To fragment the self is to invite chaos; to fragment Whoopi Goldberg across five distinct corporeal forms is an act of theatrical hubris so profound it borders on the apocalyptic. When I took my seat to witness the newly expanded staging of The Whoopi Monologues, I was prepared for the standard pieties of revivalist theater, expecting little more than a polite nostalgic exhumation of her 1984 solo triumph; instead, I was confronted with Kerry Washington, Kara Young, Dominique Fishback, Danielle Pinnock, and Kecia Lewis, a terrifying quintet functioning as a hive-mind, dividing the singular essence of a daytime talk-show moderator into five unbearable vectors of dramatic intent.
One is immediately reminded of Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal analysis of polyphony in The Brothers Karamazov, wherein the singular authorial voice is shattered into autonomous, competing consciousnesses; yet even Dostoevsky, in his most fevered Russian Orthodox dread, never dared to unleash five independent Whoopis upon the Petersburg intelligentsia. The sheer ontological weight of watching Danielle Pinnock and Kerry Washington trade barbs is deeply destabilizing, a structural collapse of the unified subject that leaves the audience adrift in a sea of overlapping dreadlocks and fiercely articulated monologues about welfare and air travel.
Consider, if you possess the stomach for it, the staging logistics required to prevent the five actresses from initiating a catastrophic feedback loop of idiosyncratic vocal fry; Washington’s interpretation leans heavily into the wry, exasperated sighs of the original performances, while Lewis anchors the stage with a booming, devastating gravitas that threatens to swallow her co-stars whole. It is a precarious balancing act of tonal dissonances that requires the viewer to romanticize the sheer anxiety of watching five distinct women attempt to navigate the same oversized 1980s blazer without tearing the fabric of spacetime.
The structural pacing, sluggish and burdened by its own multiplicity, mirrors the glacial, punishing existential dread of Béla Tarr’s seven-hour Hungarian cinema masterpiece Sátántangó; much like Tarr’s villagers trudging through the relentless, muddy rain, the theatergoer must endure the agonizing realization that whenever one Whoopi momentarily cedes the spotlight, four others remain lurking in the wings, their latent kinetic energy threatening to overwhelm the stage's structural integrity. This is not merely a play, but rather an endurance test of the highest order, a deliberate ritual of audience subjugation.
We hypothesized that modern audiences possessed neither the attention span nor the psychic fortitude to receive the unfiltered essence of Whoopi from a single biological source, necessitating a controlled dilution of her aura across five discrete vessels.
Yet for all its high-minded pretensions regarding the multiplicity of the Black female experience, the actual execution of this five-pronged assault on the senses lands with the garish, chaotic sensory overload of the 1993 animatronic Chuck E. Cheese Munch’s Make Believe Band; one watches Fishback and Young oscillate through their respective registers with the exact same frantic, disjointed mechanical whirring of a robotic mouse and his avian keyboardist attempting to harmonize on a Top 40 cover. It is a spectacle that immediately induces a profound, inescapable nausea, a desperate yearning for the comparatively restrained era when a single performer was deemed sufficient to convey the mild amusement of an observational anecdote.
Ultimately, the decision to multiply the Goldberg persona cannot be viewed as a mere artistic experiment, but rather a chilling harbinger of a future in which no canonical text is safe from the ravenous demands of ensemble casting; if we do not draw a firm line here, it is only a matter of time before we are subjected to a staging of Hamlet in which the melancholy Dane is portrayed by a twelve-man rugby scrum, and the remaining fragments of Western civilization are finally swept away in a cacophony of overlapping soliloquies.