The Fault Lines That Divide Us and ‘The White Card’

{image id=1329125 align=left size=large caption="Patricia Kalember, Jim Poulos, and Karen Pittman in "The White Card."""}

The audience is split through the middle into two sections of white chairs facing one another.The stage lies in between. The walls are white. The entire set is white. Bright, harsh lights fill the room. When the show begins, the lights barely dim, continuing to make the whiteness all too clear. Playwright and poet Claudia Rankine’s play, “The White Card,” directed by Diana Paulus, is showing at the Emerson Paramount Theater from Feb. 24 to Apr. 1. It blurs the line between performance and reality, digging through the past to unearth contemporary truths about race and oppression. Set in upper-class New York, the play captures a dinner hosted at the home of Charles (Daniel Gerroll) and Virginia (Patricia Kalember), a wealthy white couple who curate and collect artwork. They invite erudite art dealer Eric (Jim Poulos), their activist and undergraduate son Alex (Colton Ryan), and renowned black artist Charlotte (Karen Pittman). The couple, in a bid to buy Charlotte’s art, organize a dinner party of sorts, but the conversation quickly devolves into a nuanced, powerful discussion on the intersection of art, race, and responsibility.

“The White Card” demands as much from its audience as its actors, drawing spectators to see the world recreated on stage as simply that: a recreation of what Rankine calls the “fault line between black and white lives.” As the play progresses, Charles’s passion for collecting art unfolds to reveal darker roots. This performance takes the shape of a conversation between the characters, and also between the audience members, who look across at each other and the stage as the play unfolds. Rankine approaches structural racism through the lens of white philanthropy, challenging the idea of the white savior and turning a critical eye to the implications of white benevolence.

“Black people have never been human,” Charlotte says. She speaks during a heated encounter with Charles, pointing out that the art he collects—memorabilia of black suffering—not only reduces these painful experiences to mere artwork, but also desensitizes people to the brutality of racial discrimination.

In the second act of the play, Charlotte shows Charles her most recent artworks: a series of photographs of Charles and Virginia socializing at New York’s top art galleries and museums. She asks Charles whether—for all his patronage of black art—he has ever stopped to consider how he unknowingly facilitates racial discrimination in different aspects of his life. Charles challenges his own legacy, unravelling as he grapples with his good intentions and his philanthropy, realizing that they amount to little more than “shopping for black death,” as Charlotte puts it. His art patronage is not the solution to understanding or coming to terms with years of racism. Rather, it is antithetical to the solution, rendering black lives synonymous with suffering.

The dialogue is pointed and poetic. The witty repartee flows between the characters like two sides of the same coin, arguing fundamentally different views of race: one from a white perspective, and the other from a black perspective. Paulus’s cast, composed of accomplished Broadway and off-Broadway actors, delivers a moving performance, rich with raw emotion and a hunger for the truth. Charles and Charlotte are particularly fantastic, bringing complex ideas about race to the forefront. Engaging and incisive, the plot does not devolve into a lecture on race, but instead portrays a genuine human struggle to understand the roles we must assume to subvert oppressive institutions and biases.

At its heart, “The White Card” aims to spark nuanced conversations, which are years overdue. Yet, the performance does not end with the final act. Rather, it urges its audience to stay behind and break into groups to discuss race with candor and compassion. “The White Card” is the play that never ends, finding life in the fight against the systematic oppression of the black community.