THE HANGOVER REPORT – Whitney White’s provocative SEMBLANCE showcases an impressive up-and-coming auteur at work

Whitney White, whose “Semblance” is currently playing at New York Theatre Workshop.

It seems like the impressively multi-talented theater-maker Whitney White is everywhere I look these days. In addition to remounting her searing staging of Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down earlier this summer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (the production will again be staged this fall at Playwrights Horizons), her work was also recently on display in the Bushwick Starr’s production of Definition: An Installation Experience. Additionally, she’s directing James Baldwin’s classic play The Amen Corner at Washington, DC’s venerable Shakespeare Theatre Company later in the fall.

Currently, however, you’ll be able to get a taste of this impressive up-and-coming auteur’s out-of-the-box brilliance and witness her continuing development as a theater artist via New York Theatre Workshop’s short but fascinating film-cum-stage production of Semblance, which Ms. White wrote and directed. Over the course of about 45 minutes, the show/film artfully unspools an array of intensely candid cinematic portraits of Black women, provoking viewers to take a deeper look at what constitutes their identities (this is the flip-side of Definition, which investigates the Black feminine identity from the inside/first person). Each of these women are intimately and skillfully portrayed by a single actress – the gorgeous Nikiya Mathis, who’s chameleonic film performance is an astonishing coup in and of itself.

Like its apparent companion piece Definition, Semblance in presentation is an actor-less hybrid experience that attempts to redefine the notion of live, in-person theater as it smartly (i.e., safely) re-opens NYTW’s doors to audiences for the first time in more than a year. Ms. White uses subtle flourishes – particularly in making known the centrality of the audience to the overall experience – to enhance the theatricality of the episodic but fluidly edited film. The end result is something truly unique – a form that I hope isn’t just a passing fad out of necessity in our current predicament.

RECOMMENDED

SEMBLANCE
Off-Broadway, Film/Theater / In-person
New York Theatre Workshop
45 minutes (without an intermission)
Through August 29

Categories: Off-Broadway, Theater

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