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by Matthew Lopez, directed by Philip Akin

Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company and Obsidian Theatre Company, Toronto Centre for the Arts Studio Theatre, Toronto

March 21-April 14, 2013

“They shall be your bondmen for ever.” Leviticus 25:46

Matthew Lopez’s 2006 play The Whipping Man won a passle of awards when it eventually appeared off Broadway in 2010.  One can only assume that the award givers were reacting to the novelty of Lopez’s subject matter – a Jewish Confederate soldier and his two slaves raised as Jews.  The play’s structure breaks no new ground since it harks back to the old-fashioned structure pioneered by Ibsen in the 19th century, wherein a person returns home after an absence causing long-held secrets to be revealed.  As a work of theatre The Whipping Man is mediocre and contrived and has the annoying habit of raising intriguing questions without ever exploring them. 

The setting is the ruined house of the DeLeon family in Richmond, Virginia in 1865 shortly after the fall of Richmond on April 2 and the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9.  The DeLeons are Jewish and raised their slaves to be Jewish.  Only two of the DeLeon slaves are left – Simon (Sterling Jarvis) and John (Thomas Olajide) – the rest of the family and slaves having fled.  The action begins when a severely wounded Confederate soldier seeks shelter in the house.  He turns out to be Caleb (Brett Donahue), DeLeon’s son and heir.  Caleb’s leg is gangrenous and needs to be amputated.  Rather than go to the hospital Caleb insists that Simon do it there in the house leading to a gruesome onstage scene saved by a sudden blackout.  When John realizes that it is Passover, Simon decides to prepare a seder.  The coincidence of the three celebrating the release of the Jews from slavery in Egypt just after American slaves have been freed through the defeat of the South leads to the revealing of secrets held by all three of the participants. 

While this conjunction of celebrating Passover just after the freeing of the American slaves is fascinating, Lopez undermines our faith in his play far too many times.  Simon tells John that he is not going to amputate Caleb’s leg himself.  Rather, he is going to get Caleb drunk enough so that he passes out, or hopes he passes out at the sight of the saw, and then he and John will take him to the hospital.  This is quite sensible but in direct contradiction to this Simon does not wait for Caleb to pass out and begins sawing away while he’s still awake.  It makes no sense except that Lopez needs to have Caleb in the house for his plot to work.

Lopez raises many important questions but drops them as soon as he brings them up.  Caleb tells Simon that being in the war has caused him to lose is faith.  Simon’s answer is, “War is not proof of God’s absence.  It’s proof of His absence from men’s hearts”.  Although Simon’s logic is specious, that’s the end of the topic.  Caleb participates in the seder and the discussion of loss of faith is over.

John, who can read, has memorized Leviticus 25:44-46 regarding how the Jews should treat their slaves: “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.  Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.  And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigor.”  John quotes this to Caleb to taunt him by showing that the biblical text condones slavery but treats Jewish slaves and heathen slaves differently.  One might think this would lead to a discussion of Caleb’s or John’s beliefs, especially since Caleb fought for the South, but it does not.  The question is that since the DeLeons raised their slaves to be Jewish how can they continue to treat them as if they were heathen.  But there is no discussion, and John remains happily Jewish despite the biblical support for slavery.

The worst example of Lopez’s refusal to confront the issues his play raises is when Caleb breaks down in tears apparently because of the shame he feels for having fought for the preservation of slavery.  Yet, Lopez has Simon immediately go to comfort him saying, “There, there.  It’s okay”.  In what way exactly is it okay?  Simon has previously reminded Caleb that he can no longer order him to do things but must ask.  Why now Simon’s simplistic comfort for a man who fought against Simon’s interests? 

There is a more fundamental question that Lopez only glances at.  In the South as in the Holy Roman Empire, “cuius regio, eius religio” was the rule.  Slaves were brought up in the religion of their masters or, to put in more negatively, masters imposed their religion on their slaves.  Lopez gives Simon only one sentence related to this question when he tells Caleb, “And now you say you’ve given up praying just as easily as that. Because it was yours to discard if you wanted to. It was never ours. It was given to us and it could be taken away…”.  Yet, despite the fact that Simon and John know that Judaism has been artificially forced on them, Lopez shows them as enthusiastic practitioners of the religion.  Lopez even has Simon portray the possibility of working for Christian masters as a reason to stay loyal to the DeLeon family.  Again, this does not make sense.  How can the knowledge that a foreign religion, whether Judaism or Christianity, is forced upon them go together with such loyalty to these imposed beliefs? 

The question is further muddied when Lopez has Simon say that Lincoln is their Moses because both led people out of slavery.  Moses led the Israelites to another country.  Lincoln did not, as some black activists would later urge, lead the slaves back to Africa, so that they would have to live with freedom plus the strictures of discrimination from then on.

Despite plot holes and Lopez’s fuzzy thinking, director Philip Akin has brought the play to the stage as effectively as possible by emphasizing secrets held and revealed over Lopez’s self-aborted attempt to create a play of ideas.  The greatest performance comes from Sterling Jarvis.  Simon is a character in constant danger of becoming an Uncle Tom, but Jarvis by emphasizing the man’s individuality and strength of thought keeps him safe from that danger.  It is a masterful portrayal that makes more sense of the character on stage than Lopez does on the page. 

Brett Donahue is the weak link in the cast.  He acting range seems to have only two setting – loud and soft – with nothing in between.  He is very good in delivering the letter spoken to his beloved at the start of Act 2 in his soft mode, but the unvaried shouting he uses in his loud mode banishes subtlety from his portrayal.  When Thomas Olajide makes his first entrance as the wily John, he seems to have stepped in from a world completely different from the other two on stage, as if The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had time-travelled into the past.  Once John’s role takes a more serious turn, Olajide completely changes his performance and becomes with Jarvis one of the anchors of the show’s intensity.  John’s narrative of his encounter with the “Whipping Man” who punishes slaves is one of the strongest in the entire play.

Sean Mulcahy’s set quite effectively conjures up in a small space the feel of a Georgian mansion partially destroyed in a war.  His costumes are effective though Caleb’s pristine boot soles do not suggest they were ever used to walk for miles over rough terrain.  Andrew Smith uses his lighting both to create two types of atmosphere – the naturalistic look of the ruined home and the mood of the three men in it.

The prime value of Lopez’s play is to make people aware that there were Jews who fought in the Civil War – about 7000 on the Union side, about 3000 on the Confederate side.  A Jew was even the Secretary of State for the Confederacy.  Also, Lopez is right that Southern Jews did bring up their slaves in the Jewish faith.  Unfortunately, his play is contrived of so many interlocking secrets that they undermine his attempt at realism.  While Lopez is aware of the important topics his play could deal with, he shies away from them as if afraid too much intellectual content will inhibit the play’s commercial prospects.  That is really a shame because the superficial treatment of important ideas makes them appear to be easily dismissible.  The ideas Lopez raises deserve a better forum.  While it does not consider Judaism or the imagery of Passover, for a better play about the lingering effects of the Civil War on African-Americans and the debts brothers owe one another, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog (2011) is far superior.

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Thomas Olajide, Sterling Jarvis and Brett Donahue. ©2013 Joanna Akyol.

For tickets, visit www.hgjewishtheatre.com.