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“In The White Card,” said Jared, “Rankine deals us an engrossing, dispiriting and raw examination of the fault lines between the races. The confrontations onstage are likely to land in our own conscious leaving much to reconcile. It’s not often that theater, as a looking glass, is this crystal clear.”

Claudia Rankine’s play is particularly poignant in the Boston setting. The A.R.T. and ArtsEmerson audiences are primarily white. The house lights are kept on throughout the show because the audience is a crucial part of the performance. The White Card holds a mirror up to its patrons and asks, ‘Is this you?’

Ms. Rankine has given us a challenging, timely, and necessary work that deserves both our undivided attention and praise.

By the end of the play, there is a sense that the characters have been altered by their raw, highly-charged encounters with each other. It doesn’t feel like a resolution, but a greater understanding has been achieved, leaving us with the hope that dialogue may continue.

The playwright wants us to squirm, but simultaneously implores us to stay in the room to wrestle with these issues – as individuals and as members of communities that are willing to engage in tough conversations.

It is accepted wisdom that “Seeing is believing,” and seeing is precisely what The White Card requires: seeing what is assumed and unexamined, namely the white card which gives those who have it a hidden pass, and those who don’t, provocation. The White Card got under my skin. It stages a very difficult conversation about racism and the unconscious white bias which perpetuates it, and culminates in a jolting moment of recognition which reveals the lens through which white culture looks– and does not see.

It’s an intense and achingly relevant play…Rankine observes the details of white complacency with piercing vision. No white audience member can depart the experience able to say he or she has never been challenged to confront the meaning of white privilege, and in that sense the play is clearly successful.

Claudia Rankine’s new play explores understanding, identity, and belonging.

As an inquiry into structural racism and an interrogation of whiteness — or, as the play’s sole black character puts it, “the ordinary complicity of white people’’ — The White Card is a bracing experience that leaves you with plenty to think about.