White Girl in Danger
Tony Kiser Theater, New York City ★★★★
“White Girl in Danger both wants to offer up a soap-opera thrill ride and dismantle the ride as it’s running,” said Jackson McHenry in NYMag.com. “Like many soaps, it’s also a hot mess, though an ambitious and fascinating one.” Michael R. Jackson’s off-Broadway follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning musical, A Strange Loop, begins as a snarky satire of the fading daytime TV genre. Latoya Edwards plays Keesha, a young woman who, in the soap-opera world she inhabits, is a “Blackground” character in a town called Allwhite. Keesha dreams of escaping stock storylines about racism and police violence to participate in the juicy main dramas that subject the white girls to eating disorders, bad boyfriends, and serial killers. She realher ambition in the second act, becoming Allwhite’s queen bee. The comedy, however, “turns lacerating but less contained,” as Jackson zooms in on the conflict between Keesha’s ambitions and her mother’s values.
“Everything about White Girl in Danger is hard to follow,” said Jesse Green in
The New York Times. As in a soap opera, ludicrous plot twists are common, and a character’s personality can be recast in a moment. “Yet somehow the show remains compelling.” It helps that there are strong musical numbers, including a “full-throated thrill” delivered late by Tarra Conner
Jones as Keesha’s mother. But “what keeps your attention most of the time is the bounty and electricity of Jackson’s ideas, which derive as much from his history as a soap-opera lover as from his complex approach to the underlying conflicts of race and gender.” White Girl never manages to untangle its complex web of themes, but Jackson’s current draft isn’t a failure. Instead, “it’s a start.”