The White Card: A Play

A play about the imagined fault line between black and white lives by Claudia Rankine, the author of Citizen

The White Card stages a conversation that is both informed and derailed by the black/white American drama. 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.
--from the introduction by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine's first published play, 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.

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.

Author: Claudia Rankine
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 03/19/2019
Pages: 80
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 7.80h x 5.40w x 0.30d
ISBN13: 9781555978396
ISBN10: 1555978398
BISAC Categories:
- Drama | American | African American & Black

About the Author
Claudia Rankine is the author of five works of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric, a New York Timesbestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a MacArthur Fellow and the Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.