Rankine’s The White Card is a moving and revelatory distillation of racial divisions as experienced in the white spaces of the living room, the art gallery, the theater, and the imagination itself.Ĭlaudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. One year later, the second scene brings Charlotte and Charles into the artist’s studio, and their confrontation raises both the stakes and the questions of what―and who―is actually on display. Their conversation about art and representations of race spirals toward the devastation of Virginia and Charles’s intentions. ―from the introduction by Claudia RankineĬlaudia Rankine’s first published play, The White Card, poses the essential Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible?Ĭomposed of two scenes, the play opens with a dinner party thrown by Virginia and Charles, an influential Manhattan couple, for the up-and-coming artist Charlotte. The scenes in this one-act play, for all the characters’ disagreements, stalemates, and seeming impasses, explore what happens if one is willing to stay in the room when it is painful to bear the pressure to listen and the obligation to respond. The White Card stages a conversation that is both informed and derailed by the black/white American drama. A play about the imagined fault line between black and white lives by Claudia Rankine, the author of Citizen

Don t let me be lonely claudia rankine