I’ve struck it.” Actually, Suzan-Lori Parks has.
White Noise opened March 20, 2019, and runs through May 5. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
