Whitney White.
A little more than an hour-long train ride cracks open new terrain for Brooklyn dwellers like playwright-director-actor-musician Whitney White. As she journeys along the mechanical horse that is the Metro North, building-clad skylines slope off into flat land and nestled banks along the Hudson River. It’s here in the hamlet of Garrison that we arrive at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (HVSF), a theatre lover’s respite which has just launched its 37th season, including White’s Bard-inspired play By the Queen.
The journey from bustling Brooklyn to twee Garrison might just be a metaphor for White’s life these days. When we met for this story, she was straddling an impossible Tony press junket schedule as a director nominee for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, trying to see many of her colleagues’ work in nominated shows, while also running to rehearsals for By the Queen, prepping for her next major Broadway project (The Last Five Years), and navigating the throes of new motherhood and wifedom. Yet her presence was as calm as the gargantuan trees peppering the valley.
There are some immediate clues that she is human and not, as many assume, a supernova. In a short car ride from the train station to HVSF’s iconic open-air tent, I learned that she’s getting into iced coffee, debating the suitability of a days-old salmon onigiri, and repeat-wearing the same shirt from her previous night’s adventure (she saw Eddie Redmayne in Cabaret). For such a titanic artistic force, her gold-tinged box braids, large inquisitive eyes, and even that recycled knit top are instantly settling and familiar. The Tony pin accenting that top, less so.
On June 16, White attended the awards show as only the fifth Black woman ever to be nominated for Best Direction of a Play in the Tony’s 77-year history. Though directing is what White is best known for, and what’s stirring up this current batch of nominations and obligations, White takes her many other gigs just as seriously.
She began her career as an actor in Chicago in 2008. Fed up with auditioning for pigeonholed ideas of what Black women could be, she started creating her own work. Accordingly, her recent directing credits—including the aforementioned Jaja’s, Aleshea Harris’s On Sugarland, Ife Olujobi’s Jordans—all presented substantial and varied roles for Black female actors. White also writes and performs her own music and curated a multi-part series of theatrical concerts about Shakespeare’s women and Black female ambition, beginning with the praised Macbeth in Stride (which has played at various regional theatres and is still circling New York). And for her next Broadway venture, Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, she is reimagining the story with a twist: It will feature a Black woman (played by Adrienne Warren) opposite the Jewish male lead (played by Nick Jonas) as the central couple, adding a new cultural dynamic to the two-hander.
By the Queen blends many of White’s favorite things—namely, contemporary issues and classical texts. The show reimagines Shakespeare’s history plays about the War of the Roses through the lens of a woman who recurs in four of them, Queen Margaret. In the show, Margaret’s life is trifurcated into stages, as the introduction to the script puts it:
Margaret 1: Our youngest Margaret. Contemporary, fresh, and defiant.
Margaret 2: In her dirty thirties. And a little salty.
Margaret 3: An elder and resplendent. Always sees the bright side.
It’s a story of survival and consequence that blends history with modern-day rhythms. In it, White stirs text from the three Henry VI plays and their sequel, Richard III, with contemporary language and, crucially, critical jabs. To wit:
Ensemble 1 (Suffolk): An earl I am, and Suffolk am I call’d. Be not offended, nature’s miracle, Thou art allotted to be ta’en by me.
Margaret 3: What a line.
Margaret 1, 2, 3: —Thou art allotted to be ta’en by me! My hand would free her, but my heart says no.
Margaret 1: A little toxic, no?
Margaret 3: She’s right. Looking back…I mean…consent?
Margaret 1: When someone is literally running away from you, just leave them alone.
Margaret 3: We’re trained to like that shit.
White-knuckled audiences at heritage theatres, Shakespeare festivals, and really all across American theatre at large have lately been watching as writers including James Ijames, Amy Herzog, Heidi Schreck, and now White tweak the classics. While purists certainly still have their say, By the Queen is almost defiantly impure: raunchy, raucous, “part disco party, part riotous post-mortem on a life lived to the fullest,” as a blurb on the website puts it. The bits of rehearsal I witnessed were full of dance and play, in addition to White’s bawdy praise for sound designer Lee Kinney’s cut of a song in the show (“That cue got me pregnant!”) and spicy applause when actor Nance Williamson (who plays Margaret Three) debuted a striking red costume (“Play Sexyy Redd!”).
The play itself folds this youthful energy, as well as people of color and queerness, into Elizabethan drama. Any concern about ruffled feathers doesn’t faze White.
“The reality is, nobody is a Shakespeare purist, because none of us were there,” she said. “There’s incredible scholarship surrounding the canon, and I have respect for the work of artistic institutions and heritage theatres that support classical work, but I also live in the world now. I have no other way to understand what I’m doing but through the lens I live in. Thus Shakespeare is going to sound the way this play sounds to me.”
The challenge of nailing down that sound was of particular interest to director Shana Cooper, who is no stranger to Shakespeare: She’s directed Romeo and Juliet at Yale Repertory Theatre, The Taming of the Shrew at California Shakespeare Theater, Julius Caesar at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. White thought it was important to give another female director the opportunity, and Cooper saw it important to champion White’s vision.
“She’s a force of nature in the best possible way,” Cooper gushed. “When I first heard her talk about the play, there was so much that I understood through the specificity, muscularity, and ferocity with which she articulates everything, especially the character of Margaret.” Indeed, raved Cooper, White’s “mind works at the speed of fire…I think there’s a lot of Margaret in her.”
In 2024, that level of ambition, and the nauseating regurgitation of phrases like “having it all,” remains a War of the Roses-sized problem for female theatremakers, who though they are seeing more parity in employment are not typically afforded the kind of room for visionary work that male directors have long enjoyed. In this situation, who better to look to for inspiration than Margaret of Anjou, the original historical queen depicted in Shakespeare’s plays as navigating a world of men who repeatedly make the mistake of underestimating her?
“Margaret speaks more than any other woman in Shakespeare’s canon,” White noted, highlighting the character’s unique survival among Shakespeare’s women. This fascination led White to conduct extensive research on the “she-wolf of France,” discovering letters that revealed the real-life Margaret to be a powerful, decisive woman who signed her murder-ordering missives with one hell of a signature: “By the Queen.”
“She was a whole person that we don’t know enough about,” White argued. “I’m like, damn, Shakespeare’s imagination of this woman was so evocative that it precedes actual information about that human being. I wanted to learn more about the real person to see the distance between what he made and what existed of her. When I found those letters she wrote, making demands and ordering murders, I was like, ‘Wow, the idea of power and femininity is not actually a new idea.’ When you go back and look at cultural understandings of deities and goddesses and matriarchal societies, why is it so hard for us to wrap our minds around the idea of an ambitious woman if it’s something that’s been floating around forever?”
What does feel like a specifically contemporary rub is the function of so-called non-traditional casting in these historical roles. The three Margarets in this case—played in ascending order by Malika Samuel, Sarin Monae West, and Nance Williamson—don’t share the same race or gender pronouns.
“I can’t tell you how many Shakespearean plays I used to audition for,” White relayed gravely. “Artistic capacity for accepting Black bodies in every world has grown over time, but it’s not perfect.” She stopped to consider that her young actor self in the 2000s “would not have ever dreamed that something like this would be possible, not just for myself but for entire casts of people. I’m most proud of that. It’s not that hard to see many different women as one and to unify the female experience without losing what makes the Black female experience special.”
Members of her cast agree. “It’s actually not about thinking of Shakespeare as the enemy,” said Nance Williamson, a Hudson Valley veteran. “It’s about elbowing, making more room. That’s Whitney: She knows that Margaret and all of us are more than just the confines of a man’s speech about who I am.”
“What’s also really beautiful,” Malika Samuel chimed in, “is that Whitney breaks beyond just Margaret to create a commentary on how women are treated in history—how Black women are treated and viewed and confined. Margaret Two has this wonderful speech where she really just attacks every word that they try to trap women in, that they try to trap Black women in especially: ‘aggressive,’ ‘bitch’—all of these terms meant to vilify.”
As my time in this verdant wonderland neared its close, White was just gearing up for the second block of evening rehearsals. The sun had dipped slightly, but her mind, which surely must have been buzzing with obligations, retained all of its leonine focus; when we sat down to talk one-on-one, it was like we were the only two gals in Garrison. And, as often happens when gals gather, the conversation shifted to relationships. White, to what seems like her own surprise, is married to documentary filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin, and they have a young son whom she reveres as her toughest critic.
“Children are brutally honest,” she said. “My bullshit meter is getting so much better. I have this little person who knows all my weaknesses, and if I do something that’s not actually funny, he knows when I’m being fake. By the Queen, Jaja’s being my world premiere on Broadway, the Tony nomination—it’s not lost on me that all that happened after having a child.”
White’s success and the joy she’s found in both career and family feels like redemption—a win for the Chicago-based actor who knew she was destined for more than the limiting roles she was fed. The longing to reach back in time and assure that younger version of herself about the thrills to come is a big part of why she wrote By the Queen, she explained. Of all the negative qualities associated with Queen Margaret—bitter, cruel, vengeful—what is most fascinating about her is her gift of prophecy. What she speaks materializes.
The same is true for White. Sarin Monae West, who has worked with White in the past, called White “one of the most powerful women I’ve ever met. She is not afraid—or when she is, she turns it into something that generates opportunity for others, that generates space for others. She’s rigorous about the kinds of questions that she asks, especially of Shakespeare, but those questions are seated in the world that we all live in right now. She gives me hope for what theatre could be, what this industry could be, what the world could be. She’s taken permission and given it to herself, and by proxy, also given it to us.”
Brittani Samuel is a Caribbean American arts journalist, theatre critic, and the co-editor of 3Views on Theater. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Broadway News, and The Washington Post. To read more of her published work, visit BrittaniSamuel.com.
