Help Review: Claudia Rankine vs. Whiteness

Even if Help never entirely sheds its essayistic origins, the premise of finding poetry in personal scholarship is consistently compelling.

The Shed
Photo: Kate Glicksberg

“It’s not my point, it’s our reality,” the poet, scholar, and playwright Claudia Rankine imagines telling a white man on an airplane when he insists he gets the point after she’s explained how he’s benefited from white privilege. Rankine admits she didn’t really say those words to him then, but she’s saying them to us now in Help.

Now playing at the Shed, the play is about Rankine’s attempts to get white people, white men especially, to “see the same things at the same time, exist together in the same reality” as Black women. Those “same things,” first and foremost, are white privilege and structural racism, and she meticulously interrogates how and why white people can be so unaware of their racial identity, so certain that conversations about race aren’t conversations about them.

“To stay alive, forget thriving, I need to negotiate whiteness,” says the Narrator (April Matthis), and Help seems to be a self-help work in a way, not only for the white audiences asked to acknowledge reality but also for Black women navigating the oft-invisible structures that threaten their survival. Rankine questions how she could fail to be interested in interrogating whiteness when the white man in America, “with single and celebrated exceptions…is President, boss, my other boss, husband, colleague, my seatmate, accountant…”

Advertisement

The list goes on. She might as well have included the theater critic as well, as it’s an inevitability that many, if not most, reviews of Help, including this one, will be written by white men with the power to pass public judgment on a Black woman’s critique of white male power systems without acknowledging their own place inside it, as well as the privilege to cherry-pick which aspects of Help they choose to engage with and share.

Help is based on Rankine’s 2019 essay “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked,” and the thousands of comments she received after its publication. The textual transformation that the essay undergoes is the play’s most theatrically exciting and ambitious element. Anecdotal recollections of Rankine’s spontaneous conversations with strangers about their privilege spring to life on stage, enacted by an ensemble of nine white men and two white women who ooze in and out of these anonymous roles, sometimes standing in for the more famous figures that Rankine quotes in her piece.

In one particularly inventive moment, a line from the essay about the inevitability of Rankine’s own well-meaning husband enacting his white privilege (“There’s no outrunning the kingdom, the power and the glory”) becomes a choral chant, growing to a crazed crescendo. Even if Help never entirely sheds its essayistic origins, the premise of finding poetry, even music, in personal scholarship is consistently compelling. Matthis, as the Narrator who’s very much Rankine (much of the text and all of the anecdotes come directly from the playwright’s personal essay), captures the author’s forthrightness, balancing a perseverant, urgent curiosity with a sort of sardonic despair.

Advertisement
Help
April Matthis as the Narrator in Help, directed by Taibi Magar, at the Shed. © Kate Glicksberg

Shut down mid-previews in March 2020, Help now contains two year’s worth of new material, including an up-to-the-minute reference to Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court hearings. And it’s disturbing to see how swiftly the audience recognizes a catalog of quotations from among America’s most notable pandemic-era racists: Amy Cooper, Kyle Rittenhouse, Lauren Boebert. We have, it seems, become connoisseurs, of a jukebox of hate.

Rankine’s most prominent white figures tend to be among the most vocally anti-Black and farthest right, and the overreliance on these cases to reveal the ways that whiteness manifests malevolently may give white audiences too many outs to distance themselves. Rankine seems to do this deliberately, suggesting that “to move beyond the n-words, the confederate flags, and the firearms” in the pursuit of a more all-encompassing understanding of whiteness “feels reckless even in the imagination.” How can one engage with what boils beneath, flashing only occasionally to the surface, when there are raging conflagrations all around us too?

That’s an understandable tension, but, on stage, the impersonations of the most horrifically familiar public comments (there’s a lot of Trump here, naturally) play far less piercingly than the conversations between Rankine and the white men she casually draws into dialogue about their whiteness and the ways they wield it. Those men include a CEO who brags about his company’s diversity efforts while claiming that he doesn’t see a color and a father anxious that his son won’t get into Yale (where Rankine teaches) because of affirmative action.

Advertisement

After gently pushing back on one of these people’s casual racism, Rankine tells the audience that she’s relieved at her own clarity and bluntness, “pleased that I hadn’t lubricated the moment.” There’s no fluff in her writing, no moments of lubrication for the audience either. But Taibi Magar’s production, with long, awkward silent sequences for the white ensemble, lets the audience off the hook far too often. Between sections of Rankine’s text, the ensemble scoots around the stage in high-backed rolling chairs, sometimes holding hands and spinning in circles, usually in meandering formations that feel like rehearsal room improvisations.

And the ensemble, decked out in business attire while forming tableaux that feel directly ripped from Succession, again seems to reference such a specific segment of white power that white audiences may struggle to locate themselves there. Shamel Pitts’s abstract choreography, likewise, so distracts from the material and feels so random—at times robotic, balletic, writhing—that the crisp conviction of Rankine’s writing loses its edge.

“Our lives remains so separate that, after centuries,” Rankine muses, “we are still without the words that give us access to each other.” Help is a theatrical event that poetically explores, above all, how race manifests in language, how politicans’ soundbites and strangers’ muttered microaggressions continue to serve as the oil in the engines of white supremacy. It’s a strange disappointment that a staging so resolutely undecipherable should hamper a text and a central performance that blister in the directness of their storytelling.

Advertisement

Help is now running at the Shed.

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.