“White Girl in Danger,” a soap opera satire by Michael R. Jackson, will be staged in New York next spring by Second Stage and Vineyard theaters.
As a child, Michael R. Jackson would religiously watch soap operas with his great-aunt. “Days of Our Lives.” “Another World.” “Santa Barbara.” “The Young and the Restless.”
He kept watching through high school. He interned at “All My Children” in college. And then he moved to New York, hoping to become a soap opera writer.
Instead, he became a dramatist, and an acclaimed one at that: His first musical, “A Strange Loop,” a meta take on a Broadway usher writing his own musical, won both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best musical, and it’s now running on Broadway.
Next spring, his sophomore musical will arrive Off Broadway. It’s called “White Girl in Danger,” and it’s a race-conscious sendup of the soap opera genre.
“White Girl in Danger” imagines a soap opera set in a town called Allwhite, with a group of Black characters, called Blackgrounds, who are featured only in story lines about slavery and policing. One of those characters, Keesha, seeks to break that pattern by seizing a central story line from a trio of white protagonists, Meagan, Maegan and Megan, but in so doing she also risks running afoul of an Allwhite killer.
“There’s a lot of genre elements coming from the soap opera, Lifetime movie, melodrama world,” Jackson said. “The idea for the show was going to be a broad satire, but then these conversations around representation, diversity, equity, inclusion started to happen in the theater world, and I started to think about those issues, and suddenly one molecule attached itself to another.”
Jackson has been developing the musical since 2017, and last summer the incubator New York Stage and Film presented a two-day, concert-style reading of it in the Hudson Valley.
The musical, with a 12-person cast, will be jointly produced by two New York nonprofits, Vineyard Theater and Second Stage Theater, and will be staged next spring at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. The show, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly, is scheduled to start previews on March 15 and open April 10.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
