Writer, director, musician, and actor Whitney White creates dynamic live performances for theatre born of collaborative processes. Whether she is directing Hedda Gabler, Othello, a musical adaptation of Chekov’s Three Sisters, James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner or Aleshea Harris’ What to Send Up When It Goes Down, she constructs visceral, poetic, unapologetic, fabulous, and singular worlds.

For White, plays and performances are enigmas to be cracked. She sees theatre as an arena to share truth and an occasion to engage in dialogue and to examine issues of identity, ambition, violence, power and traditional power structures through nontraditional storytelling – fractured structure, breaking the fourth wall, multiple theatrical and cinematic techniques - influenced by the worlds of music, concert, ensemble-based theater, and rigorous physical exploration. Sacrificing neither nuanced political engagement nor theatrical beauty, spectacle and celebration, her work speaks as much to the senses as to the mind.   

Digging deep into the power and timelessness of certain “classic” works, White also brings an in-this-very-moment sensibility to reimagining what might be. Exploring Black female power, she wrote Macbeth in Stride, through Lady Macbeth’s point-of-view, played by White herself. The composer of this rock concert? Whitney White.

photo: Melissa Bunni Elian