Shepherdstown, West Virginia—The annual Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) has frequently billed itself as “Think Theater.” While some plays each year have fallen short of this mark, J.T. Rogers’ brilliant White People,” currently running in repertory with the festival’s other offerings, marks a real high water mark in this event’s impressive 20-year history. It tackles the seemingly never-ending American obsession with race with stunning candor and runs at it from an entirely unexpected direction. It could very well be the most thought-provoking new play I’ve seen in over a decade.

Performed without intermission, White People is really three interlocking one-act monologues, each featuring a single character located a distinct geographical area. None of the characters knows or meets the others for the duration of the play. But the insoluble dilemmas and very real tragedies of each parallel those of the others, suggesting a commonality of fate. And that commonality is bound up in the misfortune of their race. Each of the characters is white.

Misfortune? Haven’t we learned that white people have been unfairly “privileged” from time immemorial to the detriment of people “of color? ” And that white males are even more unfairly “privileged” than white women? White People confronts this increasingly false, faux class-struggle narrative head-on in a sympathetic, race-neutral manner that nonetheless clearly lays out the racial paradox we confront in the twenty-first century. Yet the playwright is able to navigate this minefield with an uncommon clarity of vision, remarkably free of cliché or cant.

At the play’s outset, we meet its three distinctive characters, one by one. First up is Alan (Lee Sellars), a teacher in New York City who resides with his wife near Stuyvesant Square. He’s made a study of Peter Stuyvesant, the square’s dour Dutch namesake. He  admires Stuyvesant’s sense of industry while admitting he’s appalled at the man’s coldness and insensitivity in social and business matters.

We eventually meet Martin (Kurt Zischke) and Mara Lynn (Margot White) as well. Martin’s a classic, Type-A businessman working in St. Louis but residing in the fashionable suburb of Chesterfield. We’d perhaps identify him as a “button-down” type, but he disparages that kind of collar as decidedly lacking in class. He’s actually a displaced resident of New York himself, sent to this distant branch office by his law firm to clean house and straighten things up.

And finally, there’s Mara Lynn, a seemingly conventional housewife in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to a huge Army base. A popular girl in high school, she married her hunky school sweetheart, an athletic hero of great promise who blew out a knee and ended up ordinary like everyone else, much to his perpetual chagrin.

Martin and Alan represent the white upper and middle-middle class respectively, while Mara Lynn, to her eternal chagrin, lives closer to the bottom end of the economic food chain, thanks largely to her feckless has-been husband and, as we gradually learn, to the burden of her severely learning-disabled son.

It’s here, in the lives of their children or soon-to-be children, that each of these characters turns out to have something tragically in common. Mara Lynn’s tragedy is paralleled by the impending tragedy of Alan and his pregnant wife. They’re both attacked without provocation by black thugs who savagely kick Alan’s wife causing almost certain brain damage to her third-trimester fetus.

The tails are turned in the case of Martin. Although Martin’s wife originally hailed from the Midwest, she couldn’t bear returning there with him to St. Louis, and deserts him, along with their daughter, for New York. That leaves Martin to care for their son who becomes increasingly alienated and withdrawn until he’s accused of participating in an attack on a hapless young black couple that leaves the male with, yes indeed, a serious brain injury.

Damaged brains actually seem to serve as a central metaphor in this complex triad of stories. The point is ironically underscored in Martin’s first scene, in which he’s listening to a CD of Poulenc’s 1957 opera, Dialogues des carmélites (Dialogues of the Carmelites), the tragic story of a convent that undergoes collective martyrdom for defying the secular powers of the French Revolution. He sites the closing prayer of the nuns as they ascend the scaffold, and is fascinated by the scene’s finality during which the music and the singing are punctuated by the incessant “thunk” of the guillotine.

The opera’s finale underscores the central idea in White People, namely, that the intellect and reason are increasingly cut off from primal, unthinking, reactive reality. The power of rational thought seems powerless to terminate the useless phenomenon of racial and tribal politics, both of which have outlived any possible purpose, save, perhaps, to be utilized as an extension of Marxist class struggle theology.

Paralleling this intellectual dilemma is the very real yet never discussed tragedy of America’s white people in the 21^st century. All three of Rogers’ characters, representing all three economic classes, find themselves bewildered, defeated, and alone in their own country. Each is well-meaning. All three betray the occasional racist tic, but each of them fights it back, knowing that it’s wrong and determined to rise above instinct.

Yet each also knows that he or she is being gradually ostracized and marginalized by a society that seems paradoxically bent on somehow destroying whiteness, blaming it somehow for all the world’s problems. And in this ostracization, each becomes the ultimate “victim” of the currently recognized “victim class.”

This is deep stuff, and it’s hard to summarize in a relatively brief review. But in sympathizing with the humanity and, indeed, the pathos and bewilderment of his white characters, Rogers is bravely airing a sacrilegious thought with regard to today’s standardized liberal narrative: Whatever do today’s white people have to do with yesterday’s racial and tribal injustices? How are they to blame? And how does transforming them into a new victim class improve the situation?

Alan, Mara Lynn, and Martin want to do right by their families, their society, and their country. But they see life slipping away from them as they lose control or even influence in all three spheres, metaphorically, perhaps, not unlike Poulenc’s Carmelites who watched their sisters leave their earthly existence one by one.

More than any “problem play” in recent memory, White People scrupulously avoids stacking the deck or even in taking sides one way or the other. Its characters ring true both in their life histories and in the essence of their collective humanity, all of which is movingly projected by three very-high caliber actors at the top of their craft.

White People is an astonishing achievement, impressive at all levels. Freed from both left- and right-wing talking points, lies, half-truths, slander, and just plain blather, it asks us, through living, breathing characters, if we really want to be a Balkanized nation as opposed to the “one nation” the Founding Fathers envisioned. In so doing, it questions our nation’s current social mores and trajectory in a profound and thought-provoking way.

White People is, hands down and by an order of magnitude, the very best play of CATF’s 20^th anniversary season.

Rating: **** (Four stars, our highest.)

At the Festival:

Running through August 1, CATF will be rotating in repertory the following dramatic offerings:

• The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show, a world premiere by Max Baker and Lee Sellers. The first musical at CATF at least since we’ve been reviewing the festival for the Washington Times (circa Y2K), this show promises “toe-tapping” pop songs and a satirical look into our current theater-of-the-absurd era.
• Lidless, a first production by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. A look into Guantanamo Bay through the eyes of both the interrogator and the interrogated. Will the U.S. be the bad guy again? Stay tuned.
• Inana by Michele Lowe. An unusual treatment of a compelling behind-the-scenes story from the Second Iraq War interweaving heroic attempts to save priceless artworks with an unexpected love story.
• Breadcrumbs, a world premiere by Jennifer Haley.  An elderly writer grapples with early-stage Alzheimer’s as she attempts to write what will probably be her last work of fiction—or not.
• White People by J.T. Rogers. Three plays within a play dealing with the third-rail topic of our times—the Decline and Fall of white America.

Tickets: Prices begin at $25 per seat depending on package purchase. For single and group ticket sales, call 304-876-3304, or see below.

Information, including directions to Shepherdstown, WV: Visit www.catf.org or call 304-876-3473 or 800-999-CATF (2283).

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