The initial information you need on The Whitney Album, Jillian Walker’s 90-minute presentation now on Walker Street – which she considers meaningful, and why not? – is that it isn’t a play. By turns and sometimes simultaneously, it’s a ritual and/or a lecture.
When she and Stephanie Weeks enter singing, stomping, and percussive playing, Walker is so physically stunning, audience members (congregants?) are likely to go along with anything she wants those gathered to go along with.
Tall, lean, elegant in Jojo Siu’s svelte costume with headpiece, she declares that after losing out on a Harvard teaching position, she spent two years becoming an “Afro-indigenous priest.” Greeting the already attentive crowd as such, she’s so enthralling a celebrant that she could be invoking and celebrating anything, and spectators would fall in line.
Front and center on Peiyi Wong’s spare, predominantly white and equally elegant set is a sizable golden bowl that goes an estimable way toward establishing the ritual Whitney Album element. Walker and Weeks pick up fancy flasks and pour ocean water into the capacious bowl, as if preparing baptismal liquid, or something along those lines.
Hardly incidentally and before The Whitney Album begins, and in the pre-lights-up moment, a downstage-left record player, seen to by actor/soundman Ben Jalosa Williams, has been airing Whitney Houston to create Walker’s required mood. (P.S.: Houston’s voice is much more effective than much of the noise blasted incessantly these ear-splitting, pre-curtain-up days.)
The preview of imminent attractions marked, Walker moves into the ritual-lecturing. She’s chosen Houston as her example of the triumph and plight of Black women in contemporary society. It’s a good, even inspired, choice. When, however Williams, leaving his sound equipment for some later moments, attempts to get Houston chatting, he doesn’t get far.
Whitney finds it difficult to speak for herself, a condition substantiating Walker’s theorizing. Mother Cissy warrants a nod but not onetime husband Bobby Brown. (For those wondering if she ever mentions Clive Davis, the Columbia Records CEO, later Arista founder and foremost corporate Houston champion, the answer is no, she doesn’t. There is, however, a fleeting reference to someone called “Clyde.”)
Walker’s ardent message – with at times Walker and Weeks both portraying Houston — is that the ultimately drug-plagued icon faced psychological problems just as Black women have through the ages. She phrases it like this: “How do I/we honor Whitney Houston by way of Sally Hemings?” For a time, she even impersonates Houston by putting on a flowing wig; she’s making much of a wig’s transforming and restricting attributes.
Houston isn’t the only subject that Walker addresses, sometimes as a character called Gogo and often teaming with Weeks when returning to the golden bowl for more pouring from the flasks. Other fluids are also addressed in Walker’s poetic prose. (Don’t ask about Gogo. This participant wasn’t sure about her but contentedly continued to go with the mesmerizing flow.)
Sweat is a body fluid receiving special attention when Walker begins emphasizing physical and emotional love. She recognizes sweat as a common manifestation of physical love. Describing perspiration as “a familiar corporeal offering,” she also recognizes it as a manifestation of shame and guilt.
Notably throughout the often spiritual proceedings, music dominates, much of it Whitney’s, some of it intoned by Walker (strains of the national anthem) and Weeks. Mahalia Jackson is heard as well – or at least someone sounding like the great Mahalia singing about freedom.
Eventually, Houston includes other topics (smoke, for one), but though her script indicates she has method to her presentation, the effects occasionally seem random, Whitney lost in the mist.
And then Walker gets to her seemingly unifying goal. For the final segment she declares her ultimate belief is that everything at all significant in life is about people, is about bringing people together. She not only insists on it in dialog, she literalizes it. For the last several minutes, she asks all audience members to join her in the playing area.
Few in the audience with which this reviewer attended hesitated even a second or two before leaving their shoes by their seat and forming a large circle with her and Weeks on the stage floor. (Full disclosure: This reviewer, no longer a participant but now a professional observer, remained in his seat, loafers on.)
When circled, Walker, Weeks, and patrons indulged in two “vibes”: harmonized chants, including a lyric about water representing love. That may have had patrons once again thinking of the ritual bowl and the notion that everything in life is connected.
Okay, yes, Walker closes her ritual-lecture wrapped in a cliché about people ultimately being important; but exclaiming it, she exudes such charm that only non-believers will resist. She’s a people person. Shouldn’t we all be?
The Whitney Album opened June 6, 2023, at Soho Rep and runs through July 2. Tickets and information: sohorep.org
