Whitney White and Shakespeare

Whitney White is a theatrical powerhouse. A director, writer, actor, and musician, White’s work has been seen on Broadway, Off Broadway, and at major institutions including The Public Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and, most recently, the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her projects include Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, The Last Five Years, Macbeth in Stride, and By The Queen, which was featured in the Folger’s 2025 Reading Room Festival.

In this episode, White discusses All Is But Fantasy, her four-play musical cycle created for the RSC, where it’s now receiving its world premiere. The high-energy, gig-theater show investigates Shakespeare’s women and ambition, focusing on Lady Macbeth, Emilia, Juliet, and Richard III. Each piece combines performance with original music, using sound and rhythm as a way into the text and as a tool for rethinking these characters whose inner lives are often cut short or overlooked.

White reflects on why Shakespeare’s women so often meet tragic ends, how those stories continue to feel familiar, and what it means to keep staging them now. She considers the ways that music, performance, and adaptation can help us better understand Shakespeare today.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 10, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica, with Garland Scott serving as executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Melvin Rickarby in Stratford, England, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Paola García Acuña. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services were provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

All Is But Fantasy | Royal Shakespeare Company

Whitney White is an Obie and Lily Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated director, actor, and musician, celebrated for her bold, innovative storytelling across both Broadway and off-Broadway. She recently received the Drama League’s 2025 Founders Award for Excellence in Directing and an Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in Directing.

All Is But Fantasy, White’s four-part musical exploration of Shakespeare’s women and ambition, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, marks her RSC debut as a writer, director, and actor. The two-part high-energy gig theater show is receiving its world premiere at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in January and February 2026.

White’s other directing credits on Broadway include The Last Five Years and Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, off-Broadway credits include Liberation, Walden, Jordan’s, Soft, On Sugarland, What to Send Up When It Goes Down, Our Dear Drug Lord, and For All the Women Who Thought They Were Mad. She recently opened Saturday Church, a new musical featuring songs by Sia and Honey Dijon at New York Theatre Workshop. She also created Macbeth In Stride at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, writing the book, music and lyrics. Additional directing work includes The Secret Life of Bees, By The Queen, The Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, A Human Being of a Sort, An Iliad, The Amen Corner, Othello, Canyon, and Jump.

On screen, White has appeared in Ocean’s Eight, Single Drunk Female, Louie, and The Playboy Club, and she contributed as a writer to Boots Riley’s acclaimed series I’m A Virgo for Prime Video.

Previous:
Shakespeare and Mathematics

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: Whitney White is a powerhouse of theatrical talent. A musician, actor, writer, and director, White has been extremely busy over the past few years.

She received an Obie award for directing in 2020 for her production of the play Our Dear Dead Drug Lord.

In 2023, she directed Jaja’s African Hair Braiding on Broadway, for which she was nominated for a Tony. 2024 found her directing two Off-Broadway plays, Jordan’s at the Public and Walden at Second Stage.

In 2025, she directed Broadway productions of The Last Five Years and Liberation. And another show Off Broadway, Saturday Church, featuring the music of Sia.

And just a few weeks ago, she received an Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in Directing.

Her work in 2025 included writing and starring in a reimagining of Macbeth, called Macbeth in Stride, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

And her play about Queen Margaret, titled By the Queen, was included in last year’s Folger Reading Room Festival.

Now, White has written, directed, and stars in a four-play cycle at the Royal Shakespeare Company called All Is But Fantasy. Each short play in the cycle investigates characters in the Shakespeare canon from new angles: Lady Macbeth, Emilia, Juliet, and Richard III. White’s original music weaves through the plays.

[CLIP of “Reach for It” from All Is But Fantasy by Whitney White.]

That was White singing “Reach for It,” from her play about Lady Macbeth.

Here’s Whitney White, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.
———————–

BARBARA BOGAEV: “When I close my eyes, I see ambition in front of me. The way that it goes, power’s not supposed to look like me.” It’s such a direct expression of raw ambition from Lady Macbeth in your song, “Reach for It.” What was the genesis of the song? And what was your in to a production centered on Lady Macbeth and the other women of Shakespeare?

WHITNEY WHITE: Well, my first in was just a deep love of Shakespeare. I don’t know if you’ll meet a bigger Shakespeare nerd than me—well, you probably will, but I’m just a part of that.

BOGAEV: Oh, you’ve got a lot of competition. [Both laugh.]

WHITE: I know I’ve got competition, but I do count those fellow Shakespearean nerds as my community!

The first time I read Macbeth, I was in a graduate program at Brown University, and I had been assigned the dagger scene. I was a second year in that program. I read the scene and I was like, “Wait a minute, what’s the deal with this lady?” I went back and read the entire play and I remember I could not believe that she gets a letter and then she jumps into action. That’s it, you know, that’s her first thing.

BOGAEV: Wow, that’s all she needed.

WHITE: She comes on stage, she gets a letter, and she goes, “Let’s do this.” I thought that was incredibly contemporary and powerful.

I do think that the female experience is one that is powered by will. Like, when I think about the things I’ve seen my mother and her sisters achieve in their lifetime and the obstacles they’ve overcome, like, that’s just will. Something happens and you just decide to overcome it.

So, I was just very moved by the story. When she does the raven speech, it sounded like a rock song to me and then I started writing “Reach for It”.

I would sit down and I would read each play, and I would hear music, or think of a genre, or think of an artist, and then write music—my own original music inspired by the genre I was hearing, you know? Each play has a different melody, has a different song.

BOGAEV: What really hits me listening to that song and seeing you at work is female ambition and how historically it’s been perceived as so threatening and so dangerous and so subversive. And it still is. An aggressive, ambitious man is celebrated as a powerful alpha and an aggressive, ambitious woman is so often just labeled a bitch or a witch, to go way back.

WHITE: Yeah.

BOGAEV: So, is this something that you always identified with in Shakespeare plays though? Or is it what you wanted to restore to his texts?

WHITE: You know what it is—this is a great question—it’s like I just took an honest look at which plays were my favorite plays, and they are Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Richard III, and Macbeth. Then, when I started looking at those plays, the arcs are so similar. So, I’m like, “Well, what does that say about me? What does that say about the world that these plays are still so viable?” You know what I mean? So, I just started asking a ton of questions. Why? Why? Why? Why, you know? What are the parallels between the Lady Macbeth and Richard III? And why do these female narratives end in such tragedy?

So, the project was just a series of asking questions and looking for the answers in the text. But also in the headlines around us in the news, you know, in the films we watch, and the TV shows we watch. Just looking at how these narratives that Shakespeare codified. He’s not the first man to write a woman being killed the way Desdemona and Emilia are, but he codified it in Western literature, in Western literary arts, in a way that it’s now with us forever, you know? And why is that? Why is Othello relevant still, and why is it going to be relevant way after we’re gone? These are big questions, and the piece just kind of starts to crack all those open.

BOGAEV: You brought up so much in there, but I feel like we should just take a moment before we go on. Talk about what your production is like to experience in the theater so people can picture something as you’re talking. Because it’s really kind of meta. It’s a concert performance. It’s kind of like you’re part of this band and the witches are part of the band. But it’s also references how you go about producing a Shakespeare play. You say it flat out in the beginning of the play, “A lot of doing these plays is figuring out how to do them.”

WHITE: How are we going to do them?

BOGAEV: Yeah. Your character, you as the Woman character, says that. And you break the fourth wall all the time. You break all the walls.

WHITE: I’m very naughty. I’m like, “What is a fourth wall? I can see this lady in the third row. I might as well talk to her, and sing to her, and make her feel like she’s part of the world,” you know?

BOGAEV: Yeah.

WHITE: But I think this is a great question because I really love making theater that is for people. For everybody and anybody. I think theaters should be spaces where we all feel welcome. It’s a space where we can make something in the moment and live in it together, and there’s something beautiful about that.

So, when I come in, I just have a beat immediately with the audience because I want them to know from the moment the lights open that we are here together. This isn’t a play where we’re going to pretend like you’re not there. We’re going to tell a story and at times you’re going to be welcome to be part of it. No pressure. But you’re welcome. We acknowledge your existence and we’re grateful you’re here. And that continues throughout the play.

BOGAEV: Yes, I feel like you’re creating the fire that we all gather around, the ancient storytelling feeling. We’re all part of it.

WHITE: Yes! Totally.

BOGAEV: But also, the play feels to me like we’re inside your brain as you read or watch Shakespeare.

WHITE: Definitely.

BOGAEV: I mean, what you were talking about before, it’s like your inner dialogue and questions like, “Why don’t Macbeth and Lady Macbeth talk to each other anymore after they kill the King? Why does their love fall apart?”

WHITE: Yeah. I hope it all weaves together but I thought that the project of showing people the kinds of conversations that surround putting up a Shakespeare in play in 2000-and-now—you know, the RSC does so many productions every year, and I think the rehearsal process and how we mount these productions are really interesting because it gets really sticky. It gets thorny.

If there’s a Black woman in a Lady Macbeth role, what does that mean and what kind of dramaturgical research has the team put in place to protect that actor and make sure the world is built for her? If you have a Black Juliet—which we’ve seen recently—in this modern, complicated time—what are we doing right to look after these people and make sure the plays we’re building support their existence in the play? And on and on, you know what I mean?

BOGAEV: Total transparency. No elephants in the room.

WHITE: No elephants—well, there’s a couple elephants, but we’re trying to deal with them anyway.

BOGAEV: Yeah. I want to go back to something else that you said earlier about how you heard a soundtrack of Shakespeare’s heroines. Does each of Shakespeare’s women characters have a certain sound or musical genre to you?

WHITE: Yeah, to me, definitely.

BOGAEV: Is that how you experience them when you’re reading or watching them?

WHITE: Yeah, definitely. I think the woman from The Winter’s Tale who turns to stone, she sounds like Joni Mitchell. I think that Ophelia sounds like a Schubert or Schumann liebeslied, which is a German kind of love song. I think that Lady Macbeth sounds like Ike and Tina Turner and the Doors. I think that when I listen to Juliet, I hear Courtney Love and post pop punk princesses, Charlie XCX, and those kinds of women. And when I hear the women of Richard III, I just hear gospel. I hear women cursing, women crying, women trying to pray and change the world around them.

And I really do think—especially the epic speeches, right? It’s the epic speeches that really inspired the music—if you really get in there and do that text work, look at the words that are repeating, look at how the rhythm is building, it starts to have a vibe. It starts to have a feeling, and so, I just tried to listen to that and keep going.

BOGAEV: That’s so interesting. It’s like Shakespeare’s synesthesia.

WHITE: I’ve never heard that. That’s amazing.

BOGAEV: What about Emilia?

WHITE: Blues, poor thing.

BOGAEV: Blues. Okay, that’s Iago’s wife and accomplice, of course, Desdemona’s maid, and she has two parts in your show.

WHITE: She’s probably my favorite character of all of them because she’s one of us. She’s not a princess. She’s not an idolized teen like Juliet. She’s not a queen, like Lady Macbeth or the women of Richard.

BOGAEV: She’s not elite.

WHITE: She’s a common woman. She’s a common woman married to this guy who asks her, “Hey, get this handkerchief for me. Do something for me.” And it gets her killed when she speaks her truth. I think the Emilia feels the most immediate to me right now. It just sounded like blues, you know, when you listen to Billie Holiday and Howling Wolf.

BOGAEV: You really get into the class issues in the play around Emilia. In one of the songs, Desdemona wants to be “friends.” I’m making quotation marks, you know, “friends,” the way someone who employs a cleaning person wants to consider themselves friends, and no one working for someone else thinks of their boss as their friend. I think the words that pop out are “friends,” a word these women need around the class lines.

WHITE: Yes.

BOGAEV: But with a power imbalance, how can that be? It did make me think that so much attention is paid in this play of the class difference and power imbalance between Othello and Iago. But the Emilia-Desdemona relationship is even more marked, yet it’s unexplored.

WHITE: I know. It’s amazing. We come on and Desdemona has been spoken about and called everything: White ewe. A land carrack. A prize. Perfection. Skin whiter than snow. And my character comes on and I’m just a wife, “Thy wife shall attend on her,”and then the character pops forward. Her first moment isn’t even her own line, and then by the end she’s killed by her husband. It is soaring. It is so heroic. Emilia’s such a blues ballad to the unsung women, to me, in domestic abuse and women who live in the shadows, who risk their lives to speak the truth, and then they pay for it.

BOGAEV: Well, yeah. When you’re watching or reading Othello, are you always wondering why Emilia stays with Iago, this sociopath?

WHITE: That’s a whole thing. It’s like maybe she doesn’t see that sociopathy, you know? And their final scene, I don’t want to give it away, he says, “Be wise, get thee home. Are you fool? Go home. Go, go, go.” I think the question of who did you marry and how much do you know about them is really the key to that. Because when they’re together you don’t see him abusing her. I’m sure it’s obvious he’s a dark guy, but I think the mystery of their marriage is the most honest portrait of marriage in the Shakespearean canon because people’s relationships really are a mystery, you know? And then you read the headline in the news, you know, “Woman killed by husband” and you’re like, “What was going on there?” We will never know. So, there’s something very contemporary about it to me.

BOGAEV: There is. And there’s something else that you brought up already. Let’s talk about it. The dead girl trope. I mean, it’s just as pervasive now as it was in Shakespeare’s time.

WHITE: Ever was.

BOGAEV: Yeah, I mean, so much of true crime and crime fiction leans on the dead girl fetish and we’ve had many people—

WHITE: I can’t watch any more of these true crime shows. The opening statement is like, “A girl found.” I’m like, “Jesus, we’re obsessed. We are obsessed with this narrative.”

BOGAEV: Usually naked.

WHITE: Yeah, and that’s, you know, what I’m trying to question: Why are we so obsessed, you know?

BOGAEV: Well, and that’s what you’re getting to. All Shakespeare’s women in All Is But Fantasy, they all die by Act Five, as you point out. Juliet, Emilia and Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and Lady Ann and Richard III. So, how much does your inspiration to adapt these plays come from a desire to co-opt that cliche?

WHITE: I think this is the deepest question I’m facing right now. I didn’t change the endings. I just persist through all of them.

I think it’s incredibly brave for these portraits to exist in Shakespeare’s work. You know, he’s showing us how the world can be. I think it’s amazing that all his plays don’t have fairytale endings, that they have realistic endings.

But I think my question is—I don’t have a bone to pick with Shakespeare. I love Shakespeare.—I have a bone to pick with us. How come we haven’t gotten any better? How come Emilia’s story is relevant? How come everything that Othello says in his last speech, from talking about killing a “turban Turk,” everything in there is still so dangerous and so relevant? How have we not evolved past these stories?

So, I think sometimes people come to my shows and they’re like, “Oh, she’s got a bone to pick with Shakespeare because she’s Black,” and dah, dah, dah. And actually, no, I think Shakespeare’s great. I think we are the problem. We haven’t changed, you know? So, maybe the plays will… it’s making me question how can I change a little bit more.

BOGAEV: I’d like to talk about that, but I’d also like to talk about where you came from. I’m curious about your path to theater. When did you first know you wanted to be a performer?

WHITE: I think I was in a production of Rumpelstiltskin in the second grade.

BOGAEV: So, who were you?

WHITE: I don’t even know. I wasn’t even like a character of note. I was just spinning gold in the corner. But I was like, “I love this.”

BOGAEV: Oh, so sweet. You’re also in a church choir, right?

WHITE: Yes. I sang at my Catholic school. We had to do liturgical music and back then you would get a hymnal so you would learn how to read music. At the same time, my grandfather took me to an Apostolic Church on the South Side of Chicago. And oh my gosh, that church, it’s incredible. It’s got fifty plus people in the choir, full band. You walk in, the lights are bright, there’s joy and celebration and the music’s incredible. So, I do think faith and sacred music, definitely, fueled my love of art and music was my gateway to all of this, you know?

BOGAEV: And that’s what you’re bringing to these concert productions. That’s what it feels like. The lights are full up. You’re in a band. It’s not fifty people up there, but—

WHITE: Next time, next production.

BOGAEV: Let it be known.

WHITE: Yeah. [Both laugh.]

BOGAEV: There’s definitely call and response, too.

WHITE: Lots.

BOGAEV: So, what’s your Shakespeare history? Did you see the plays as a kid?

WHITE: I love that. That’s like AA, “What’s your history with this?”

BOGAEV: “My name is Whitney White.”

WHITE: “Hi, my name’s Whitney and I love Shakespeare. That’s what I like to say. I’m in recovery, long recovery.”

I grew up in Chicago, love my city so much. I went to incredible schools and they would take us on school trips. I remember seeing Shakespeare at Chicago Shakes, which is a wonderful theater. I’ve since directed a production there. And we would also go see theater at the Court Theatre.

So yeah, I saw a production of Midsummer and a production of Twelfth Night, and it was very magical. And then in high school, I was Fairy number three in a production of Midsummer, which I also very much enjoyed.

BOGAEV: Fairy number three, yes, go!

WHITE: I was like a purple fairy, like, everything was purple.

BOGAEV: Amazing. Midsummer, the gateway drug.

WHITE: I’ve never worn that much glitter, and I probably never will again!

BOGAEV: Well, okay, so, you couldn’t not be an artist. You started out as an actor—I guess this was what, the 2000s?

WHITE: Yes. I was an actor for a while. Yes, ma’am.

BOGAEV: What was it like for you to audition for roles in Shakespeare plays back then? What were you up against?

WHITE: Tricky, very tricky.

BOGAEV: Right.

WHITE: If I’m frank, it was very tricky because while there was diverse or colorblind casting, it wasn’t as common, and I think the way that people were typed in the 2000s was really brutal. It’s relaxing a little bit now, you know? But the idea of what an ingenue was, what a leading lady was, and the politics of what that body should look like, how their beauty should present, how they should carry their bodies, there’s a type, you know? It was just fascinating to be told where I fit in. And that’s still a thing. You are who you are, you present who you present, and characters are written the way they’re written.

BOGAEV: Yeah. Where did you fit in? What were you being told?

WHITE: I think I often would book Maria, the maids. I played a lot of maids, you know. I played Maria in a Twelfth Night and she’s interesting. She ends up with Sir Toby, but she’s a maid, nonetheless. I played a nursing maid in Sarah Ruhl’s play, The Vibrator Play. I played a slave in Showboat. And then Passing Strange came around. I was in the Chicago premiere of Passing Strange, and that production, like, saved me and inspired me so much. In fact, this show’s really inspired by Passing Strange. The idea of a band on stage and a Black storyteller just being who they are telling a story and the music supporting that story. That changed my life right there.

BOGAEV: Wow. I mean, it’s just not that long ago and it sounds like the 1900s, you know.

WHITE: Yeah, things changed fast, I think, but we are still working on it, obviously, you know?

BOGAEV: Is that why you started writing? Did you want to write the roles you wanted to perform and to write parts for all kinds of performers like you?

WHITE: Honestly, no. I’m such a poster child of education, like I really want us to keep investing in arts education because I truly always thought I would only be a performer. It wasn’t until I met several teachers at Brown that I even tried writing or directing.

I’m going to be honest; I was a performer. I was a singer and I was in bands. I was in musicals, a couple of TV episodes. I went to get my MFA in acting and I really thought that’s what I was going to do. Then, I had a writing teacher, Deb Salem Smith, a directing teacher, Brian Mertes, and all of the staff. That program really forced us to try other things. It was mandatory to take writing. It was mandatory to take directing. Who knows where I would be without that push, you know?

BOGAEV: Shout out to teachers. Shout out to educators.

WHITE: Yes, shout out to educators.

BOGAEV: Well, one of your early breaks directing Shakespeare was a gig assisting Sam Gold in directing Othello back in 2016. That was the production that was just full of celebrities: Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo and Rachel Brosnahan [and Ruth Negga]. So, what was the collaboration like with Sam Gold? What part of the process did you focus on?

WHITE: It’s so memorable. It really was. He’s a beautiful artist and director, and he had such a wonderful chemistry with that cast.

Othello is a very intense play. It’s unforgiving. It’s unblinking. It asks a lot of the Black body and the Black performer. When it comes time to murder Desdemona, I think that was the moment there were conversations about. Whether or not someone should portray the role of Othello? What is the value of showing rage on stage at all, especially for a Black actor? And that’s a deep, long, long conversation. Where does violence and anger and all this exist in the kind of bigger project of humanizing Black bodies on stage and the path towards like liberation and freedom? You know what I mean? The Malcolm X way or the Dr. King way, right? I just cherish that time because we were having big conversations, but there was such a generosity in that cast. They were all very kind to each other and kind to me. I was nobody at the time. I was just an assistant, you know? But I cherished that production because hard conversations were had in such a loving, respectful way that I observed, you know? And I try and take that with me.

BOGAEV: And what was the takeaway? What was the decision?

WHITE: David Oyelowo is one of the most incredible actors I’ve ever seen up close and personal. His final speech, “Think of me as I am,” to this day it wrecks me. His performance was so incredible, and to watch him work through the politics of that violent act and then coming out on the end. It was unforgettable. You know, my big takeaway is David Oyelowo always just can do anything, and so can Daniel Craig, you know? But also, I had a huge takeaway of what about the women? And that’s why I’m here.

You know, it’s funny, when you’re working on—you can get copies of director scripts for Othello, and you can see where the women’s lines are cut, I’m not talking about the one—I’ve seen lots of director scripts and I can see when Emilia’s lines are cut, you know? But she’s the one who calls everyone in and says, “Villainy, villainy,” you know?

BOGAEV: Oh, she gets cut to shreds.

WHITE: Right? She gets cut to shreds.

BOGAEV: So does Juliet.

WHITE: Right? And that’s really my question: why are we doing that? Cut the other people. Don’t cut us.

BOGAEV: You’ve also written a play about one of Shakespeare’s few recurring female characters, Queen Margaret. It’s called By the Queen and was performed at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in 2024 and the Folger Reading Room Festival just last year. It’s a reimagining of the history plays and the Wars of the Roses through the lens of Margaret’s experience in her long life. So, why Margaret? What does she mean to you?

WHITE: Well, I was going to try and put Margaret in my musical series, but when I workshopped it, it did not work because her story didn’t have fatal beats. It has tragic beats, but not the tragic ending.

There was something about Margaret. She’s just larger than life. She needed her own play. She just keeps coming back and fighting people, and then in Richard III, she’s just incredible. That scene where everybody is afraid of her is, I think, one of the funniest scenes ever. Even Richard III is like, “Oh God, it’s her.” There’s something just too good about that.

It felt like she needed her own play and it felt like she needed to have a play with herself. So, in By the Queen, there’s three Margarets and they’re all reminiscing, and it’s the three Margarets you meet across those four plays: Young Margaret, when she’s taken; Middle Margaret, who falls in love with Suffolk and has her lover beheaded; Older Margaret, who loses her husband and son, but then faces off with Richard III. She just had too much material to be in a one little one-hour play. She was a diva. She needed her own time.

BOGAEV: And she’s a survivor. She’s the one survivor. I think you said somewhere that she reminded you of women in your family.

WHITE: Yeah. You know, she just keeps going and the lights go down and she’s good. At the end of Richard III right before everyone gets killed and the war breaks out, her last lines are like, “Good luck ladies. I’m going to France.” It’s literally her line. She’s like, “Your sad woes will entertain me when I’m in France.” And she just leaves. I just love that. She goes into her own sunset, you know?

BOGAEV: Well, in By the Queen and in all your plays you mix contemporary language with Shakespeare’s verse and it feels a little bit like code switching. How do you think about adapting Shakespearean language?

WHITE: It does. It feels kind of like a mix tape to me, which doesn’t bother me, but might bother some people. You know, it’s just how I make my adaptations of Shakespeare’s work. But I try to think of the contemporary language as providing context because you can’t do better than Shakespeare. The raven speech is the raven speech, but it could be encased in a setting that makes it a little bit clearer or more, not clearer but more alive to me in the now.

BOGAEV: More inviting. It invites everyone in.

WHITE: Yeah. More inviting, yeah. I’m really just trying to follow what I feel and what I hear, to be honest, and what I see moves the audience. I’m out there every night performing, and I’m looking in people’s faces. I go by what’s moving them, not what someone tells me to do, you know?

BOGAEV: Well, it’s really interesting. By the end of All Is But Fantasy you are kind of done reclaiming Shakespeare’s women. You as the Woman character in this play want to play Richard III and the man—

WHITE: Controversial. [Both laugh.]

BOGAEV: And the man character plays Lady Anne. So, what are you going for with the gender flipping?

WHITE: I think once you’ve had enough of being the girls who get their heads chopped off you want to try something different.

BOGAEV: It’s time.

WHITE: It’s time. I think likewise for women who’ve been told—you know, I remember I had a critic come recently and say, “Oh, you know, it’s just a feminist piece. It’s dated. We’ve already had the conversation.”—we have not already had the conversation. We need to keep having the conversation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that, you know, and why at the end of the play, my character isn’t some hero. I’m a villain. Because you can go crazy trying to fight the system. I don’t want to give away the end, but I also go through all these plays with a male actor and there’s a lot of stuff surrounding love and the portraits of marriage and Shakespeare’s portraits of marriage and heterosexuality, and when you have the same two people playing the same couples over and over again, it gets really deep, you know? So, finally at the end, we both want to switch. We want to try something else.

BOGAEV: Break the mold.

WHITE: We want to break the mold. Then, it’s a little crazy what happens after that. So, you’ll have to come and see it.

BOGAEV: Well, I guess my question is, do you personally identify with Richard in the sense that his hate is rising out of being rudely stamped? In other words, being othered?

WHITE: Yeah, I think so.

BOGAEV: Because of his looks?

WHITE: Yeah. I think that’s very overt in the text. I by no means want to equate the experience of being in a Black identifying Afro-diasporic body, a she/her body that’s not the same as someone who has varied ability at all. I’m super respectful of that. But at the same time, when you are born othered, and you see certain things over the course of your life, you do ask, “Why am I playing by everyone else’s rules? Why am I being obedient? Why am I taking this lying down?”

So, I think what I do identify with is he starts to play and he goes, “I hate this weak piping time. I hate the time that I live in.” That’s what he says. And, you know, things have transpired certainly recently, but over the past five years that remind us of the time we’re living in, that the conversation is not over and we have to keep having it. So, I think it’s just fascinating, you know?

BOGAEV: Yes, you bring it into this current moment. You say, “It’s another elephant in the room. It’s not Richard’s time. It’s not his way. This fake liberal moment we’re all in. I mean, I don’t even know what ‘woke’ means anymore.” I’m quoting you here. “I’m sick of having to explain to people that there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with waking up, with being awake.”

WHITE: Yeah. That’s it, that’s it, there’s nothing wrong with it. And the next line is, “You start to feel crazy. You start to feel that I, as a Black woman, was rudely stamped,” you know? And then it goes back into his language. It’s a big leap, and I don’t want to give too much of it away. It’s meant to be a conversation starter, and we’ll see what kind of conversation it starts.

BOGAEV: Well, the question you keep asking in this play is how Shakespeare could write things that are still so relevant.

WHITE: Yeah, it’s crazy.

BOGAEV: It is crazy. What is your answer?

WHITE: I don’t know. I’ve read so many books by people who are much smarter than me. Emma Smith and Stephen Greenblatt and Patsy Rodenburg, and these great, great scholars of the Bard. I just read a book Shakespeare’s White Others, and there’s so much scholarship on it.

I think the thing I’ve landed on today, because it changes every day, is perhaps there are key structures that Western society on either side of the Atlantic is still dependent on that were put in place in the 1600s. We’re still operating off of those structures, you know, the beginning of these huge global markets and the structures that made colonialism possible. We actually live in a world where it’s still down there, right? Like, those gears are still turning, and maybe until we take those gears out, the stories are going to keep being relevant. That’s a tricky thing, you know what I mean?

The narratives that he was able to capture are still key to our understanding of ourselves, and how we frame each other, and what entertains us. Every action movie is Henry V and every romcom is Much Ado and every tragic lover is Romeo and Juliet. It’s like the Bible. So, it’s like the chicken and the egg, do you know what I mean? He’s capturing something that spoke to everybody then, and those things still speak to us now. So, it’s a very complex thing.

BOGAEV: Thank you so much. It was such fun to talk with you, and I really wish you the best with the run.

WHITE: Thank you, I’ll take it. Thank you.

———————–

KARIM-COOPER: That was Whitney White, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

All Is But Fantasy runs through February 21st at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Melvin Rickarby in Stratford, England, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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