The Complexities Of Making A Musical About Race, Told From The Point Of View Of A Young White Woman

When a team decided to adapt Sue Monk Kidd’s 2002 book The Secret Life of Bees into a 2019 musical, and the only African American person on the production team was playwright Lynn Nottage, well, they knew they had some discussions ahead of them. Nottage says, “What makes this very different from those other stories [like The Help or Green Book], is that this white girl enters into a black space, and she has to negotiate a space that’s alien to her, rather than the black body entering the white space.” – NPR