The title of a new play now being performed at The Shed in midtown Manhattan is “Help.”

“Help” as a demand. A scream uttered by the narrator, a Black woman standing in for playwright, poet and essayist Claudia Rankine.

“Help” is a challenging 90 minutes of Theater focused on white (especially male) privilege and on Black anger at the endless emotional work of conforming to White expectations. An important and timely subject, especially in a still-fractured post-Trump America, where we continue to deal with the noxious racism, sexism and classism that the former president’s overtly crass cruelty unleashed into public view.

There is nearly nothing entertaining about “Help.”  Okay, perhaps the dance numbers into which the nine men and two women of the company occasionally and inexplicably break. At the end of one such number, when the company is gathered center stage and raised their hands in a Nazi salute, was discomfiting.

The world premiere of “Help” is a polemic which frequently feels more like being in a college lecture on the Black experience in modern America than theater.

Which, in fact, it is. “Help” is written almost verbatim on an essay Rankine wrote in The New York Times in … Continue reading..