Robert Quillen Camp’s play, about an antiracist discussion group, starts out naturalistically, but then pivots, with bloody abandon, to the absurd.
“This orgy of white monstrosity must cease! Now! NOW!”
Barked at maximum volume, the command is hard to ignore. And indeed, it puts a screechy brake on one of the most exhilaratingly bizarre scenes of the theatrical summer, if not year, toward the end of the new show “White on White.”
The reprieve is temporary: The action revs up again, and at one point I could not help but gasp in horrified delight, or maybe it was delighted horror — the two are closely intertwined in Robert Quillen Camp’s absurdist, outrageous Grand Guignol, which recently opened at the Off Off Broadway space JACK in Brooklyn.
As far as setups go, the one in this show, presented by the Hoi Polloi company (“Three Pianos”), is very familiar: A seemingly innocuous confab makes a hard turn into unexpected terrain. Fictional weddings, funerals, Thanksgivings and Christmases have long had a habit of going off the rails; in recent years the battlefield has moved away from those family-centric occasions to gatherings of various types — work meetings, recovery groups, political assemblies — that tend to end with people blowing a gasket and telling each other what’s what. (Tracy Letts’s “The Minutes,” currently on Broadway, is the latest example, about a small town’s City Council.)
And so it is in “White on White,” which takes place during a meeting of an antiracist discussion group hosted by Hannah (Nisi Sturgis) in her suburban home — the participants are white so they can avoid “putting an undue burden on people of color,” as Hannah’s husband, Peter (Brandt Adams), puts it. Most of the audience members sit in a large circle, as if we, too, were in Hannah’s beige, characterless living room. (Mimi Lien is the scenic design consultant.)
The first two-thirds of the show — directed by Alec Duffy, who also wrote the music, and Lori Elizabeth Parquet — focus on an exquisitely observed dissection of progressive mores and subtle class friction. Michelle (Rebecca Mozo), a blithely entitled type-A mom, pressures the mechanic O’Reilly (Peter Mills Weiss, “While You Were Partying”) into taking a look at her car, even though he is overworked. O’Reilly is the only one helping himself to the snacks.
Peter is sitting in a meeting for the first time, and at first we discover the group through his eyes. Adams communicates Peter’s befuddlement through a seemingly blank face and almost imperceptibly widening eyes as the proceedings grow increasingly odd. The first obvious sign may be when the attendees start singing cryptic ditties with titles like “A Ship Doesn’t Capsize,” backed by Michelle’s partner, Riley (Dinah Berkeley), on an autoharp. When the group’s female members leave the room for a separate conversation, we are left with the men, including Peter, and an ominous pulse grows louder in the background — Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste’s sound design helps create a disquieting atmosphere as the cultish vibe that had been simmering gets closer to a boil.
“White on White” appears to target the way some white people find comfort in rituals of performative expiation. Until, that is, they reach the point where self-analysis ends and self-interest begins.
But instead of being yet another chatty, naturalistic couch play, the show throws itself into the grotesque, when the essence of whiteness manifests in a burst of body horror as surreal as it is funny. That over-the-top scene does not resolve anything for characters or viewers alike — Camp refrains from offering a cathartic ending — but its go-for-broke delirium is uncommonly satisfying.
White on White
Through July 16 at Jack, Brooklyn; jackny.org/white-on-white. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
