Coming Soon: Claudia Rankine's The White Card

The Boston Globe covers the lead-up to the premiere of Claudia Rankine's new play, The White Card, which will start previews at ART on Saturday and runs through April, directed by Diane Paulus. After attending a dinner party that "went south fast" during discussions of Black Lives Matter and race, Rankine began to write the play, a staged conversation. "'We just don’t know how to talk about race and racism and white dominance,' Rankine says." More, from Globe correspondent Patti Hartigan: 

The play features a dinner party not unlike the one Rankine attended. It unfolds in a swank New York apartment, where an art collector named Charles wines and dines a provocative African-American visual artist named Charlotte. He and his wife and art dealer want to acquire Charlotte’s work for his invaluable collection. But just like in real life, the gathering goes off the rails quickly, with insensitive comments, blow-ups, accusations, and misunderstandings that flow thicker than the deliciously expensive Piquepoul Blanc.

Rankine conducted multiple interviews when she was writing “Citizen,” but for “The White Card,” she just sat around her kitchen table and read it with her closest friends, many of whom are white women. “There was a sense of ‘Is this woman believable to you as a white woman? Is this man believable? Is this a space you understand?’ I would say, ‘I am acutely aware that as a black woman I don’t know fully what it is for you to be you, in the same way you don’t know fully what it is to be me.’ We bring with us a historical past.”

And she was astonished at how the world mirrored the words she had written. In the play, the characters discuss the depiction of Emmett Till, the African-American boy murdered in 1955 after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman. His mother insisted on an open casket so that people could see the brutality of lynching. Rankine wrote a discussion of Till into her play, but then last March, the issue inflamed the art world after a painting of the dead boy was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial. “It was down on paper already, and then the Biennial opened,” she says.