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‘White’ uses comedy to examine certain hard truths
The play, by Pulitzer Prize winner James IJames, opens Thursday at the Off-Central.
The new production at the Off-Central is White, from Pulitzer Prize-winner James Ijames. It’s the sort of dark comedy that’s intended to make an audience uncomfortable, even as they’re laughing.
A white painter can’t get his work shown in a tony, big-city art museum; they’re exclusively looking for persons of color for a “New Voices”-type exhibition.
Frustrated, he hires a Black actress to pretend she created his paintings.
Ijames (Fat Ham) uses a palette of racism, sexism, identity (the artist happens to be gay) and pure art snobbery to hang White on the wall.
Weston Allen plays Gus, the artist.
“The show allows people a further reminder of what we are currently dealing with in our world,” pointed out director Travis Ray. “It deals with how we manage ourselves, and how me manage things that are usually out of our control, but we attempt to. And the play asks questions.
“The playwright does a great job of having us hear something, and sit in it, and then it breaks through with comedy. Which I think is amazing. It’s definitely a combo.”
Opening Thursday and running through Oct. 19, White is based on something that actually happened, in 2014 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
The cast includes Weston Allen as Gus, the artist; Keith Batchelor as Gus’ boyfriend Tanner; Caron Davis as Vanessa, the actress who becomes, in a Pygmalion-esque turn of events, the “artist” Balkonaé; and Jen Casler as museum curator Jane.
Director Travis Ray.
Washington, D.C.’s DC Theater Arts sang the show’s praises when it opened there in 2017, calling it “audacious and hilarious … It’s bold, outlandish, insightful, and as exciting a play as you’re likely to see this year.”
Ray, an adjunct professor of theater at New College in Sarasota who’s worked extensively with that area’s West Coast Black Theatre and Florida Studio Theatre, will be part of a meet-the-creatives talkback at the Off-Central after Thursday’s performance of White.
There are conversations to be had, about nerves that have been touched.
“I think pieces like this are important because most people don’t want to feel uncomfortable,” Ray said. “Most people shy away from that. We don’t, as a people of various races and sexual orientations, we don’t all have a space where we feel safe to ask these simple questions. And this show does that.
“This is one where you’ll laugh and have a good time, but at the end of the day I guarantee this is a show you’ll learn something from. And I think that’s more important than feeling uncomfortable.”
The Off-Central is at 2260 1st Avenue S., St. Petersburg. For showtimes and tickets, visit the website at this link.
