Review: Journey on race relations takes some wrong turns in ‘White Guy on the Bus’

As the title suggests, “White Guy on the Bus” is a play about troubled urban race relations. Playwright Bruce Graham lobs a grenade at the post civil rights-era conceit that we’ve made real progress toward easing economic and cultural tensions between the haves and have-nots.

A topical but problematic Road Theatre Company production delivers the brutal central thesis of Graham’s 2015 drama: We may have evolved more articulate and diplomatic ways to talk about racial problems and solutions, but given the choice all sides would rather exploit a corrupt system for their own benefit.

“I’m a numbers man,” declares the play’s title character, a successful financial advisor named Ray (Kevin McCorkle). It’s an assertion he’s fond of repeating, but whether he means it as a boast, a guilty confession or a license to break the law depends on a shifting moral perspective that remains frustratingly ambiguous.

We begin on genteel turf — an intellectual debate about race at a dinner gathering between Ray, his wife Roz (Amy Stoch) and the much younger white couple, Christopher (Crash Buist) and Molly (Teagan Rose) they’ve informally adopted.

The arguments throughout the play, like Ray himself, are strictly by the numbers, with clichéd issues and talking points trotted out like a to-do list: white privilege, check; inequality in the justice system, check; media-driven racial stereotypes, check; political correctness, check. And so on.

Nevertheless, dangerous currents move beneath the discussion, and Roz delivers her warning about our racial melting-pot society: “You throw stuff in and eventually it overheats.”

In parallel interwoven scenes, we learn that Ray has a curious habit of riding a bus route between his lily-white suburbs and a seedy state prison neighborhood. During these trips he becomes increasingly friendly with fellow commuter Shatique (Kacie Rogers), a struggling black single mother whose straight-from-the-gut attitude is a refreshingly honest contrast to Ray’s upper-middle-class mask. Things take an unexpectedly sinister turn, however, when he shows up on her tenement doorstep with a dangerous proposal.

For all the narrative’s twists, the play hinges on a central character whose identity shifts as a matter of dramatic convenience. An offstage triggering event doesn’t begin to explain the ease with which this white-collar finance guy, who seems at first to have a measure of integrity, conscience and even generosity, transforms into a thug straight out of a Martin Scorsese movie. Nor does a throwaway line about Ray’s father having been a bus driver do much for his mean streets cred.

Neither McCorkle’s poker-faced performance nor Stewart J. Zully’s uninspired staging solve the play’s sensationalistic exploitation of racial conflict. Ultimately, the melodrama sends more serious concerns to the back of the bus.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

‘White Guy on the Bus’

Where: The Road on Magnolia, NoHo Senior Arts Colony, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; ends March 18

Tickets: $34

Information: (818) 761-8838, www.roadtheatre.org

Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

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