IN “White People,” a sociology report masquerading as drama, playwright J.T. Rogers seeks to expose the racism that permeates every aspect of American life – a concept about as shocking as Claude Rains’ discovery that there’s gambling in “Casablanca.”
Using the tiresome structure of interwoven monologues – used, to far greater effect, by Conor McPherson in his “Port Authority” – the play features three stock characters.
Martin (John Dossett) is a hotshot attorney who’s moved from Brooklyn to St. Louis so that he and his family can “live in a community of people who look like me” and who decries the disheveled clothes and rap music favored by the underlings at his firm.
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Mara Lynn (Rebecca Brooksher) is an embittered former homecoming queen who blames her downward mobility on the influx of immigrants in her North Carolina community:
“All these new people – black, brown, yellow – they need to wait their turn . . . because we were here first.”
And Alan (Michael Shulman) is a New York City teacher so politically correct that he barely knows how to communicate with his largely minority students.
Eventually we come to learn about the separate, tragic events that force each of the characters to confront his or her racial attitudes.
None of the situations are exactly revelatory, and one longs for the bracing honesty and humor with which Spike Lee explored similar themes in “Do the Right Thing” and other films.
The actors do perfectly well with their archetypal roles, but their performances are as unsurprising as the characters they play.
WHITE PEOPLE Atlantic Stage 2, 330 W. 16th St.; 212-279-4200. Through Feb. 22.