In Jackson’s complex and cross-linked encyclopedia of ideas, Nell and Keesha stand for a multitude of distorted representations of Black women in white culture, soap operatic or otherwise. He loves those representations but also loathes them, usually in the same breath; the ambivalence is the motor of the show’s satire, which scathes and kisses.

Nell is the more familiar case: She’s the “Mammy” figure from “Gone With the Wind” and the title character from “Caroline, or Change,” even though they are nothing alike. The 11 o’clock number Jackson gives her, a ringer for “I Know Where I’ve Been” from “Hairspray,” provides the same full-throated thrill (in Jones’s titanic performance) as Motormouth Maybelle’s did in the earlier show, even as Jackson punctures its uplift by recasting it as “That’s Why I Kill.”

And in Keesha’s quest for “an interblacktional bleminist movement that will liberate all Blackgrounds,” Jackson needles the jargon of trauma and revolution — and the bourgeois appropriation of victimhood he suggests it represents. Yet Keesha, as portrayed by the tireless Edwards, is also the eternal spirit of Black advancement spurred by bright young women from Beneatha Younger onward. It is not, we soon learn, just the Allwhite Writer who can’t make up his mind.

If that leaves the characters confusing and hard to follow, well, they can join the club. Everything about “White Girl in Danger” is confusing and hard to follow. In the manner of soap operas, but with an absurdly fast twitch rate, personalities and plots get rewritten without notice. There’s very little for the actors to act except the twitch itself, which quickly grows tiresome through no fault of their own. Since most of them play three or more roles — Liz Lark Brown as all the white mothers, Eric William Morris as all the white boyfriends — they tend to blur into archetypes when they don’t whirl into inconsequence.