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Room with a view: Lars Jan’s play “The White Album” stars Mia Barrow (center)
and will immerse 20 selected members of the audience on stage in a set
designed to look like a mid-century California mansion. Rafael Hernandez
‘White’ on time
Play looks at activism across the decades
Tumultuous times: Actress Mia Barron will read
the complete text of Joan Didion’s essay “The
White Album,” in an adaptation directed by
Lars Jan, opening on Nov. 28 at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater. Lars Jan
COURIER LIFE, N 24-7 OV. 23-29, 2018 45
By Kevin Duggan Call it a drama for dramatic times.
A new interactive play delves
deep into the turbulent 1960s,
drawing a connection to the struggles of
young political activists in 2018. “The
White Album,” opening at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater on
Nov. 28, adapts journalist Joan Didion’s
1978 essay of the same name for the stage,
and examines how the dramatic changes
of that decade resonate today, according
to its director.
“I was interested to see whether the
most defining issues that were questioned
by the youth in the 1960s resonate with
the issues of young activists today,” said
Lars Jan.
Didion’s essay takes a first-person
look at the movements and events that
challenged American society in the final
years of the decade, including the Black
Panthers, student protests, and the Manson
Family murders, all of which boiled over in
her native California.
Actress Mia Barron will recite the essay
onstage, bringing Didion’s lucid writing
voice to life, according to Jan.
“Essential to the essay is that Didion
herself is the central character,” Jan said.
“Mia translates the electricity of Didion’s
language into somebody reflecting on her
own inner life and physiology, in a way
that’s very human.”
While most of the audience will watch
Barron and a small group of actors perform
Didion’s text, an additional selection
of about 20 audience members will join
them onstage.
Before each show, Jan and his Early
Morning Opera company will recruit this
“inner audience” from among local students,
activists, and artists between the
ages of 21 and 30.
Members of this group will watch the
beginning of the play from the stage, and
then shift into the background, moving
into a glass structure that resembles a midcentury
Californian house.
Instead of hearing the rest of the play,
they will don headphones and listen to
recordings of seminal events from the
1960s, including concert films and footage
of police cracking down on protests.
To most of the audience, the scene
onstage will look like a quiet gathering
that finally breaks into a dance party that
is fully 2018, according to Jan.
“They become kind of a visual score,”
he said.
After the show, the two audiences will
have a chance to come together for an open
discussion of the themes of the play. Jan
hopes these talks will help to create connections
across generations.
“The average age of theatergoers is such
that they will likely have lived through the
1960s, and they look at history from a very
different perspective than young people of
today,” he said.
Didion’s account of a confusing era
speaks to people from any era, said Jan.
“Joan Didion has this gorgeous brain
and writes this piece very incisively about
the confusion and violence around her
and the profound desire to create meaning
around this. And I think that that’s something
everybody can relate to,” he said.
Anyone interested in joining the “inner
audience” can write to madeline@earlymorningopera.
com.
“The White Album” at BAM Harvey
Theater 651 Fulton St. at Ashland Place,
(718) 636–4100, www.bam.org. Nov.
28–Dec. 1 at 7:30 pm. $25–$70.
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