These days, even the silliest concepts get respectful and prominent feature play if they are sufficiently “woke.” The New York Times previewed the play “Help” in Sunday's Arts section under the headline “Claudia Rankine Flies the Unfriendly Skies.” Why “unfriendly”? Because they are clogged with “white male privilege."
The play is based on Rankine's ponderous 2019 Times essay in which she pestered white male passengers about their white privilege: “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.”
Besides making Rankine the world's worst seatmate, one wonders if there aren’t bigger fish to fry on the racial justice front. But there were no questions like that from Times writer Salamishah Tillet, who isn't a Times' staffer but a professor of English and Africana Studies.
In that essay, Rankine described her repeated experiences being rendered invisible by white men as they waited in first-class lines together at the airport, and her attempts to ask other white men sitting next to her in the intimate and elite space of the airplane cabin how they perceive their own white privilege. “I wondered, what is this ‘stuckness’ inside racial hierarchies that refuses the neutrality of the skies?” she wrote....
....
[For the play] Rankine reinvented herself as the Narrator, a middle-aged black air traveler played by Roslyn Ruff (“Fairview”), and created 20 white male characters who are on the plane with her....
Tillet herself felt intimidated in the presence of so many white males.
....In a scene choreographed by Shamel Pitts, as the white male actors frenetically danced around an empty airline seat meant for the Narrator with movements that referenced everything from gyrated hips to Hitler salutes, it felt a bit like a vaudeville flash mob. And because both Rankine and Ruff were out at a photo shoot, I was one of two black women in the room, heightening my sense of being overtaken by the actors’ whiteness and maleness.
All of this effort to combat awful offenses such as....um, cutting in line?
....In one scene, a white man steps in front of the Narrator without excusing himself or acknowledging her. By having Ruff stand next to her empty space in the line, her character’s invisibility is rendered hypervisible for the audience.
Tillet let Ruff chide her fellow actors, who remain a faceless mass of white privilege throughout.
....In the beginning, Ruff said, some of her castmates would offer “a defense” of one of the white men’s comments in the script, derived from the letters to Rankine.
“That was fascinating,” she said, and sometimes led to “a reflective moment. An ‘OK. Wait a minute.’ And a real realization that in their defensiveness, that, too, is privilege at work.”
Do those struggling actors consider themselves "privileged"?
When she’s not flying first class around the country to lecture other people on “privilege,” Rankine mines racially charged significance out of benign actions. An admiring Orlando Weekly article says her poetry book Citizen “documents everyday racism, gestures even smaller than microaggressions...”
