Whoopi Goldberg Was and Always Will Be the Whole Show
Her eponymous one-woman show was the seed of her Hollywood stardom, which a new revival now frames as the source of something matrilineal, passed down to two generations of Black actresses.
Illustration of Kara Young Dominique Fishback Danielle Pinnock Kerry Washington Kecia Lewis and Whoopi Goldberg
Illustration by Jacqueline Philippeau
That voice of God filling the basement theatre at Lincoln Center—you know it as well as that of your own mother. The glottal quality, the vowel dilation. It belongs to Whoopi Goldberg, who, in a prerecorded message, coaxed the matinée audience at “The Whoopi Monologues,” an upbeat reimagining of her one-woman show from the early nineteen-eighties, into silencing their phones. The audience was delighted to be coaxed, delighted to hear from Goldberg herself. The proscenium at “The Monologues” is very thin; sitting among the crowd—which, to my eye, consisted predominantly of women in their sixties and seventies—the atmosphere of reminiscence was thick.
Before it was called “The Whoopi Monologues,” it was “Whoopi Goldberg,” and before that it was “The Spook Show.” There were four outlandish, outcast characters, whom Goldberg utterly embodied with something as slight as the crossing of her eyes or the dragging of her leg. Performing during the misery of the Reagan years, Goldberg had imagined the characters as spooks, after Sam Greenlee’s C.I.A. satire “ The Spook Who Sat by the Door.” She wanted her multiracial, hip audience to feel, as their laughter dried out, haunted, spied on. Goldberg, this dark-skinned woman born Caryn Elaine Johnson, was a fixture of downtown Manhattan, then, when it was still downtown. The director Mike Nichols, with his godfather touch, seeing that Goldberg was the future, brought her from the Dance Theatre Workshop to Broadway, where “The Spook Show” was rechristened “Whoopi Goldberg.” That production was the seed of her Hollywood stardom, which this revival now frames as the source of something matrilineal, passed down to two generations of Black actresses.
How else to process the flourishes that the director, Whitney White, has added to the starkness of the original monologues? Five performers meet onstage after that presiding voice dissipates, as if summoned by it. They can be here because she was here, an evolution story. They are huddled together next to the actress Kerry Washington (whose company, alongside Goldberg’s, produced the show, in partnership with Lincoln Center Theatre), and so we begin to think she might serve as a kind of metaphysical host of the Whoopi cabaret. But as quickly as the actresses merge they disperse, each boxing themselves away in an individual dressing-room set, a reference to the credits for the HBO adaptation of the special. The meta-host idea, which I thought was compelling, never returns.
“The Monologues” is fascinating, in one sense, because it allows Goldberg the playwright to stand as separate from Goldberg the performer, who is so totalizing as to be an eclipse. As a monologuist, Goldberg forced standup and theatre to touch, to pollute each other; in splitting into Fontaine, Blonde Girl, Surfer Girl, Jamaican Lady, and, in an anniversary show put up in the early two-thousands, Lurleen, she rocked the solid ground of the “self” that we expect from a comedic performer. White and her wonderful cast, which she sometimes assembles in a formation that recalls stagings of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf,” cannot re-create that splitting, or a tension nearly as pointed, and so what we get instead are entertaining character interpretations that never cross into the psychological.
Kara Young, as the hood philosopher Fontaine, starts the show. Goldberg had given Fontaine an addict’s hunch; a keen, mistrustful stare; a shit-talking rhythm of speech that made you think of the loping, digressive style of Richard Pryor, with whom he shares a favorite word: “Motherfucker.” The twist in his monologue, which is about a life of petty theft and a flight (both literal, to Amsterdam, and abstract), is that he has a “Ph.D. I can’t do shit with, so I stay high so I don’t get mad.” Young is unlike any other stage performer I’ve seen. She replicates Goldberg’s crowdwork but she doesn’t try to hit Goldberg’s beats, which wouldn’t make too much cultural sense anymore, anyway. She transforms Fontaine’s extroversion, turning the monologue into something like a tragicomic soliloquy. Fontaine ends up at the Anne Frank House, where he reacts to the stubborn optimism of children—who still believe in the fundamental goodness of the world “no matter what you do” to them—with an anguished awe. But I got the feeling that there was something lost in Young’s transmission to the audience, like everyone thought they caught the ball she’d volleyed; instead, it was spinning beneath the seats. Fontaine is a figure of Reagan-era social neglect, but he is also Goldberg’s essential character (she reprised him in a stand-alone show), the bridge laying bare her twinned visions of Jewishness and Blackness, two cultures profoundly shaped by their relationships to sublimating suffering through entertainment. It’s a thorny, underappreciated aspect of Goldberg, and of the very nature of the work and how it developed, which I suspect the audience, averse to what isn’t woke, only felt as heartrending.
But that’s the mixed blessing of this staging: everyone here is working with the benefit of hindsight, both political and dramaturgical, and that flattens the emotional mood of the thing—each monologue building to a final, righteous note. The heart arrives smuggled in with the blade, in these monologues as text. The show projects a lot of images, including photographs of the actresses as girls. The quotation from Anne Frank that had vexed Fontaine—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart”—lingers behind Young near the end of her monologue, and is still lingering in our minds as the next performer, Dominique Fishback (who was so agile and brilliantly physical in the television show “Swarm”), introduces us to her skipping Blonde Girl. The character is a Black girl, aged seven, who ties a white T-shirt around her head to mimic the swing of straight hair. Because we’re already primed to feel pity toward her, the “reveal” in her monologue, that she sat in a tub full of Clorox bleach, in an attempt to become white, doesn’t land with the force that it should. That Anne Frank line is still on our minds, as is Goldberg’s own performance as Celie, her breakout role, in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of “The Color Purple,” just one year after “The Monologues” went to Broadway.
The world is changed and it is not changed. Goldberg wrote the monologues—each one, at base, about the bodies of women, the punishments they endure—in response to the dearth of options available to her as a Black woman in entertainment. And then she became synonymous with entertainment, “an industry unto herself,” to quote my colleague Hilton Als. So it doesn’t take much strain to see the political logic in reviving “The Monologues” now, in a backlash era that mirrors the Reagan years. What doesn’t fully jell is the show’s relationship to the politics of entertainment. Blonde Girl wanders guilelessly into the crowd, asking a Black woman to touch her hair, because she does not see women on television who look like her. That is not the contour of our problem. Consider the ubiquity of Whoopi herself, for one. Washington’s performance as Surfer Girl is all wrong, not only because Washington treats the monologue too literally, losing the vocal-fry naïveté of the character, as she tells us of her coat-hanger abortion, but because Goldberg herself has diluted the persona in years since. (Goldberg is a staunch abortion-rights activist, and the Surfer Girl monologue, we now know, is drawn from a home abortion she had as a teen-ager.) On “The View,” where, for two decades, Goldberg has presided as a leader in its tribunal format, she often brings out the Valley Girl voice to rib on trashy pop culture. Ditto, Lurleen, the menopausal, middle-aged mother, played with court-holding class by Kecia Lewis, and Jamaican Lady, played by Danielle Pinnock, laden with a gold belt and a teal-blue pixie wig, à la dancehall queen—the least dramatically realized of the five characters but the most straight-up farcical. They cannot live free of the writer who made them.
Maybe these slippages only matter to the Whoopi obsessives who know too much about her fractal aspect, as host, actor, comedian, playwright, producer, activist, and the rest. I am a Whoopi obsessive. I have a distinct memory of seeing her in “Ghost,” playing Oda Mae Brown, the con-artist medium and the third in the threesome of her, Patrick Swayze’s Sam Wheat, the murdered banker plotting justice from beyond the grave, and Demi Moore’s Molly Jensen, his grieving, naïve artist girlfriend. The failure of one of that movie’s iconic scenes is that, by its own romance logic, when Sam’s ghost possesses the medium, it should be Oda Mae who the audience sees kissing Molly. The film, the industry that made it, the culture that made that industry, would never allow that kiss to happen. “The Whoopi Monologues” has a romance logic, too: Whoopi as the shepherd of the flock, who, near play’s end, start disco dancing around one another, in a fantastical break. If you want to, you can have fun with it. ♦
