White Girl In Danger Preview! Special Discount Code!
Tony-winner Michael R. Jackson talks to Digest about his new soap-themed musical, White Girl In Danger, playing now at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater in New York City.
Soap Opera Digest: How did you become a fan of soaps?
Michael R. Jackson: I grew up in Detroit Michigan, in the city limits, until I was 18 years old and I left and went to NYU for college and grad school. Both my parents worked, so before I was old enough to go to school, my mother would drop me off at her aunt’s house, my great aunt Ruth. She was probably in her late 60s and I was 5 or 6 years old. There were no children around, so there was nothing else for me to do but watch television with her. We would watch SALE OF THE CENTURY at 10:30, CLASSIC CONCENTRATION at 11:30. YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS would start at 12:30 and then we would switch to DAYS OF OUR LIVES at 1, ANOTHER WORLD at 2, SANTA BARBARA at 3 and then I would go in another room and watch cartoons for the rest of the afternoon until my parents picked me up. Watching these people in these fictional towns, I developed an attachment to them.
Digest: Did you keep watching them?
Jackson: When I got a little older, I started recording them on VHS. When ANOTHER WORLD got canceled, which I was so heartbroken over, I had seen little snippets of ONE LIFE TO LIVE and I was very intrigued by Viki and Dorian and the multiple personalities so I started watching that at 2 o’clock and that quickly became my show, show, show. I got mad at DAYS for the Virtual Eden storyline, so I punished them by switching to ALL MY CHILDREN when I was in college. I was very into Greenlee and Leo, also Vanessa, played By Marj Dusay, and then I interned at ALL MY CHILDREN in the production office for a semester and then the next semester, I interned at the network. And then I graduated from undergrad and then I got a 12-week Youth Marketing Consulting job with ABC Daytime and we would watch all the ABC shows at the time, including PORT CHARLES, and we would tell the network executives what our “young people thoughts were”. And then I got into grad school for musical theater writing. I had also applied for a job at CBS Daytime. I didn’t get that job but if I had gotten it, I wouldn’t be writing musicals today.
Digest: What drew you in to the genre?
Jackson: It’s so many things. The big umbrella is that they’re stories without end; you’re part of these people’s lives every day and they’re part of your life every day and they become this weird extension of your consciousness. But also, especially in the older days, the pacing of the shows was much slower, so it was almost like you were watching a one-act play every day. Something about the meticulousness of that, for someone who would eventually become interested in theater, I just found to be very inspirational.
Digest: Do you think it informed your path to becoming a writer in a way?
Jackson: As a little kid, I was involved in child acting a bit and I also loved to read, so I think I would have gravitated toward writing in one way or another. But I think what soaps did was really give me a foundation for storytelling in general. When I was in undergrad at NYU, I took a soap writing class with [former soap Head Writer] Harding Lemay, may he rest in peace. He said something in one of those classes that stuck with me for all writing that I’ve ever done since then. He said, “When you’re in a scene, you want to go deep instead of long.” And I think that’s always stuck with me, which is go deep in a scene instead of long, and I’m really grateful to him for that. It was a really cool class because we got to write sample scenes and they found some money where we could shoot little scenes with actors on a soundstage in NYU. So I just love the genre. It’s a complicated thing because I don’t watch anymore because I think just so much has changed in terms of the production values and the money and all of that. I also think that the climate of the world has changed in a lot of ways, and I am from another time of that, but it’s still in my bones. I subscribed to Soap Opera Digest for many, many years when I was in high school. I read it from cover to cover. I know people spouse’s names, I know their children’s names. I know who used to date whom. All their lives were like another soap opera inside the soap opera to me, so those are my superstars to this day.
Digest: You made a splash with your first musical, A Strange Loop, for which you won both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize. What is the genesis of your new show, White Girl in Danger?
Jackson: As I mentioned, I’m a big soap fan, grew up on them, but also Lifetime movies and Jackie Collins novels. What I learned about myself as a child and as a young adult was that I was deeply into melodrama. There was something about that mode of storytelling and how emotions filtered down through those characters spoke to that internally. After NYU for dramatic writing, I went to NYU for musical theater writing, and it was there that I had this funny little idea that I might do a spoof of Lifetime movies. One thing I noticed is at the center of them was always a white girl or woman who was in some sort of peril, either of her own creation or because of someone else. I came up with this sketch with a theme song that went, “White girl in danger, she’s doing drugs but she won’t do her homework,” because I had watched so many of them that it was impossible for me not to connect them. And then a couple of years later, these conversations around diversity, equity, inclusion, etc. began to really bubble up in the culture, but very intensely in the theater world. And as a black writer and someone who had been writing stories since I was 11, these ideas just started to float together, and thus the idea for the show was sort of born. And then it evolved in many ways beyond that initial collision of ideas.
Digest: What is the premise of the show?
Jackson: The show is set in a soap opera town called Allwhite. In Allwhite, there are two races and classes of people. There are the Allwhites, who have these crazy storyline lives as far as the eye can see and then you have the Blackgrounds. The Blackgrounds story happens on the fringes of Allwhite until one day, one of the Blackgrounds, this girl named Keesha is like, “I’m tired of this. Why can’t we ever have an Allwhite storyline?” It just so happens that that day, the Allwhite writer, who is sort of the Oz-like figure of the universe who they never see but hear from every once in a while, announces that Molly Goodwhite has been killed by the Allwhite Killer. And for that reason, the role of best friend to Meagan, Megan and Maegan, the top Allwhite girls of the town, will be filled by this Blackground, Keesha Gibbs. So she’s very excited, but Keesha soon realizes that it’s not enough and she’ll never fit in with them, so she makes a pact with the Allwhite writer to beg him to let her have her own Allwhite story and he starts to steal their storylines away from them. And the soap part of it is that it goes full-throttle into the storylines changing as Keesha climbs through these different tropes and soap staples that are sort of refracted through a throwback era.
Digest: Who is the show for?
Jackson: I’m a boring humanist, so I do think it’s for everyone, but I will say that if you are a soap fan, it will be an extra-special, particularly if you’re some who has watched for a long time, because you’ll understand the insanity of the universe. What I’m trying to do in 2 hours and 45 minutes is squeeze down 50 years of a genre, so it’s more heightened and insane than the actual soap world in some ways. So if you’re a soap fan, I think it will be extra-special for you, but if you’re not and you’ve never seen one, I still think there’s an underlying story and message that you’ll be able to track and follow that will be funny and thought-provoking and all of that.
Digest: What are your hopes for the show?
Jackson: My hopes are that people will be open to taking the ride because it’s a truly a ride. I’ve been on Broadway, and I loved being on Broadway, and I would love White Girl in Danger to be in that space, but my secret dream is that I would really love to see it on television.
White Girl In Danger is playing now at. For tickets — and a special discount code (on the flyer below)! — click here.
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