Review: Giving A 'Karen' the Scrooge Treatment: WHITELISTED at Contemporary American Theater Festival

In an interview transcribed in the program to her show Whitelisted, now premiering at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, playwright Chisa Hutchinson has credited the film Get Out! as an influence, and that claim seems reasonable: both works use the tools of the horror genre to deal with the plight of Blacks in a racist society. But there's another clear progenitor, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in which ghostly visitations force the protagonist to confront what's wrong with his soul. The comparison is instructive.

Here the protagonist, Rebecca (Kate MacCluggage) is a classic "Karen," a monster of unappreciated White privilege and unacknowledged bigotry. But her monstrosity is mostly fairly minor league and mostly comical. Rebecca's sins include appropriating Ebonics and rap numbers for comic effect, doing something unspecified to get her tenant to hate her, indulging in oxycontin for recreational purposes, sexual pursuit of vapid hot guys, drinking designer water, frequently calling the police for various matters that should not be deemed police emergencies, owning a fancy coffeemaker, trying to cheat a security consultant who has worked hard for her, and being a White gentrifier in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The non-emergency calls to the cops are the ones that are less minor and more tinged with racism, like calling them on an autistic 12-year-old who rings his bicycle bell too frequently for her taste, and on a Black beggar lady who hangs out on her stoop.

In many respects, the worst indictment of Rebecca comes out of her own mouth. On the one hand, she's vigilant to call out any perceived micro-aggressions against her, for instance when her security consultant, in the line of work, points out that she had a gentleman caller overnight, and she ripostes that he's "slut-shaming" her. When it's suggested she may be a tad racist, she likes the suggestion to being raped. But she's close to clueless in dealing out micro-aggressions of her own and in embracing and proclaiming prejudices she will never own as such:

"Can we all just stop pretending that there isn't truth in stereotypes now? I mean, we had a black president- one I voted for, by the way- it should now be safe for us to admit that a lot of that shit is accurate as fuck. Fact: Asians are generally just better at math than the rest of us. White people cannot dance. Like even the ones of us who can technically move look like they're trying way too hard, you know? Latino men? Practicing chauvinists.... Black men aren't much better in that department, but they've got (gestures toward her crotch) you know... so women are way more willing to overlook that shit. And black women are rude and aggressive and yes, angry! And I'm not blaming them. Really. Oh God, if I woke up black, I'd be pissed, too. You know?"

This is brilliant; Hutchinson has quite the ear for this kind of hilariously self-revelatory talk. And this is all, from a dramatic point of view, a cruising for a bruising, one that will be delivered by ghosts.

But: Dickens understood, as Hutchinson does not seem to, that the punishment ghosts impose must fit the crime, and that things work best when the offender learns from the punishment and internalizes the lesson. Scrooge, after all, goes on to see that Tiny Tim does not die. Granting Scrooge the indulgence of a chance to reform doesn't detract from Dickens' attack on the radical mercantile individualism Scrooge originally typifies. By contrast, without getting into specifics, the ghosts in this case have been through hell, a hell that Rebecca, for all her awfulness, did not create. And then the ghosts turn around and visit roughly the same experience on Rebecca, leaving her utterly broken. On the showing of the script, Rebecca did not have anything this bad coming, and that in turn leaves a bad taste in the mouth at the end of the play. Mean-spirited fun gets old after a while.

I would urge Hutchinson, in revising the play, to do one of two things: either make Rebecca the true and prime agent of the ghosts' misery, in which case she deserves what she gets, or heed Dickens' example and allow her some insight and some measure of redemption.

CATF is a good company to put on a show like this, because it is a technical heavy lift, involving a number of supernatural effects, and CATF has the resources to pull them off. I won't share details here, because they're all meant to be surprises. (They all surprised me!) Kristin Horton, the director, keeps the rhythms of humor and horror cooking just right, and MacCluggage does obnoxious, clueless, and racist to perfection, which may not sound like much of a compliment, but it is. Valerie Lewis makes a scary ghost indeed, one who, like Hamlet's dad, turns out to have a sorry tale to tell. And Carlo Alban, whose turn as Diego, the security contractor required to absorb vast amounts of Rebecca's blithe obnoxiousness without too much demur, gives the role the forbearance and sweetness it demands.

As the program notes, this is Chisa Hutchinson's third outing at CATF. I liked both of her previous entries, The Wedding Gift (2016) and Dead and Breathing (2014), and she continues to wax both original and amusing, without slighting the serious messages she always delivers.

Whitelisted, by Chisa Hutchinson, directed by Kristin Horton, presented by the Contemporary American Theater Festival through July 31, at the Frank Center, 260 University Drive, Shepherdstown, WV 25443. Tickets $38-$68 at link below, or 681-240-2283 ext. 1. Adult language, sexual behavior, partial nudity. All audience members will be required to show proof of vaccination status and photo ID, and to wear a mask while in the theater.

Production photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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