The White Card

by Claudia Rankine

Moderated by Blake Bush-Meek

The White Card poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible? Composed 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. Their conversation about art and representations of race spirals toward the devastation of Virginia and Charles’s intentions. 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.

About the playwright 

Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine is the author of eight books, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.
In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of National Book Critics Circle Award, Forward Prize, LA Times Book Award, the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, DAAD, The American Academy in Rome, The American Academy in Berlin, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine teaches in the NYU Creative Writing Program and lives in New York.

About the moderator

Blake Bush-Meek

Blake Bush-Meek is a native Memphian and licensed Cosmetologist with 19 years of experience in the beauty industry, including theatre, film, print, editorial, and artist-training and development. Recent credits include Opera Memphis’ The Barber of Seville, La Calisto, Carmen; TN Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night; University of Memphis’ The Rake’s Progress, Into the Woods; Ballet Memphis’ Dracula; and Theatre Memphis’ The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Master Class.