This spring, Whitney White directed the ensemble drama “Liberation” Off Broadway, then the two-hander “The Last Five Years” on Broadway. Just days after that musical opened, she stood in an upstairs room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, rehearsing “Macbeth in Stride,” her adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy, which begins performances on Tuesday.
During the song “Reach for It,” White, who plays a version of Lady Macbeth, took the lead. “Power’s not supposed to look like me,” she sang into a microphone.
Maybe it should.
A multidisciplinary artist with an unusual number of hyphens, White, 39, is an actor, a musician, a writer for theater and television (the Amazon series “I’m a Virgo”) and an increasingly in-demand, Tony-nominated stage director. Her current projects, White observed during a rehearsal break, are all about ambitious women. “I’m weirdly one of them,” she said.
White grew up in Chicago, in a one-bedroom apartment with her working single mother. Her first exposure to theater was at her grandfather’s church, the Apostolic Church of God, which boasted a 50-person choir. A visit to Cirque du Soleil was another formative experience.
At Northwestern, White took theater classes, but she found the scene there cliquey, exclusionary, so she majored in political science instead. While interning for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, she realized that she had to be an artist after all.
“There’s nothing else that I can really wholeheartedly do with myself,” she said.
After working as an actor for a few years, she enrolled in a master’s program at Brown University. There she met the actor Charlie Thurston, her co-star in “Macbeth in Stride.” Thurston recalled how she lit up a classroom.
“She is super present and alive and brings her full self,” Thurston said. This was apparent even over a quick taco lunch on BAM’s rooftop. White, dressed in black from motorcycle jacket to heeled boots, was dynamic, charismatic, convivial.
Every M.F.A. actor had to direct a scene, and after seeing White’s, a professor suggested that she had a gift for it. “I have a noisy mind, and when I am directing, my mind is not so noisy,” she said. “I was like, I have to keep doing this.”
After graduation she applied for both acting jobs and directing fellowships. Just as she’d booked a “Porgy and Bess” tour, New York Theater Workshop invited her, in 2016, to assist Sam Gold in directing a starry production of “Othello.” She accepted.
Those next years were hectic. During the day, White directed workshops. At night she bartended and performed at venues like Joe’s Pub. On the train home, she wrote musicals on her phone. Sometimes she would have to hide these talents, so as not to discomfit people. “I had to segment myself for many, many years,” she said.
In 2018, she landed her first major theater project, Aleshea Harris’s “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” a participatory pageant that mourns Black lives lost to racialized violence. In 2022, she won an Obie award for directing Alexis Scheer’s “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord.” And in the fall of 2023, she brought Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” to Broadway.
In a review for The New York Times, Jesse Green wrote that White kept “the stage activated and the stories simmering at a happy bubble.” She was nominated for a Tony for her work.
Though “Jaja’s” and “What to Send Up” are both ensemble plays by Black women, White is drawn to work across medium and genre and style. “Her goal has always been to craft a really broad, beautiful, wide ranging career,” Bioh, a friend since “Jaja’s,” said.
White echoed this. “If I’m pigeonholed, I’ll never get there,” she said.
Still, there are a few common threads. White’s style is typically exuberant and accessible. Preferring work that acknowledges and welcomes the audience, she has rarely met a fourth wall she didn’t want to smash. Every show, she said, is a love letter to the women in her family, women who sacrificed for her, women who do not always feel comfortable in traditional theater spaces.
“I’m trying to make work for everybody,” she said.
To see White’s name attached to Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years,” a niche show popular with musical aficionados that runs through June 22, was something of a surprise. A two-person musical, it charts the breakdown of a marriage between the novelist Jamie and the actress Cathy. Though structurally shrewd, it is a more traditional work than most in White’s oeuvre, and having first premiered in 2001, it is neither a new play nor a classic.
But Cathy — like the women of “Liberation” and even Lady Macbeth — is ambitious for herself, even as that ambition goes unrealized during the show. “That’s been the through line this year, like, is it possible to have more?” White said. In Cathy, White recognized herself. She had never seen the role played by a Black woman, but she suggested it to Adrienne Warren, a recent Tony winner and White’s collaborator on a musical version of the Netflix sensation “The Queen’s Gambit.”
“Whitney had a vision from the beginning,” Warren said. That vision was persuasive. “She’s just infectious,” Warren, who now plays Cathy, said. “She’s like a firework of a director.” (The pop star Nick Jonas plays Jamie.)
Still, as with Jamie and Cathy’s relationship, it wasn’t quite happily ever after. Reviews were mixed, and in a curtain speech, Brown praised diversity equity and inclusion efforts for how they had challenged him, then added: “I would not, I don’t think you would either, have gotten to meet Whitney White without that challenge.” Though he was praising White, some in the theater world interpreted this as Brown claiming that White, a proven director, had been hired for reasons other than her merits. (Representatives of the show did not make Brown available for comment.)
White was diplomatic. “I think he was trying to say that he was proud of the work and grateful for everyone’s contributions to it,” White said. She believes that her directing speaks for itself. As Bess Wohl, who wrote “Liberation,” had said a few days earlier, “She’s bringing the gift of who she is to the work, and it’s extraordinary.”
White does not direct “Macbeth in Stride.” (Tyler Dobrowsky and Taibi Magar are the directors.) So at BAM, she could focus all of her energy on her performance, as she prepared “Macbeth in Stride,” the first in a four-part exploration of Shakespeare’s characters called “All Is But Fantasy,” for a new production.
“It’s thrilling for her, to home in on her specific journey as opposed to trying to balance all of the things all at once,” Thurston said.
Then again, White finds that balance just as thrilling. (And as the mother of a toddler, she is always having to balance anyway.) She would like to direct Shakespeare and more musicals. (“The Queen’s Gambit” and a show called “Saturday Church,” with music by Sia, are both in the offing.) There are more parts of “All Is But Fantasy” and other shows she hopes to write.
“I am looking, I am hungry, I am searching,” she said. Ambition didn’t work out especially well for Lady Macbeth. On White, it promises better.
Asked how personally ambitious she is, White paused. Then she smiled and said that she hoped her answer didn’t sound too unhinged. “I’ve tapped into only, like, 20 percent of what I can do,” she said. “I haven’t even started.”
