Whitney White Is Everywhere
This spring, Whitney White directed the ensemble drama Liberation Off Broadway, then quickly moved to Broadway with the two-hander The Last Five Years. Just days after that show opened, she was already at work rehearsing Macbeth in Stride at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where she plays a version of Lady Macbeth. During one number, she sang, “Power’s not supposed to look like me.” Maybe it should.
White, 39, is a multidisciplinary artist — actor, musician, writer, and Tony-nominated director — known for projects that spotlight ambitious women. “I’m weirdly one of them,” she said during a rehearsal break. Her work this year has focused on female characters striving for more, a theme that resonates personally.
Raised in Chicago by a single mother, White found her first love for performance in her grandfather’s church choir and later through a formative Cirque du Soleil show. Despite taking theater classes at Northwestern, she majored in political science, feeling excluded from the campus arts scene. It wasn’t until working on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign that she realized she needed to pursue the arts full-time.
After a few years as an actor, White earned a master’s degree at Brown University, where she met her Macbeth in Stride co-star Charlie Thurston. There, she discovered her passion for directing, finding mental clarity in it. “I have a noisy mind,” she said. “When I am directing, my mind is not so noisy.”
White balanced multiple jobs after graduation: directing by day, bartending and performing by night, and writing musicals on her phone during subway rides. In 2016, she landed a life-changing opportunity assisting Sam Gold on Othello at New York Theater Workshop.
Her breakout came in 2018 with Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down. She won an Obie for directing Our Dear Drug Lord in 2022, and brought Jocelyn Bioh’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding to Broadway in 2023, earning a Tony nomination for keeping “the stage activated,” as noted by The New York Times.
While White often works on ensemble plays by Black women, she resists artistic pigeonholing. “Her goal has always been to craft a really broad, beautiful, wide-ranging career,” Bioh said. White echoed that sentiment: “If I’m pigeonholed, I’ll never get there.”
Her signature style is vibrant and welcoming. She often breaks the fourth wall, creating work for people like the women in her family — women who made sacrifices and don’t always feel seen in traditional theater spaces. “I’m trying to make work for everybody,” she said.
Directing The Last Five Years was a surprising turn, as it’s a more conventional piece than her typical fare. Still, its central character Cathy — an ambitious woman thwarted by circumstance — aligned with White’s ongoing themes. She envisioned Adrienne Warren, a Black Tony winner, in the role. Warren, now starring alongside Nick Jonas, described White as “a firework of a director.”
Though the show earned mixed reviews, it sparked a controversial moment when composer Jason Robert Brown praised diversity efforts but implied White’s hiring might have come from those initiatives rather than merit. White remained diplomatic, saying he was likely expressing gratitude for the team. “I think my directing speaks for itself,” she said.
While she’s not directing Macbeth in Stride, White relishes the chance to focus on performance in this first installment of her Shakespeare-inspired series All Is But Fantasy. With more directing and writing projects ahead, including The Queen’s Gambit musical and Saturday Church with music by Sia, her ambitions remain sky-high.
Asked how ambitious she is, White paused and smiled: “I’ve tapped into only, like, 20 percent of what I can do,” she said. “I haven’t even started.”
