Throwing in just about everything including the kitchen sink in its examination of how African-American characters are marginalized in mass media, White Girl in Danger, Michael R. Jackson’s riotous follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Strange Loop, is a piercingly satiric send-up of soap operas—with more stories than the Freedom Tower. We’re inside a TV drama universe ruled over by the Great White Writer. Blackground player Keesha Gibbs (devilishly funny LaToya Edwards) longs to move out of Police Violence Storytime and join the main players of AllWhite, a Peyton Place-like center of debauchery and scandal (that allusion shows you how old the critic is). Accompanying Keesha on her upwardly mobile trek is her down-to-earth mother Nell (the amazing Tarra Conner Jones), who graduates from lunch lady to school nurse to assistant district attorney as she follows her daughter up the racially tinged ladder of success.
The premise is perfectly valid and timely and Jackson’s score contains many rock-driven, catchy tunes including the ’70s-charged title song. Jackson’s book also has many laughs and sharp insight into African-American and white power dynamics, but there’s just too many tropes and schticks to keep track of. We go from high school trauma to courtroom clashes to political elections to “Dynasty”-like catfights to horror films with side trips to slavery scenarios. Director Lileana Blain-Cruz manages to keep the multiple plots moving, aided by Adam Rigg’s versatile set.
