First published in 1978, the late Joan Didion’s essay The White Album is a shifting literary mosaic that takes readers from the Black Panther Trials, to a troubled recording session with The Doors, to student sit-ins and strikes, and into the events that for Didion and many others, put an end to the hazy hopes of the Summer of Love: the Manson Murders.
Directed by Lars Jan for the Early Morning Opera company, featuring the Obie-winning actor Mia Barron, and populated by some of the most compelling and controversial figures of the era, The White Album is a bold staging of the entire text, one that expands Didion’s piercing observations of her world and her own mind into a brilliantly theatrical phantasmagoria of voices, attitudes, dreams and nightmares.
The White Album premiered at the Next Wave Festival at Brooklyn’s BAM Harvey Theater in 2018.
