Onstage and Off, Whitney White Is Everywhere This Spring
This spring, Whitney White directed the ensemble drama 'Liberation' Off Broadway, then the two-hander 'The Last Five Years' on Broadway. Just days after that musical opened, she stood in an upstairs room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, rehearsing 'Macbeth in Stride,' her adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy, which begins performances on Tuesday.
During the song 'Reach for It,' White, who plays a version of Lady Macbeth, took the lead. 'Power's not supposed to look like me,' she sang into a microphone.
Maybe it should.
A multidisciplinary artist with an unusual number of hyphens, White, 39, is an actor, a musician, a writer for theater and television (the Amazon series 'I'm a Virgo') and an increasingly in-demand, Tony-nominated stage director. Her current projects, White observed during a rehearsal break, are all about ambitious women. 'I'm weirdly one of them,' she said.
White grew up in Chicago, in a one-bedroom apartment with her working single mother. Her first exposure to theater was at her grandfather's church, the Apostolic Church of God, which boasted a 50-person choir. A visit to Cirque du Soleil was another formative experience.
At Northwestern, White took theater classes, but she found the scene there cliquey, exclusionary, so she majored in political science instead. While interning for Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008, she realized that she had to be an artist after all.
'There's nothing else that I can really wholeheartedly do with myself,' she said. With Nygel D. Robinson at the piano, the cast of 'Macbeth in Stride' in rehearsal, from left: Charlie Thurston, White, Holli' Conway, Phoenix Best and Ciara Alyse Harris. Credit... Elias Williams for The New York Times
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