Whitney White, a writer, performer, and Tony Award-nominated director, will bring “The Case of the Stranger,” an original song cycle, to Guild Hall on Saturday evening at 8. The work was inspired in part by a speech attributed to Shakespeare from the late-16th-century play “Sir Thomas More.”
Ms. White began to develop the piece as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in 2020 to 2022. She subsequently performed a portion of it at a Greek arts festival, before continuing to develop it in the 2024 Guild Hall William P. Raynor Artist-in-Residence program.
While the piece also includes text, “At Guild Hall we’re going to be doing an evening of just the songs,” said Ms. White in a phone conversation. “What’s special about it is the music has been accumulated over time. Every time I work with a new singer, whether Palestinian or Greek or Mexican or Ugandan or Eritrean, we push more music out so it’s this ever-expanding piece.”
The performance at Guild Hall, with music direction by Ben Covello, will feature as vocalists Ms. White, Veronica Otim, an African-American singer, and Rotana Tarabzouni, a Saudi-Palestinian vocalist. They will be accompanied by a six-piece band.
Of the music, Ms. White said, “I like to call it contemporary global music with a great vibe. At times it feels like rock, at time if feels like something else as we explore Middle Eastern scales,” and there is an oud, an instrument popular in Middle Eastern and Islamic music, in the band.
As for the Shakespeare text, the idea came to her before she was in residence at Guild Hall, when she saw a video of Ian McKellen performing the Thomas More monologue known as “The Strangers’ Case” speech. On May 1, 1517 (known as Evil May Day, according to myshakespeare.com), riots broke out in London in response to an influx of immigrant workers. The play, written 80 years later, references some of those events.
“Sir Thomas More is talking to an angry mob who are seeking to chase and capture and loot and kill settlers from France and Flanders,” said Ms. White. The speech concludes with More urging the crowd to imagine themselves in a foreign land where the inhabitants “spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements were not all appropriate to your comforts, but chartered unto them, what would you think to be thus used? This is the strangers’ case; and this your mountainish inhumanity.”
“I thought that the speech, obviously and very unfortunately, rang so true today,” said Ms. White. “The songs are kind of inspired by the multitude of ways we treat strangers. I’ve kissed a stranger on the dance floor, and yet many strangers are being chased away and taken away, as we see on the news every day. ‘Stranger’ is a very complicated word, but I like Shakespeare’s use of it. It certainly leaves a bit more mystery than ‘immigrant’ or ‘illegal’ or ‘alien.’ ”
She expects to perform nine numbers from the show, for which she wrote all of the music and lyrics. Each song deals with things the singers, as daughters of immigrants, are dealing with themselves as strangers. “It’s not all dark,” she said. “We really took the word ‘stranger’ and just started playing with it. And you will hear the speech from the titular play in the concert.”
Ms. White has won the Susan Stroman directing award; her original musical “Definition” was part of the 2019 Sundance Theatre Lab, and her four-part musical exploration of Shakespeare’s women and ambition is currently under commission from the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In addition to Mr. Covello, who has been collaborating with Ms. White on “The Case of the Stranger” since the first concert, she is also working with Maxim Pozdorovkin, a political filmmaker from Russia. “He has been a great dramaturge on this piece, helping me flesh out more and more stories.”
Next Thursday, Ms. White, her fellow singers, and the band will take the song cycle to Little Island, the floating theater in the Hudson River, for a free performance.
Tickets to the Guild Hall show are $45 to $75, $40.50 to $67.50 for members, with a few balcony seats priced at $25.
