Buzz Blog

There’s a ghost wandering through the audience at the outset of Chisa Hutchinson’s Whitelisted—not literally, of course, and not even really within the framework of the play. It’s a disturbed woman (played by Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin), pleading individually with audience members for money while suggesting that some terrible fate has befallen her daughter. Immediately, Whitelisted becomes a direct and uncomfortable challenge: Do you respond to the call for help that’s staring you in the face? Or can you behave, from a position of relative security, that it has nothing to do with you, that the potentially scary thing isn’t really there?

Whitelisted—currently receiving its regional premiere at Salt Lake Acting Company—does ultimately turn into an actual ghost story, though it gets there only gradually and quite effectively. The central character is Rebecca (Collette Astle), a 30-something White woman who designs dollhouse furniture out of an apartment in a gentrifying New York neighborhood, frequently calling the police to complain about anything that bothers her. She goes about her days blithely, until her hook-up with a guy she’s been interested in (Eliyah Ghaeini) takes a creepy turn, as he first appears to be dead in her shower, then disappears entirely.

What follows is mostly a horror tale about institutional racism and privilege; think A Christmas Carol, if Scrooge were the worst Karen you’ve ever encountered. Hutchinson is wise enough to spike the narrative with plenty of humor, particularly in Astle’s prickly performance and her awkward interactions with a Latinx security expert (Jacob Barnes) she hires to help figure out what’s going on in her apartment, so that the narrative almost never feels like it’s turning into a lecture. Co-directors Latoya Cameron and Tito Livas build some generally unsettling scenes with the help of a tremendous technical team—notably, lighting designer Jesse Portillo, sound designer Joe Killian and scenic designer Erik Reichert—as Whitelisted combines actual monsters with psychological terror to explore what happens when your indifference comes back to haunt you.

It's hard not to wonder if Whitelisted might have been even more effective if Rebecca hadn’t been so exaggerated a version of White obliviousness, even re-purposing the “I voted for Obama” line from Get Out. As wonderfully as Astle plays what she’s given, it becomes a bit too easy for progressive White audience members to cluck their tongues and feel like the character doesn’t really represent them, when it seems more important to implicate everyone in the structures that fail the play’s vengeful spirit.

Then again, there is that opening scene involving Darby-Duffin’s desperate woman—and I’d be lying my ass off if I didn’t acknowledge that I spent much of that time trying to avoid eye contact from my aisle seat, hoping she wouldn’t put me on the spot. As creepy and disturbing as Whitelisted is as a genre piece, it might be even scarier when Hutchinson nails the way we can passively contribute to an ongoing horror story, unconcerned that some supernatural force might some day call us to account.

Whitelisted runs through Oct. 27 at Salt Lake Acting Company (168 W. 500 North) . Visit the website for performance dates/times and tickets.