Process

Before the end of Watchface’s April 1989 run of Bloody Mary at Dance Theater Workshop, the
theater commissioned the group to mount another production the following year. Kim X
Knowlton proposed a show about a family of white supremacists, incorporating actual
details and mythology of the movement. Kim offered to handle the bulk of the research and
directing with Iris Rose as co-director.

For many months before rehearsals began, Kim devoted herself to researching the latest
white supremacist dogma, as well as the efforts of organizations like the Southern Poverty
Law Center (SPLC) to monitor and curtail its spread. She obtained subscriptions to several
periodicals through a rented post office box in a different neighborhood.

Though the white supremacist ideology and agenda were not as well-known at that time as
they would be after Tim McVeigh destroyed a federal building in Oklahoma City six years
later, there were certain incidents that focused the public’s attention on the issue in the
1980s. Most notably, in 1988 David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, campaigned
in the Democratic presidential primaries, and four years earlier progressive radio host Alan
Berg was murdered by The Order, a splinter group of the Aryan Nation white nationalist
movement.

Kim began scouring the television listings looking for talk shows dealing with related
subjects. Among her finds was a notorious episode of Geraldo! called “Young Hate
Mongers” in which a member of the White Aryan Resistance Youth attacked Geraldo Rivera –
who the youths referred to as “Jerry Rivers” – breaking his nose with a chair. Kim also taped
Oprah Winfrey’s show on polygamy, which was espoused among supremacists as a strategy
to more quickly increase the race.

One vital source Kim found mentioned often in her research was The Turner Diaries, a 1978
novel that served as a touchstone for the supremacist worldview. Written by Andrew
McDonald, a pseudonym for neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, it depicts a violent right-wing
revolution in the United States that leads to the collapse of the federal government, nuclear
war, and a race war that eliminates all minorities. A copy of The Turner Diaries was later
found in Tim McVeigh’s backpack when he was apprehended.

The characters that Kim conceived for the show were based on archetypes that she found
within her research. Her fictional extended family adhered around a charismatic central
father figure, Josiah White, and his three wives: a subservient, devoted first wife; a frightened,
delicate, pregnant second wife; and a compliant, but ultimately unreliable third wife who
was along for the ride. Josiah’s brother Zak and Zak’s wife Peggy were angry, violent, self-styled
warriors in a race war. The three other members of the household were single men
that performed specific functions within the group: Zak and Josiah’s cousin Boone was a
gung ho sidekick and racist comedian; Kinder was an older drifter who provided unofficial
religious guidance; and Ryan was an expert on survival tactics and weapons.

White was different from a typical Watchface show in many ways. The show was built on an
overall fictional narrative that Kim developed on her own, and the sections tended to be
longer, allowing more time to develop the complex subject matter. Conventional theatrical
forms like monologues and expositional dialogue scenes alternated with the more usual
Watchface sections using the techniques described in METHOD. As a result, the show was
created with less input from the cast, though there was still collaboration involved in its
writing and the creation of movements.

Four short sections, Ryan, Ellen, Lenore, and Ruth, were monologues based on character
histories provided by actors Kurt Fulton, Laura Breen, Linda Cassens, and Helen Russell,
respectively. Lenore script These backstories were written as homework, but other sections
were developed through improvisation. Even before the cast was set, Kim convened a
series of improvisational workshops at a rented loft space in the Tribeca neighborhood of
lower Manhattan so she could try out ideas for turning the information she was gathering into
performance. During the workshops, she and Iris made notes of bits of dialogue that might
prove useful in writing the final script. Later, when rehearsals were well under way, more
improvisation sessions were scheduled in order to fill in specific parts of the script that were
still missing. An improv between Richard Schachter* as Josiah and Helen as Ruth, for
example, was later woven together in the final script with another scene between Linda’s
Lenore and Robin Francis Robinson’s Kinder. The latter was based on a series of improvs in
which Lenore described several long dreams in great detail and Kinder offered his
interpretations.
Josiah and Ruth improv notes
Middle of the Night script

Unlike the brief monologues for some of the other characters, Robin was given a specific
assignment to bring in a list of blue-collar jobs that Kinder might have had before becoming
the ad hoc chaplain for a white separatist compound. Robin supplied 42 jobs; then, as Kim
called out each one, he improvised a detailed description of its high and low points.
Kinder’s list of jobs in the final script was reduced to a dozen, though parts of his descriptions
for some of the others were incorporated into those twelve.
Kinder’s Jobs partial improv notes
Kinder’s Jobs script

Other sections were written by Kim alone based directly on her research. These included a
pledge of allegiance to the white race, the lyrics for a hymn with music by Kim’s college
friend, musician Peter Dodge, and a benediction, as well as the show’s final speech in which
Josiah explained his racial philosophy.

White maintained a balance between its traditional theatrical scenes that advanced the
story line and the movement-oriented sections based on Watchface techniques. The former
included two all-cast table scenes that largely carried the burden of filling the audience in
on the plot. The movement sections more often explored specific ideas, underlining and
heightening them, as an aria does in an opera. These included the full-cast production
number called Religion that illustrated the complex white supremacist mythology, and
March of the Workers, which suggested daily life in a General Motors factory.
March of the Workers partial script and choreography

Cast members created movement for the mythology section based on specific assignments.
Each performer contributed an original salute, salutes and each created an Emblem for one
of the countries that made up the “Great Nations of the White Man,” which were then
processed into Abstractions. nations Abstractions Sometimes different Emblems for the same
word or phrase were created by multiple performers; these included Mud People, Breath,
Rot, and Migration. The results were then mutated by having two participants execute their
Emblems at the same time, picking up bits of each other’s and incorporating it into theirs in a
process known in Watchface as Triangles.

Another change from most Watchface shows was the inclusion of two other performers,
besides Kurt, who were trained dancers – Leah Goldstein and Mike Kraus. Even though
Watchface techniques were used to create Kurt’s solo ode to survivalism and weaponry and
Leah and Mike’s Warriors duet, the resulting movements were more physically challenging
and dance-like than what the same techniques might have elicited from other members of
Watchface.

Although Watchface disbanded only seven months after White, the production indicated a
direction in which they might have proceeded if they had continued: including more
traditionally theatrical elements and more outside performers, capitalizing on their particular
talents and skills to expand Watchface’s performance vocabulary.
 

*Richard Schachter is referred to as both Richard and R.N. Schachter in programs and production notes.