Last night, at MTC, we saw Matthew Lopez’s play, Whipping Man. I admired the play and the performances, and I noted the skill with which the playwright wove his plot lines into a dense mat of ironies. But I didn’t enjoy myself for a moment. 

I don’t much like plays without roles for women; there’s that. Nor do I care for plays set in ruined houses — I want to tidy them up, and I exhaust myself trying to decide where I’d start. But the biggest handicap presented by Whipping Man was its Civil War context. When I wasn’t mentally repairing broken windows, I was simmering in my contrarian view of what many Southerners quite rightfully call the War of Northern Aggression. This is not the place to expound on that theme, but listening to a former slave celebrate his new freedom, while knowing what that freedom would in all likelihood mean for him, for his children, and for his children’s children, was an irony so bitter that only the comic flash of a Tom Stoppard could have made it supportable. No one is going to mistake Whipping Man for the work of Tom Stoppard. It is an earnest, well-crafted morality tale, built on a twist designed to make audiences sit up and think. As such, I wish it a flourishing career in the theatre departments of the nation’s colleges and universities. 

The twist is that Southern Jews not only owned slaves but imposed Jewish ways upon them. Whether this made the slaves Jews is the crux of Whipping Man. The Book of Leviticus is quoted: “Such you may treat as slaves. But as for your Israelite kinsmen, no one shall rule ruthlessly over the other.” (25:46). I quote from the JPS edition of the Tanakh; for “Israelite kinsmen,” Mr Lopez substitutes the far more pungent “brothers.” Pungent, that is, because, in a glaringly foreseeable development at the end of the show, two of his characters discover a fraternal bond. When they were children, the slave brother was frequently sent off to the whipping man for chastisement. (The whipping man was never fully explained. We surmised that he provided a service for urban slaveholders who did not staff an overseer.) The first time this happened, the white brother was taken along by the father. During the whipping, the white boy cried out, “Stop!” The black boy thought that his playmate was going to save him, but no: the white boy asked to do the whipping himself. And yet the boys remained playmates for all that. To the degradation of slaveholding, Mr Lopez adds the degradation of Jews, who might have been expected to have known better, his play keens, than to own slaves themselves. But the larger point is that Jews are human beings no better than others. That is the seal of their humanity. 

Whipping Man is set in Richmond, Virginia, in the middle of April, 1865. At the beginning, Caleb, a defecting Confederate officer with a serious leg wound (Jay Wilkison), returns to his stripped and damaged home, to find it in the care of Simon, the butler (André Braugher). When Simon blesses Caleb in Hebrew, the twist begins to turn. Presently another former slave, Nigger John, appears, loaded with goods pilfered from other deserted homes and banters edgily with Caleb about ordering people around. John can read, and he has worked out the date: Pesach. The upshot is that the second act of the play features a makeshift seder (with a brick for the charoset) that has been organized by a pious but illiterate black man — a man who has good reason to walk out on the meal at the play’s climax. It would be wrong to call the construction formulaic, but the ironies are so think that there is barely enough air for the actors to breathe. 

André Braugher does a highly commendable job of showing us a man who has been sustained by wrestling with his faithd; his Simon is neither priggish nor (notwithstanding John’s taunts) “simple.” When the full extent of his master’s faithlessness is revealed to him, Simon does not so much abandon his post as continue in the ways of righteousness with redoubled vigor. But he is as much the slave of a foreordained theatre piece as Simon was the property of a Jewish merchant. André Holland is suitably mercurial as John, a fast talker with cold feet. Jay Wilkison’s Caleb is something of a puzzle; altogether indistinguishable from any good old son of the South, he came across as evidence that a Jewish family could produce a callow college boy. That’s not much of a point to make unless, of course, you’re making the larger one that Jews are just like Mormons or the members of some other American cult. Although interesting in its way, this take on being Jewish is at odds with the rich and complicated sense of being Jewish shared by Simon and John, who, unlike Caleb, regard their faith as no more optional than the color of their skin. Perhaps Mr Lopez is making a point about the pitfalls of assimilation, which is also interesting. Interesting, but not particularly engaging as drama. 

But that’s just me. Most of the audience, once the somber mood of the final curtain had been shaken off, responded with warm appreciation. I just think it’s a pity that Whipping Man was not conceived as a heartbreaking comedy.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 at 4:00 pm.