Stilted ‘White Noise’ just fades into the background
Suzan-Lori Parks’ racial drama doesn’t deliver the jolt it’s aiming for
Suzan-Lori Parks usually has a genius for getting under our skin as Americans and exposing the brutal legacy of racism, sexism and violence that courses through our veins.
Parks, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her searing examination of black and white, slave and master in “Topdog/ Underdog,” tries to slice into our collective marrow once again with “White Noise,” now playing at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Unfortunately Jaki Bradley’s stilted production never cuts deep enough into the bone in its West Coast premiere that runs through Nov. 10 at Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre.
Parks explores how living in a racist world, a place where Leo (Chris Herbie Holland) gets roughed up by the cops for taking a stroll through a posh neighborhood, leaves a mark on all of us.
When Leo’s life starts to unravel in the wake of the beating, it also upsets his longtime relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Therese Barbato), a crusading lawyer, his best bro Ralph (Nick Dillenburg), a part-time professor who can’t get tenure, and his pal Misha (a tartly funny Aimé Donna Kelly), the star of a web talk show, “Ask a Black.”
All four have been tight ever since college. They have made music together as a band. They have hooked up with each other on various occasions. But now they come to see just how differently they are seen and heard because of the color of their skin.
Ralph feels bitter and getting passed over for a promotion. He believes he was snubbed for his whiteness. On her hilarious vlog, Misha drops her usual erudite style of conversation in favor of a lively ebonics patois. Strangely, Leo yearns to be enslaved.
The trouble is that all of the exposition feels too pat. Leo says he is an artist but it feels more like a pose than a passion. When Leo talks about growing up in the city, it sounds more like advertising copy than a life story. He says: “We were urban but none of us were extreme urban, none of us were 24/7 homeless, none of us had an obvious or debilitating parental drug situation or a problematic violent domestic abuse situation.”
It makes sense that Parks is trying to push the audience past its complacency. But these characters are not vibrantly drawn enough to make us care what they do, leave aside justify the play’s spiral into Genet-style mind games involving spiked choke collars and slave auctions. The barbarity of these scenes, which should be a messy and disturbing conjuring up of the horror of the nation’s bloody past, loses power because of the production’s low emotional wattage.
Unlike the exquisitely unsettling “Fairview,” this play never jolts us into examining ourselves. We are just left wondering why any of these characters makes the outrageous choices they do. Nothing feels organic. Certainly Leo’s desire to be subjugated in order to find his freedom never rings true.
The monologues also go nowhere, the many bowling scenes offer no insight and the flubbed lines don’t help. When Leo embarks on a 40-day journey inside the nature of slavery and the days tick on, the production loses momentum and the explosions of the final scene don’t feel earned.
Parks has great instincts about the legacy of slavery in our midst, the way people of color experience the world differently than others, but “White Noise” feels inauthentic in its soulsearching. Sadly that lets the audience off the hook. If we don’t see ourselves reflected in these characters, it’s all too easy to dismiss them as so much background noise.