"The playwright also resists including herself as a character onstage, despite casting herself as its Narrator. The result is an exercise in performance more academic than it is dramatic...Matthis...is an unwavering orator, both determined and persuasive as Rankine’s stand-in. But she has little emotion to play beyond simmering frustration...Directed by Taibi Magar, the production has a clinical slickness that holds its subject — the fictions people create to distance themselves from one another — at a chilled remove."
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"5/5 stars...Rankine astutely wrote about whiteness there, not as a skin color, but a learned mindset...It's empathetic without being unduly soft on the ugliness of whiteness and those who perpetuate it. Lest you think that, you can look to Taibi Magar and Shamel Pitts's fluid direction and choreography...Every element of 'Help' coheres to create something you can't look away from. (Of course, that's the mark of any great theatre.)"
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"This pattern of brief-chat-followed-by-rhetorical-questioning repeats throughout without changing much — certainly not enough to solve the 'what will we look at' problem... Late, late in the play’s hour and 40 minutes, the piece takes flight when Rankine dramatizes a conversation between the narrator and the narrator’s white husband. Matthis puts the microphone away, and the two characters simply speak with one another. It’s lovely and difficult and useful. For a show about dialogue, 'Help' sure makes us wait a long time for an actual one."
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"The politics of the play rankle—it’s offensive to place the deaths of people like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd on the same level as upper-middle-class air-travel discomfort. But blunt essentializing—flat caricatures of white men and Black women—works better here, as art, in a beguilingly Brechtian way meant to suss out truth from archetypes, than it does in a newspaper."
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"April Matthis plays this central role with an appropriate mixture of professorial authority and dour self-reflection...'Help' is based on a 2019 article Rankine wrote for The New York Times Magazine, which is a much better read than it is a watch...One of the more striking aspects of 'Help' is its sheer extravagance...Despite the high production costs (I won't say 'value'), 'Help' joins the ever-expanding buffet of spinach theater — you know it's good for you, even if it leaves a foul aftertaste."
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There's nothing stunningly new here. Rankine's ideas have been articulated by commentators ranging from James Baldwin and Isabel Wilkerson to David Brooks and Ross Douthat. But the text of Help is an elegant piece of synthesis, informed by the playwright's personal experience and enhanced by an unfailing ear for the absurdities and prejudices buried in everyday speech.
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It is difficult to know how to classify The Shed’s production of Claudia Rankine’s “Help,” inspired by her controversial New York Times article, “Brief Conversations with White Men,” which appeared on July 17, 2019, or its online version, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” Is it a docudrama, an illustrated lecture, a polemic? In any case, Taibi Magar’s imaginative and innovative production helps make this riveting theater, though probably a bit too long as it is only about the one thing, thoughts on white male privilege.
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"If a play is plotless and devoid of characters, is it a play? It’s a question you might ponder while watching Claudia Rankine’s 'Help'...By not following any sort of linear plot, the challenge is to bring substance to those voices filtered throughout the storytelling...And yet, even with the distancing this involves, there is still plenty of intelligent and provocative dialogue, aided by a first-rate staging from director Taibl Magar."
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