There is an edge to watching five actresses portray characters that Whoopi Goldberg wrote and performed by herself, in her 1984 solo show on Broadway, a debut that led to her star-making role in Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple.” The edge is in the comedy itself, the humor pointedly illuminating such serious issues as drug addiction, mental health, reproductive rights, immigration, while also cleverly exposing the audience’s unconscious biases — the surprise that Kara Young’s junkie Fontaine, for example, has a PhD in Literature from Columbia (“I got a PhD I can’t do shit with. So I stay high so I don’t get mad.”) But there is also an edge in realizing how sharp and original Whoopi’s homegrown comedy remains, and how she largely abandoned this particular gift of hers for a career as a movie star and talk show host. It would be absurd to argue that this ubiquitous EGOT winner wasted her talent. But “The Whoopi Monologues” made me wonder: What if she had kept at her playwriting?
The production also made me think, unfairly, of JFK’s famous remarks when he played host to 49 Nobel Prize winners at a White House dinner: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
Whoopi has a unique access to the characters she created – as you can see in the films of her 1984 Broadway show and its 2004 update, both currently available on HBOMax – not just because of her deft physical transformations, but also in part because they seem to derive from real-life observation or even lived experience (She has talked, for example, about having been a “functional” drug addict.)
Still the five-member cast of “The Whoopi Monologues” is talented in their own right, some famously so. It includes Kerry Washington, who came up with the idea for this reimagined production, and whose company Simpson Street is producing it in partnership with Lincoln Center Theater. Tony winners Kara Young and Kecia Lewis bracket the show, with the two longest and most elaborate of the monologues. Under Whitney White’s lively direction, the five actresses perform the service of reacquainting us with Whoopi’s people.
We are briefly introduced to all five, accompanied by pulsing music and bright projections, each of them emerging from a door in the backdrop that opens into their dressing room. Then we begin with Fontaine. Kara Young in dreadlocks, and always seeming about to nod off, narrates a tale that takes several unexpected turns. It starts with her burglarizing an Upper East Side apartment for some “gold-plated digital escargot forks,” that she cashes in to get a plane ticket to Amsterdam, where she winds up at Anne Frank House. Along the way, she makes stand-up like observations (about, for example, the airline food and airplane bathrooms), but her experience turns unsettling for her, and for us.
None of the three characters in the middle monologues are given actual names, just character types, which may be a tip off that they were originally intended more to show off Whoopi’s versatility more than reflect her depth of understanding about human nature.
Dominique Fishback is Blonde Girl, a young Black girl who wears a white shirt on her head, imagining herself as a blonde.
Danielle Pinnock is exuberant as Jamaican Lady, telling the most fanciful and bawdy of the tales, how she was hired and brought to the United Stages by a man so old and wrinkled she calls him raisin. He said to her: “’I need someone to do the cooking and the cleaning and to give me a little nookie.’ Now you know, child, when he said that, I didn’t know what ‘nookie’ was. No, I had no idea what it meant. I thought, yes, I can cook, I can clean, whatever nookie is, I’ll improvise.’” Of the five monologues, this is the most visually distinctive (and different from when Whoopi performed it) thanks to some sudden surprises in Qween Jean’s costuming.
Kerry Washington has taken on what may be the most problematic role. She is Surfer Girl, and she speaks in sprightly California uptalk, but what she is talking about is the horrible things that happened after she got pregnant, at age 13, as if she is not aware at how horrendous they are. This suggests somebody too air-headed to be real, and in any case makes it difficult to embrace the humor.
As Lurleen, Kecia Lewis extensively catalogues the effects of growing older, which is an overly polite way of describing a menopausal woman who doesn’t just talk graphically about her “balding pudenda,” she sings about it, while reminiscing in detail about the evolution of feminine hygiene products.
Lurleen did not exist in Whoopi’s original solo show, when Whoopi was 28 years old. She made her first appearance in the twentieth anniversary Broadway update when Whoopi has just turned 49. How wonderful it would be (albeit unlikely) to hear the latest from Lurleen – and any newly created characters – now that Whoopi is 70
The Whoopi Monologues
Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater through August 30
Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $122.50 – $182.50. Digital lottery: $20
Written by Whoopi Goldberg
Directed by Whitney White
Set design by Studio Bent: Adam Rigg & Anton Volovsek, costume design by Qween Jean, lighting design by Cha See, sound design by Fan Zhang, video design by Hana S. Kim, hair and wig design by Nikiya Mathis
Cast: Dominique Fishback as Jamaican Lady, Kecia Lewis as Lurleen, Daniell Pinnock as Blonde Girl, Kerry Washington as Surfer Girl and Kara Young as Fontaine.
Photos by Angela Marie Orellana
