League of Professional Theatre Women

December 8, 2022

For immediate Release         

Contact: Meg Gilbert
Press@TheatreWomen.org
Tel: (646) 386-6579

THE LEAGUE OF PROFESSIONAL THEATRE WOMEN LAUNCHES

COMPREHENSIVE PAY EQUITY RESEARCH STUDY

AS A PART OF THIER 40TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

As part of its mission to advocate for parity in employment, compensation and recognition for women theatre practitioners through industry-wide initiatives and public policy, the League of Professional Theatre Women (LPTW) announces the launch of an industry-wide, comprehensive pay equity research study.  Focusing on New York City and New York State theatre professionals in a variety of disciplines, the study will include qualitative and qualitative data collected through anonymous surveys and interviews in order to assess economic equity and hiring practices during the 2018 – 2022 seasons.

The Study is developed in partnership with the research firm Network for Culture & Arts Policy (NCAP) to examine pay equity, opportunities, negotiation practices, and the financial needs of theatre professionals across New York.  It will be distributed to theatre professionals through unions, membership organizations, theatre staff, and guilds.  All theatre professionals are encouraged to participate.  All responses will be collected anonymously.

The study will remain open through December 23, 2022.  All theatre professionals working or living in New York State can access the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LPTWEquity

Results will be analyzed and shared via industry convenings, town hall gatherings, and a full report of findings in fall 2023. The data will help to determine the LPTW’s priorities for targeted programming to support pay equity among industry professionals and to facilitate dialogue among industry leaders. 

“We are proud and excited that LPTW is conducting this important research project as part of our 40th Anniversary celebration,” said LPTW co-presidents Katrin Hilbe and Ludovica Villar-Hauser. “Despite recent legislation concerning hiring practices – equal pay for equal work, transparency in salary ranges for job postings  – there is still an enormous amount of secrecy surrounding money.  This study is an important step towards true gender equity with regard to salaries and pay.”

The LPTW Pay Equity Research Study is supported in part by a grant from NYSCA Regional Economic Development Councils.

The League of Professional Theatre Women, (LPTW), now celebrating its 40th Anniversary, is a membership organization championing women in theatre and advocating for increased equity and access for all theatre women. Our programs and initiatives create community, cultivate leadership, and increase opportunities and recognition for women working in theatre. The organization provides support, networking and collaboration mechanisms for members, and offers professional development and educational opportunities for all theatre women and the general public. The LPTW celebrates the historic contributions and contemporary achievements of women in theatre, both nationally and around the globe, and advocates for parity in employment, compensation and recognition for women theatre practitioners through industry-wide initiatives and public policy proposals.

The Network for Culture and Arts policy (NCAP) is a full-service research and consulting firm committed to advancing organizations and individuals that support cultural and social initiatives, programs and enterprises from idea formation to realized implementation.  Through mixed methods research, paired with expert strategic planning and implementation services, NCAP examines cultural and social activities, trends, policies, and practices that aid in shaping our lived experiences. We work with a range of cross-sector partners to substantively investigate how cultural activity and socially responsible investments offer economic and developmental benefits to enrich our communities in concrete ways that advance equity, access and prosperity.

The Regional Economic Development Councils (REDCs) support the state’s innovative approach to economic development, which empowers regional stakeholders to establish pathways to prosperity, mapped out in regional strategic plans. Through the REDCs, community, business, academic leaders, and members of the public in each region of the state put to work their unique knowledge and understanding of local priorities and assets to help direct state investment in support of job creation and economic growth.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is perhaps one of the most insightful novelists and humorists of the twentieth-twenty-first century. Robert B. Weide, whose funny bone and fascination with great comedians (he won awards for his work on his documentaries about Lennie Bruce and W.C. Fields) found him helping Larry David launch Curb Your Enthusiasm which he then directed the first five years of the show, winning awards.

That Weide adored Vonnegut as a teenager and was influenced in his career by Vonnegut’s sardonic humor and philosophical, dire wisdom that translated into crazy characters and sci-fi-like plots, seems a no brainer; for at heart, Vonnegut, like all comedians creates humor and irony from soul hell and torment. Where Weide stands out from the rest of the Vonnegut acolytes is that early on in his struggling career, he contacted Vonnegut expressing interest in making a documentary about his hero. When Vonnegut accepted, Weide began the long journey (almost 40 years) to get the film made.

However, like much of what we experience in life, it is the journey that is paramount, and for both Vonnegut and Weide, the journey of working together, connecting and becoming friends seemed to be the most vital enjoyment of their collaboration. That eventually, Weide was able to sift through the mounds of Vonnegut pictures, family films, Weide interviews with family, and Vonnegut on trains and in cars and taking stock of the video clips of his speaking tours to cobble together a noteworthy and maverick film about Vonnegut’s life, will be treasured by fans and newbees alike.

Most importantly, the film introduces an entirely new generation of ironists and satirists to Vonnegut’s soulful miseries turned into sardonic social commentary. Vonnegut always found the human comedy of politics, cultural idiocies and their attendant propaganda pushers cannon fodder for his word bazookas. Weide, who wrote and produced the film and co-directed it with Don Argott, with his editing team, selected the most salient Vonnegut quotes from his works and interspersed them with clips of his videoed tours to pepper a chronicle of Vonnegut’s life in a back and forth circular narration. When useful, Weide has Sam Waterson read some of the quotes from the novels, etc. The rendering is enthralling and what emerges is the everyman that even the most jaded of nihilists will find themselves agreeing with, despite themselves.

What makes the film extraordinary is that in becoming so familiar with his subject, Weide’s conveyance to present him is as a documentary in a documentary. In structure, it becomes downright Vonnegutesque. Vonnegut continually interrupted the flow of action in some of his novels by interjecting the writer’s voice, indeed, perhaps his alter ego in an absurd fashion as we see in drawings in Breakfast of Champions.

Likewise, Weide interrupts his Vonnegut chronicle to interject his thoughts about Vonnegut and his own life in making the documentary. Weide parallels the time period of his life with his ongoing interviews and communications with Vonnegut, critics and his children. He acts almost as an apologist would in averring and showing why it took him so long to make the film. What I find so memorable is that we see both men aging into success and/or the next stages of their lives. It is ironic that now, after his death, Vonnegut is turning over a new chapter in having his legacy brought forth once more; interestingly, though not a lot of fans followed him here, though he never left off writing. With his revitalized legacy in Weide’s film, he will be rediscovered, discovered, read and reread, and appreciated or damned for his great levity and sage quips and droll, nightmare plot scenarios…and his essays and short stories.

As a writer I found the documentary in a documentary structure intriguing and rather tongue-in cheek. It twits the documentary genre because Weide makes it very clear that he is completely enamored of this great social satirist and writer and thrilled that he was his friend. That intimacy and revelation was Weide’s choice and at one point, he also makes it clear that with all that he has put into this film, there is much more that was left out, i.e. the personal moments that happened between the two friends.

Rather than to point out all of the aspects of the Vonnegut chronicle, which Weide seems to leave no stone unturned in Vonnegut’s life, he shows the arc of Vonnegut’s career influences and development. Weide jumps around which makes the documentary intriguing, as he makes connections with his own insights and life, then jumps back and forth, past to present to past to current time. Superb. None of this is in chronological order per se; it is in thematic order. For example we discover late into the film that Vonnegut’s mom committed suicide. WHAT! We get to draw the conclusions as Vonnegut discusses how they found her.

We discover how and where Vonnegut grew up, his joining the service and fighting in WWII to experience the seminal aftermath of the bombing of Dresden, Germany which haunted him for all of his life even after he attempted to expurgate it in his first novel of great success, Slaughterhouse Five. The novel, was a war story about a man who’d become “unstuck in time,” with an ability to leap through life, out of time rather like the mystical experience Vonnegut explains he had in Germany when he envisioned the disaster of Dresden before it happened.

Weide leads us to discover how he developed his humor and social insights about technology; his brother with whom he was close was a world class scientist, forward thinking and forward moving. At times Vonnegut lived hand to mouth after he worked in the GE empire in Schenectady and left it because writing copy was nullifying. But his first wife encouraged him to write fiction; he supported himself writing short stories in the hey day of short story writers, for magazines like Colliers, until TV came and the market dried up. A key turning point in his life and career was the death of his sister and his brother-in-law. He accepted responsibility for taking in their four sons and raising them in a house of chaos. The interviews with Vonnegut’s children are priceless.

Vonnegut’s struggles were the nerve-wracking journey that ended in bankruptcy and forced the family to move and Vonnegut to teach to make some money until he struck gold with Slaughterhouse Five, became a celebrity, hobnobbed with famous writers and divorced his wife, though he stayed close to his three children. In the republication of the novels he wrote before Slaughterhouse Five, he earned enough money to be comfortable, if not happy; indeed, he became more ironic and annoyed and wrote about it with less success and popularity which he never returned to after the 1970s. It was around this time that Weide found him and the interviews with Vonnegut, his children and noted writers and friends and Vonnegut’s novel writing and speaking engagements continued, though his popularity waned. Interestingly, they collaborated on a film based on Vonnegut’s Mother Night, which was hugely unsuccessful.

Though some critics of the film find it distracting that Weide interjects himself in the film with their relationship, I found the clips profound. Weide is revealing the decades long influence Vonnegut had upon his life and career. Perhaps, it is one of the reasons that Weide even made the film at all; to get down as much as he could that fans would appreciate, for they understand Vonnegut’s profound influence. Yet, in what Weide left out, only he will be reminded of the most vital and personal portions he alone experienced, that he keeps as a treasure to himself. For those who don’t like Vonnegut, it’s a ho hum. For fans, their relationship humanizes Vonnegut who had clay feet after his divorce and falling off the Best Seller lists into a kind of writer celebrity oblivion.

However, as one does acknowledge with close friends, all of it, even what might be the little insignificances are important. And enough of the personal intimacies come through between Weide and Vonnegut and his family (smoking a Pall Mall cigarette with his daughter en memoriam) that I found myself broken-hearted that I got to experience Vonnegut in a new way, and that he left this planet and I was too caught up in my own life to stop a moment and reflect about his books and why they so moved me at the time. Though I was a great Vonnegut fan in college, I stopped reading him, put off by his son’s “revelations” about himself and his father.

For me and for others, Weide’s film opens up a new door to appreciate Vonnegut the social critic and voice of thunder railing against the worst of human ills. And we get to appreciate the how and why he was who he was, an American man who carved a place for himself in the minds of individuals to influence their thinking philosophically. For that alone this film is vitally current. Vonnegut fits with our time even more so than the time that found him resonant.

KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME  is available in theaters and on VOD
VIEW TRAILER HERE.

The World Premiere of All These Sons directed by Oscar-nominated Bing Liu (Minding the Gap) currently screens in Documentary Competition at Tribeca Film Festival. Also, the film is the feature debut of award-winning editor Joshua Altman. Accordingly, to catch this extraordinarily heartfelt work celebrating Tribeca’s twentieth year, make sure to screen it by 20 of June the festival’s end date.

One cannot help but become involved with the young men, their mentors and guides that Bing Liu shadows and interviews in this intimate portrait about two Chicago programs designed to help black communities. Uniquely dedicated to social and personal responsibility, the programs target the South and West sides of Chicago. And they particularly address gun violence. Bing Liu’s portrait is a timely and in depth perspective showing how individuals in these black communities work to re-educate, empower and heal young at-risk black men.

For decades Chicago’s gun and gang violence on the South and West sides garnered national headlines. Sadly, the terrible fact remains that the city government attacks the problem in a limited fashion. First they beef up the aggressive policing measures. Second, the police practice tough enforcement rules. Does police brutality occur? Of course as police use necessary force, sometimes ignoring excessive force which tips over into brutality. Unfortunately, abuses benefit no one. And they create divisions in an already wounded community.

By targeting those who have little opportunity to escape violent neighborhoods, the troubles circle and repeat. Violence never mitigates violence. Instead, it creates hopelessness. Indeed, oftentimes, such short-sighted plans exacerbate violence, a condition that brought Chicagoans to the current state of affairs.

Embedding themselves, Bing Liu and his team shadow two community members who introduce them to the troubled neighborhoods and the programs that help mitigate violence. Billy Moore of Iman and Marshall Hatch, Jr of Maafa, lead effective programs with tremendous effort, love and care. Throughout, filmmakers enlighten us to Moore’s and Hatch, Jr.’s backstory and the backgrounds of those under their care. Indeed, Moore and Hatch, Jr.’s lives qualify them for this work. Having once been on the other end of violence, they know the score and hold nothing back to win over those in their programs.

As the filmmakers view group sessions, personal counseling and interview Moore and Hatch Jr., we understand how Iman and Maafa create a safe space. Ironically, the at-risk youth constantly look over their shoulders for gang vengeance to knock on their doors. Drive-bys in violent neighborhoods kill the innocent and the guilty. Throughout the documentary, we understand that these young men have either killed, been in jail or have lost loved ones as the casualties of turf wars and revenge.

The documentarians approach their research revealing a flare for ethnography. Powerfully, the subjects show how they attempt to change the conditions that produce gun deaths. Thus, the programs select those young men most at risk of being a victim or perpetrator. Before their acceptance, participants must dig deep. Finally, examining their fears and justifications, the young men confront the traumas in their own lives that perpetuate violence. 

When Bing Liu and Joshua Altman in cinema verite style follow Charles, Zay and Shamont as they confront their former identities to carve out new personas, we hook into the poignancy and humanity of the process. Realizing the benefit of their own honesty with themselves, participants thrive. Interestingly, they begin to make life-affirming choices. Of course, the daily fight requires they stick with the program and adhere to their mentor’s guidance. If they accomplish this difficult task, they will construct a better future for generations to come. Indeed, their hopefulness and sensitivity redefines and stops them from acting like violent stereotypes. Kudos to the filmmakers for their unfiltered, raw perspective of the participants’ stories. Bing LIu’s honest rendering reveals Charles’, Zay’s and Shamont’s vulnerability, authenticity and will to transform themselves.

All These Sons (a reference to Arthur Miller’s All My Sons) grabs one’s heart and emotions. Indeed, this occurs because Bing Liu and Joshua Altman allow us to hear and see these young men working hard against the cycle they could easily fall back into. Theirs remains a testimony for our time that change can happen. The filmmakers and all subjects in the film relay their powerful message with the faith that fewer may be lost than if the Iman and Maafa didn’t exist.

Finally, this documentary provides a viewpoint rarely seen. It focuses on its participants who speak their truth clearly, succinctly. As a result their bravery and courage to do the hard work of transformation shines.

All These Sons screens in the Documentary Competition category at Tribeca Film Festival 2021. Check for tickets and times by clicking HERE.

Shapeless, in the Midnighter category at Tribeca Film Festival like its title, remains fairly opaque if one doesn’t recognize the signs of Ivy’s (Kelly Murtagh) illness early on. Cleverly directed by Samantha Aldana and written by Kelly Murtagh and Bryce Parsons-Twesten, the film premiered at Tribeca in the “Midnight” category. Thus, this review will provide no spoiler alerts. Rather than to ruin the eerie emotional dislocations and frightening weirdness the director brilliantly conveys with sound (music selection) and visuals, let Shapeless wash over you when you see this intriguing film.

Indeed, the impressionistic Shapeless centers around this singer/entertainer who must confront her inner demons but doesn’t. By degrees we understand how Ivy’s unconscious undercurrents surface, then retreat, then repeat in ever-widening circular patterns. Tellingly, during Ivy’s isolated moments at home, we gradually understand the entrenched and frightening conflict. However, we never see beyond to the reasons or logic of what she created that fuels her addiction. Because the film avoids the psychological, a huge chasm of uncertainty opens to engulf us in Ivy’s misery. For what she wars against, no cure presents itself. And Ivy doesn’t seek one. She just charges on and moves deeper and deeper into denial.

Fittingly, the Tribeca Film Festival Midnighter takes place in the eerie, atmospheric and elusive city of New Orleans. Known for its jazz backwaters, ghostly tales, haunting sounds, sights and smells and voodoo, the city is the perfect setting. Overarchingly, the film suggests, infers, intimates. No substantive clarity surfaces. We just get to watch Ivy grow more and more debilitated with little explanation. However, Ivy’s choice to sing in clubs contributes to her addiction. Yet, ultimately, her sickness threatens to destroy her singing career. In some ways, dependence on drugs would be easier for her to overcome. What she battles runs so deep that it refashions her into a strange creature. Thus, the fantastic becomes a part of her nature and in turn devours the health and wholeness she would seek.

Finally, Ivy, addicted to self-destructive behaviors on one level becomes further addicted to her fantastic response to those behaviors. Two people, the creature and the woman who seeks salvation, her outer and inner life rock her soul.

The director’s decisions about sound, editing and set design to imbue characterization remain spot-on. And the overall effect unbalances the viewer. Subsequently, as the film enthralls, one becomes more displaced about understanding Ivy. Conclusively, when the viewer realizes the addiction threatens Ivy’s life, yet she can’t overcome it, the shock settles into numbness. This parallels Ivy’s experience. Her situation can’t be that bad. We think as she thinks. Gradually, the viewer swept up in Ivy’s denial, accepts it as circumstance: “it is what it is.” Nevertheless, the director clues in the audience that her condition must not be ignored. And eventually we understand why, though we don’t ever find out the “why” of it.

Based on a true story of Kelly Murtagh’s personal struggle (she also co-wrote the screenplay) Shapeless becomes a cautionary tale of lies, denial, addiction, self-destruction with no resolution. Murtagh’s performance elucidates the hopelessness of those addicted and swept up with illnesses like hers. Her performance in effecting Ivy’s gradual decline in her singing voice which starts out as merely adequate, shines with understanding. Indeed, Murtagh portrays Ivy’s denial and acceptance of what she does to herself with brilliance.

The film should be seen for many reasons. Two key reasons remain Murtagh’s subtle, nuanced portrayal and Aldana’s stylized rendering of Ivy’s condition and its impact on her life. Shapless screens at Tribeca Film Festival. For tickets and times check this link: HERE.

Daveed Diggs, Zoe Winters in ‘White Noise,’ Zoë Winters, Suzan-Lori Parks, the Public (Joan Marcus)

White Noise, written by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Oskar Eustis is a long thrill-ride into the psyches of thirty-somethings reeling from the abuses of previous generations’ willful negligence, regarding racial and gender mythologies. These stereotypes and demeaning memes abide with a vengeance below the surface of friendship power dynamics and mixed-race love relationships. Indeed, Parks suggests these are embedded in the American cultural DNA. And not even elaborate experiments such as the one long-time friends Leo (Daveed Diggs-always the consummate actor/performer and a joy to watch) and Ralph (Thomas Sadowski acts with moment-to-moment precision) embark on to expurgate Leo’s fears of being shot while black, ameliorate issues of racial identity politics int heir psyches..

The ultimate message in Parks’ White Noise remains: if these race and gender myths abide among friends, then what hope is there to modify, redeem and heal the nullifying cultural divides that exist among races, genders and economic classes that are at odds with one another? This is especially so in the retrograde Trump era when noxious white supremacist groups have been empowered to embrace hate and fear by a president who finds upholding the constitution and civil rights laws loathsome and inconvenient.

Daveed Diggs, Sheria Irving in ‘White Noise,’ directed by Oskar Eustis, written by Suzan-Lori Parks, the Public (Joan Marcus)

The inherent sado-masochistic, master/slave ethos deep within the mindset of all who have white/black relationships and their gender derivatives are mostly covered by social veneers of liberalism. Parks lays bare this phenomenon in a gradual reveal that she stages within an artificial construct prompted by Leo after he has been traumatized by the police. However, it is an idea that Leo long thought about to deal with his inability to sleep which he attributes to an ambient fear begun at childhood. It is a fear that has morphed like a monster into unsettled apprehensions about being black and living in a repressive culture of white privilege.

(Foreground, L-R): Thomas Sadoski, Daveed Diggs in ‘White Noise,’ directed by Oskar Eustis, written by Suzan-Lori Parks, the Public (Joan Marcus)

To free himself of the apprehension and feel that he is empowered in his own identity apart from racial, socio-political constructs, Leo devises the Master/Slave freedom project. He finally convinces his professor/writer friend Ralph to contract his services as a slave. Leo believes that if he is owned by Ralph who will be his Master for 40 (a magically symbolic number) days, he will be psychologically secure in the knowledge that he is protected by his “Master” in a culture that promulgates institutional racism and brutality against blacks via the justice system, economic inequality and unequal opportunity. As a result of this experiment at the end of the 40 days, Leo believes he will move to the core of his own reality and become free of the stereotypes, memes, lies, matrixes, objectifications and internalizations of abuse inherent in the culture and society of America.

During their extended friendship over the years, Ralph and Leo believed they had risen above racial gender politics and achieved a state of being “cool” and close with each other. Their friends/girlfriends Misha (the humorous Sheria Irving) and Dawn (the crisp, on point Zoë Winters) whom they’ve also known for years and have swapped as partners provide the security and sanctity of love and help to be the glue that has kept the group together and flourishing.

But during Leo’s and Ralph’s Master/Slave experiment, the women learn that they have been lying to themselves and each other. Indeed, for Leo, Ralph, Misha and Dawn their outward congeniality, love and closeness is a ruse, a construct they have created for and with each other to keep the “outer hellishness” of the culture away from them.

But the ruse hasn’t worked. In one way or another all are lost and feel incomplete, despite their relative successes, a fact revealed by the conclusion of the master/slave project.

Zoë Winters in ‘White Noise,’ directed by Oskar Eustis, written by Suzan-Lori Parks, the Public (Joan Marcus)

Indeed, the experiment overturns the foursome’s relationships, their perceptions of each other and ultimately how they view themselves. In the past they have fed off the group’s collective identity and while it has made them feel loved, it also has hindered them. Misha, Dawn and Ralph have cheated on each other and are incapable of fidelity, peace or joy. Though they were able to get around being “cheaters” with secrecy and forgiveness, they remain unfulfilled in love.

That each is searching is obvious, though they are not sure what they want or who they want it with, for they are identity challenged. Only Leo has been faithful to Dawn. Only Leo, Parks’ heroic protagonist has enough self-awareness to understand he is chained by the past in the present. He realizes that he will only be at peace by finding a way to free his being to live in harmony with himself.

Over the course of the master/slave project, Parks reveals how the dynamics of this foursome fragments. Their group identity together and with their partners cannot withstand their own hypocrisies which the project reveals. Ultimately, as Leo learns, they also learn how they’ve allowed the cultural constructs to imprison them. And their attempt to avoid these underlying hate-filled concepts that surreptitiously guide their behaviors in their friendships and love relationships with each other has thwarted their quest for peace and autonomy. Their ability to forge their own healthful identities and act on their self-knowledge with a confidence that will free them has been constrained.

(L to R): Thomas Sadoski, Daveed Diggs, Zoë Winters, Sheria Irving in ‘White Noise,’ directed by Oskar Eustis, written by Suzan-Lori Parks (Joan Marcus)

After Leo and Ralph “progress” into their simulated journey back into history to effect the egregious acts of domination and subservience, the worm turns: the relationships between them and among their girlfriends morph. “Freed” to imprison himself within the soul crushing white privilege dynamics, Ralph throws himself into the “master” tropes and changes his attitude to become more bossy and edgy with Leo. Influenced by members of a White Club he joins as a secret society, he leases a punishment slave collar for Leo and pushes the master/slave behavior to levels of  cruelty and exploitation he would not have thought possible of himself prior to their experiment.

Interestingly, Leo for a time is able to sleep and rest in this masochistic abuse of slavery because it is “out in the open,” and “in your face.” Above all, he is the “author and finisher” of his slave role having come up with the contract and agreeing to the amendments that Ralph suggests. By controlling the construct himself and choosing to be subservient, he empowers himself with what he learns. As he becomes freer, Ralph’s dignity and honor are compromised, though superficially he thinks he is empowered. However, by engaging as Leo’s “Master,” Ralph becomes more loathsome to himself. It is, a state which he fought his entire life, but was incapable of overcoming. Ironically, in the “Master” roll, he further enslaves himself as a hateful loser who “gets off” on being exploitive.

The lies and pretended altruisms end. Leo’s “cool” relationship with Dawn (Winters) is over and Misha’s (Irving) hidden sexual relationship with Dawn dissolves in a fight. However, Misha admits she will most probably still keep Ralph around because by having a white boyfriend, she feels protected as part of the privileged culture. That they will continue to be unfaithful to each other doesn’t matter.

Thomas Sadoski, Zoë Winters in ‘White Noise,’ directed by Oskar Eustis, written by Suzan-Lori Parks (Joan Marcus)

By the conclusion of Parks’ dramatic polemic, Leo understands his personal self-imposed oppression he internalized from the culture’s oppressive mores. He also realizes that like his ancestors, in spite of it, he will thrive and prosper. On the other hand Ralph’s weakness so manifests to himself that he is broken. Indeed, white privilege which is meant to prosper white males in their dominance of all “under them in the culture,” actually weakens and enslaves them worse than those they attempt to victimize. The women who go along with the white privilege program are swept up in the abuse and are forced to live in a sub rosa muddle of lies and obfuscations which propel them into an abyss of misery and torment. Only if they work to extricate themselves from the fears that destroy their wholeness, will they become free to establish their own autonomy and identity.

Parks’ play is a powerhouse in its satiric elements and in its themes. She brilliantly presents her concepts through the interplay and active relationships between and among Dawn, Leo, Ralph and Misha. Eustis’ direction is insightful and illuminating. The performances, are solid; Daveed and Sadoswki are electric and the effect they produce is frightening. Irving and Winters continually surprise, and Irving’s program “Ask a Black” is absolutely hysterical. The satire throughout is astounding with just enough subtle rendering to punch you in the gut with a bit of truth to leave you breathless.

As a caveat, I nodded out during some of the solos which were expositional and might have been slimmed down to keep the pacing taught. I did find I was completely focused during Diggs’ opening monologue which was electric. His easy, relaxed bonding with the audience completely engaged me. The other solos were less so, not a fault of the actors or direction. It may have been the order in the overall arc of the play’s development. Or the solos might have been a tad redundant with explanation not dramatization.

Kudos to the design team that helps to bring the production to life. These include Clint Ramos (Senic Design) Toni-Leslie James (Costume Design) Xavier Pierce (Lighting Design) Dan Moses Schreier (Sound Design) Lucy Mackinnon (Projection Design) U. Jonathan Toppo (Fight Director) Michael Rossmy and Kelsey Rainwater (Intimacy Directors).

White Noise brings one-of-a-kind performances to a thought-provoking, memorable play about the subtle, historic mores and influences that control us if we are not introspective or self-examining. It is a must-see which runs with one intermission at the Public Theater until 5 May. For tickets go to the website by CLICKING HERE.