A sour-tasting emblem of white America
White Guy on a Bus
Ray sticks out a mile. He’s the only one dressed in a suit on the bus heading out of Philadelphia. He’s also the only white male. Pretty much everyone else is female and black, making the weekly four-hour round trip to the Philadelphia state penitentiary to visit boyfriends, husbands, brothers.
Bruce Graham’s new play is full of such uncomfortable little scenarios. We also see Ray at home, with his
wife, Roz, who teaches in a school in the Philadelphia Badlands peopled predominantly by African-american teenagers and where her fellow staff bet on how many times each week she’ll be called a white bitch.
Roz spends her spare time helping particularly academically challenged pupils but is under no illusions about their future: she knows they are more likely to be holding up 7-Elevens on a Friday night than revising for college, however much her daughter-in-law Molly declares their lives deserve more respect than that. When Roz hears that the new orthodoxy in TV advertising is to always cast a CEO as a “well spoken” African American she gives a hollow laugh.
Graham’s bleak, neatly acted play, tightly directed by Jelena Budimir, alternates between excellently observed domestic scenes, where Molly’s liberal pieties are mercilessly skewered by Roz’s weary pragmatism, and the less persuasive scenes on the bus. Here Ray, who works in high finance, has befriended Shatique, a black single mum and trainee nurse who visits her brother each week.
In a drama that refuses to flinch from the socio-economic reality of inner-city America, Graham pushes against plenty of hot button topics: the politics of victimhood; the dominance of white privilege; the expedient morality of the progressive middle class. Ray’s racism, brought to the surface by a horrific event that we hear about in flashback, becomes truly ugly in the play’s second half, but Graham is careful to ensure that the audience is unable to simply dismiss him as an out and out bigot. Rather he serves as an implacable, unignorable emblem of white male power in Trump’s America. It’s a pity that the play should lapse so crudely into melodrama, and even more so that the character of Shatique should become its predominant casualty: more than any other character her actions feel at the mercy of Graham’s plot. Still, it’s rare to encounter a play that dares to leave its audience with such a nasty, sour taste in the mouth.
Until April 21. Tickets: 01223 357851; finboroughtheatre.co.uk