Media Archive

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.

HEAR WORD!, brought to the area by the American Repertory Theater, stands on the edge of change yet to come, and calls for its arrival. “The idea was to encourage women to be the drivers for change, for equality, rather than wait for institutions or men or government,” says Ifeoma Fafunwa, the show’s writer and director. “For women to ask themselves where are they responsible for inequality, and where are they able to empower, to be powerful.”

“I want the audience to draw parallels to how patriarchy manifests itself in Africa and how it manifests itself in the rest of the world,” says Fafunwa, who is currently the Mary I. Bunting Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. “It is an olive branch, a bridge across cultures.”

“The first half of the show describes the atrocities,” says Fafunwa. “The last part asks the question: Hey, women, what are you going to do about it?”

In addition to speaking against gender inequality, Fafunwa hopes the show will dispel negative stereotypes about Africa. She hopes that the universality of the stories will illustrate that Nigeria is dealing with the same issues as the rest of the world.