Review: The Whitney Album Places the World’s Greatest Pop Star at the Center of a Healing Ritual

In midtown, when a piece of theater bears the name of a pop star, you’re typically in for a saccharine hero’s journey capped off with a vigorous mega-mix. Downtown at Soho Rep, however, you stumble into dramatic experiments like Jillian Walker’s The Whitney Album — which, if taken at its word, would likely prefer to dismantle the entire reductive and exploitative entertainment genre that keeps the wheels turning just a few miles north.

In keeping with Walker’s growing body of work about Blackness, legacy, and liberation (perhaps you caught SKiNFoLK: An American Show at the Bushwick Starr just before the pandemic shutdown), The Whitney Album borrows bits of biography from Whitney Houston — the tragic poster child of Black-American exploitation — and pieces together a performance that is equal parts shamanic healing ritual (Walker identifies herself as an Afro-indigenous priest) and intellectual interrogation of the theatrical form itself. Can theater dissolve barriers of time and space? Can it turn a singular I into a collective we? And most importantly, can it break its own corrupt cycle and free Black female bodies to take to a stage without perpetuating a tradition of abuse?

If that all sounds like a lot for a night where you really just wanted to dance along to Whitney’s greatest hits — well, it is. But even with its heady and trauma-laden premise, Walker — who performs the piece alongside the enthralling Stephanie Weeks — crafts one of the warmest theatrical experiences in New York City. That is, if you’re willing to greet it with just as much warmth. Even minor allergies to the conjuring of ancestors, deep eye-contact, and requests for musical participation would be sand in the gears of this experience that bravely relies on audience reception as much as it does on the performances of its two co-pilots. At times, Walker and Weeks scrap all boundaries and seem more like familiar conversationalists than distant players. Still, these moments are supported by just enough scaffolding to keep you from feeling completely unmoored — an achievement for director Jenny Koons whose presence is best exemplified by her near invisibility.

The Whitney Album resists structure, but in the broadest terms, it charts a course from the head to the heart in prose, verse, and song. Walker opens the show with a passing sarcastic reference to a lost Harvard professorship, and then appropriately assumes her most professorial tenor to deliver what the script calls a “lecture in love.”

Here she throws out terms like “praxis” and “colonial temporalities,” veering towards the esoteric cliff of dramatic theory until she brings her queries back to Whitney: “How do I/we honor Whitney Houston by way of Sally Hemings?” she asks. “How do I/we create a just historical space for her legacy?” Depending on each crowd’s ability to follow the pre-performance instructions about white clothing, the I-we divide may already be well on its way to collapsing (an abiding audience makes for a unified aesthetic that extends the serenity of set designer Peiyi Wong’s neutral-toned, prayerful space). But centering Whitney Houston in a meditation on a “legacy” that is simultaneously particular and universal proves a trickier task.

Walker and Weeks take turns embodying their titular icon as well as other people in her inner circle (most notably her mother Cissy, and her friend and one-time lover Robyn Crawford). Imagined scenes of a physically and emotionally spent Houston, soaked with the historically fraught sweat of Black female labor, are interspersed with verbatim interviews that frame the pop star as a commodity in a complicated relationship with her ravenous consumers. Natural hair is shrouded by signature wigs (designed by Earon Chew Nealey) and designer Jojo Siu’s nods to African costuming melt into versions of Houston’s most notorious outfits that pop out of hidden compartments in the set like intrusive visitors from other planets.

Yet despite these tangible Whitney Houston touchstones, her presence never feels like Walker’s dramatic fulcrum. Even in Houston-specific scenes, Walker is always operating on a grand historical and spiritual scale, itching to get to the part where she and her audience communally revel in the “just historical space” she’s crafted for herself as a present-day member of her muse’s artistic lineage. In her work, you’re not likely to find the clean edges of tried-and-true dramatic structure, but it is an admirable and rare example of theatrical theorizing set in motion. The most cynical or Earth-bound among us may not be able to pay the earnestly mystical premium required to buy into the experience. But before you reject The Whitney Album on its face, it’s worth considering that new realities are made by investing in new illusions.