Description
Book SynopsisThirty-somethings Leo, Misha, Ralph and Dawn have been inseparable since college. Making their way together in the big city, they are liberal, open-minded and socially aware.
As best friends and lovers, confident in their 'woke-ness', their connection with each other is stronger than anything else – until Leo is assaulted by the police in a racially motivated incident. Shaken to the core, he brings to the group an extreme proposition...
Suzan-Lori Parks' play White Noise takes an unflinching look at race in the twenty-first century from both a black and white perspective. It was first performed at The Public Theater, New York, in March 2019, directed by Oskar Eustis, and had its European premiere at the Bridge Theatre, London, in October 2021, directed by Polly Findlay.
Trade Review'An enormous provocation of a play... Sharp, zingy and oozing a darkly witty energy... a propulsive drama with pace, plotting and a deadly magnetism'
* Guardian *
'The magnificence of Parks' writing is that, like all great classical dramatists, you know at some levels what the conclusions will be, yet the tension she builds as she unfolds her arguments has you leaning forward in your seat. She never for a moment lets you rest easy... Her writing [is] immense. She holds huge ideas within her naturalistic frame: the themes of what it means to be awake, to be woke, questions about what it is to be righteous and good, wash through the work... But the play never stops working as fierce, gripping drama'
* Whatsonstage *
'Savagely absurd... In White Noise [Parks] wields absurdity like a delicate medical scalpel: it's there almost constantly, key to the operation, but she controls it with deadly serious, laser focussed intent... it's a questing, forensic play, that uses Parks's mischievous humour and Albee-esque sense of character to take a brutally hard look at the constructedness of 'tolerent' Western multicultural society'
* Time Out *
