For many of us who love experimental theatre and the deep fringe, soap operas were a gateway entertainment. Any given arc on, say, “Days of Our Lives”—remember when Marlena was possessed twice, and she (re)married the priest who exorcised her?—can go toe-to-toe with the avant-garde’s dream-logic, postmodern approach to character and its calculated use of shock. Soaps also have old theatrical bones: they’re related to nineteenth-century melodrama, with its emotion-triggering musical underscoring and extravagant, even exuberant, treatment of female peril. It’s unsurprising, then, that two new formally adventurous shows are recognizably soapy: Julia Izumi’s “Regretfully, So the Birds Are,” at Playwrights Horizons, and the Second Stage and Vineyard co-production of “White Girl in Danger” (at the Tony Kiser Theatre), a new musical by Michael R. Jackson, following up on his Pulitzer- and Tony-winning masterpiece, “A Strange Loop.”
Life in both of these shows is extreme, and death hardly registers. For instance, in “Regretfully,” the white Asian-studies professor Cam (Gibson Frazier) is dead, but he stands in his family’s front yard as a snowman, still inaccurately lecturing his three adopted children as his wife (Kristine Nielsen) languishes in jail. (This sounds like a cut story line from “Passions.”) Izumi doesn’t make us wait for exposition. On page 4, Neel (Sky Smith) hurls this at his sister Mora (Shannon Tyo):
Whew. That’s a full season of soap-opera developments, delivered in one breath. In presenting other wild happenings—Neel’s sister-girlfriend, Illy (Sasha Diamond), buys part of the sky, which enrages the local birds—Izumi is using absurdity to echo the discombobulation of transnational adoptees, adrift in a sea of uncomprehending whiteness. But the play’s lighthearted irreality has already been punctured by Neel’s reference to incest, and, with big events (parental confrontations, another murder) kept offstage, the tonal vibe deflates to something like a soap opera’s sitcom spinoff. Accordingly, the director, Jenny Koons, has encouraged a tinny sunshininess from the actors, though there are moments, particularly if Frazier and Tyo let their smiles droop, when we sense the play’s taproots reaching down for anger. These deeper feelings about identity must fight their way through the show’s goofy surface, but, when they do emerge, they’re like furious crocuses, vivid and already pissed off at spring.
Where “Regretfully” chooses daffiness, the overwhelming yet underdeveloped “White Girl in Danger” goes for gonzo maximalism. Michael R. Jackson’s musical, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, is, among other things, an R-rated satire of many types of soap opera, including daytime, nighttime, teen, and Lifetime Movie Events; a lacerating investigation of race; a Wagnerian epic about the whiteness of influences from the author’s youth (musical allusions include the Clash, Tori Amos, and the Cranberries); and a through-the-looking-glass version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods,” with Grimms’ fairy tales replaced by kitsch nineties touchstones like “Showgirls” and “Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?” (Really, the whole Tori Spelling–Elizabeth Berkley multiverse.) It’s a messy three hours—kind of a train wreck. But that’s another thing people watched for fun in the nineteenth century: trains crashing into each other.
Within the reality of a soap opera called “White Girl in Danger,” the Allwhite Killer is on the loose. Allwhite is the town where primary story lines happen; the show’s Black people live in (and also existentially constitute) the Blackground, where they suffer as secondary characters, never taking center stage. Keesha (Latoya Edwards), a Blackground character with a dawning will to power, wants to attract the killer’s attention, because victimhood would offer Keesha a juicy narrative. And that’s all she needs: the chance to endure gorgeously in the limelight, like the Allwhite girls, a “Heathers”-esque trio of variously troubled Megans (played by Lauren Marcus, Alyse Alan Louis, and Molly Hager). Keesha just wants to be self-destructive and bulimic and pursued by a killer, too! The show’s unseen creator booms down Great and Powerful Oz-like commandments, but neither he nor Keesha realizes that other Blackground characters have something to say—particularly Keesha’s mother, Nell (Tarra Conner Jones, who unleashes her glass-shattering Nell Carter-ish voice after intermission), and the unfailingly supportive janitor, Clarence (James Jackson, Jr.).
Jackson and Blain-Cruz’s take on daytime dramaturgy, in which stories can go on for years, doesn’t compress easily. Still, despite a chaotic second half, musically the show’s a barn burner. Jackson thrillingly metabolizes the spectrum of eighties and nineties sounds into a pastiche-a-palooza: the Megans’ girl band practices songs that are half Go-Go’s, half Courtney Love; later, Jones-as-Nell puts across a showstopping “Dreamgirls”-style number. The latter scene might be a deep-cut reference to the real Nell Carter’s experience with “Dreamgirls,” which she left while it was still in development to be in “Ryan’s Hope.” Certainly, this kind of hyper-referentiality fuels the show’s manic energy: the plain pink set, by Adam Rigg, quotes the backdrop of a fight between Joan Collins and Diahann Carroll in the seventh season of “Dynasty.” Heaven help the audience member who isn’t Gen X, or at least on the millennial cusp.
Multicasting creates yet more mayhem: the Allwhite moms are played by one woman (the still somehow underused Liz Lark Brown); all the white boyfriends by Eric William Morris. Blain-Cruz, amping the actors nicely, and the choreographer, the gifted Raja Feather Kelly, tuck staging jokes in everywhere, though they can’t always keep up with the show, which has the hot-to-the-touch volatility of the recently revised. The best physical comedy stems from the quick set and costume changes—the designer, Montana Levi Blanco, has particular fun with color-block windbreakers and tearaway reveals—but, even given the production’s more-is-more ethos, the visual jokes aren’t always paced for maximum impact. There’s a gag about dildos as weapons, for instance, that repeats too many times. One dildo goes a long way.
Eventually, Jackson’s own author-avatar (also played by Jackson, Jr.) appears, and sings “Centering Myself,” revealing the anguish in his process and returning to the quasi-autobiographical meta-theatre of “A Strange Loop.” Here, Jackson’s asking himself difficult questions about his own consumption of white cultural products. Have they broken him, he wonders, in some deep way? If his earliest memories—before, as the avatar sings, “I came to blackness”—are of “white women fighting in sparkly eighties evening gowns,” is there a way for his adult self to unpick those influences?
In eight pages of spoken and sung introspection, Jackson describes an analysis that looks quite different from the ebullient, transgressive romp that has preceded it, and veers into a crisp indictment of the way Black suffering can be perverted into a path to power. Keesha certainly steps on her fellow Blackground characters on her way up. “And please believe me when I tell you that I love my race,” Jackson’s avatar says. “But ladies, I utterly loathe my social class. Because we bourgie-class, bourgie-ass negroes are so detached from reality that we spend the days of our lives savagely mocking Karens and Beckys, when half the time we’re the Karens and the Beckys!”
Much as the show does, this aria distracts and contradicts itself, as it moves from target to target, from certainty to doubt. Later versions will surely be more coherent. But, even when Jackson is giving us what still seems like a draft, it’s clear that he is a one-in-a-million, hypergenerative musical-theatre rarity. Here is a chance to get your ear close to his inner monologue, and to hear the voices that drive him. ♦
