Production Language English
Country of Origin United States
Description The White Album is a multifaceted performance based featuring Joan Didion’s seminal essay about California’s shifting cultural landscape of the late 1960s. In this piece, directed by Lars Jan, the Obie-winning Mia Barron delivers the essay in its entirety while two performance works simultaneously unfold on stage (one nests within the other). Two separate audiences—one, large and traditionally seated; the other on stage, intimate, and mobile—also experience the works simultaneously but from different vantage points. The smaller audience becomes part of a contemporary house party, representing a microcosm of the promise, tumult, and violence of the era traced in Didion’s text. Party-goers on stage visually underscore stark similarities in cultural dynamics between 1968 and now, invoking themes of protest, race, and generational divide. As the “party” gathers steam and becomes unhinged, a tense climax forces guests and audience members to consider the double-edged meaning behind the essay’s famous opening line…“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Identifier 2018f.11128
