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THE WHIPPING MAN

COMPELLING DRAMA, DYNAMIC PERFORMANCES GRIP THE STAGE IN ‘THE WHIPPING MAN’
Friday, May 05, 2006
By THOM MOLYNEAUX
for The Montclair Times

Luna Stage ends their season with, ”The Whipping Man”, a new play by Matthew Lopez that explores an unexamined corner of the American landscape: the time and place that brought together the Civil War, a defeated Confederacy, demolished homes, military defeat, The Emancipation Proclamation, and Lincoln’s assassination, and asked what it all meant to slave-owning, Southern Jews and the slaves they raised in the Jewish faith. A time and place that demanded an answer to the question, “Are we Jews or slaves, Jews or niggers?”

“The Whipping Man” focuses on three complex characters. Caleb, a Southern Jewish officer in the Confederate Army, weak, bloody and gangrene infected, literally, crawls home after Lee’s surrender. But his parents’ home, his safe haven, is now just one more piece of desolate, near-rubble, stuck in the war-torn godforsaken countryside. Simon, the family’s oldest, most-trusted servant, a slave deeply committed to his Jewish faith, finds the wounded Caleb and vows to protect him and nurse him back to health.

John, a young black man, a survivor and scavenger, who grew up with Caleb also returns to the house. In his new freedom and the reality of the destroyed South, John questions his relationship to Caleb, the hypocrisy of Caleb’s parents and the tenets of the Jewish faith he, too, has adopted.

Thrown together by grim circumstance, the three men are forced look at the tangled history of their lives in this house and the cruelty, betrayal and evil that permeated their relationships. They have to test the Hebrew faith that Caleb lost in the horrors of the Battle of Vicksburg, that John is losing as he sees the actions of Jews flatly contradict the words he reads in the Bible, and that Simon clings to in spite of all the hardships he faces. And in that testing, will Simon discover that his faith is built on lies and self-deception.

In this harrowing drama, the author doesn’t spare us the minute horrific details of the gangrene that will painfully rampage through Caleb’s body inch by inch, organ by organ unless his leg is immediately amputated. And the author gives Simon a long speech detailing, step by step, how he and John, using only a saw and a couple of bottles of whisky, will operate on the dirty floor of the splintered building, and cut Caleb’s infected leg off, just above the knee. Some of these speeches are hard to listen to because they deal with painful, ugly truths. But it’s just that will-ingness to reveal, in detail, the ugly truth, that makes “The Whipping Man” a first-rate drama.

The betrayals, lies and duplicity in the intertwined lives of the three men, the secrets that go back years, are probed, explored and exposed in the course of the play, leading to its shattering climax. I won’t reveal any of those secrets here but perhaps an explanation of the play’s title, “The Whipping Man,” will give you an idea of the ground that Matthew Lopez covers in his script.

Slave owners considered to be “good masters” would never beat or whip their slaves. These self-righteous, self-approving owners would send slaves, deemed to need punishment, to the “whipping man,” a specialist for hire, a professional expert in the brutality of the whip. Both Simon and John have felt the lash of the “whipping man.” John when he was only 6 years old and in the presence of 6-year-old Caleb. They both still bear the scars of the whip on their bodies and in their souls.

As good as the Matthew Lopez script is, the Luna Stage production more than matches it. Under the taut, detailed direction of Linnet Taylor, the time, place and atmosphere, the characters, the tension and the danger are brought vividly to life. She’s elicited solid performances from three very talented actors. As John, Brandon O’Neill Scott proves to be a lithe, dangerous, and questioning freed slave, adept at hiding his fears and vulnerability. In a natural, unaffected performance, Douglas Scott Sorenson creates a conflicted wary, white Southerner trying to navigate the past and the present, and desperate to keep alive the hope of a future. The talented and versatile Frankie R. Faison not only brings raw power and authentic passion to Simon but also the sense of a man dedicated to faith and family, and imbued with an innate quiet dignity.

In creating the world of “The Whipping Man,” the director has gotten invaluable artistic contributions from the precise, subdued costumes of designer Colleen Kesterson, the subtle and effective lighting and sound of designers Jill Nagle and Margaret Pine, and especially the original reconfiguration of the Luna space by set designer Amanda Emery. Miss Emery has put a set into that fresh intimate space evocative of the time and place of the story, and most importantly, of the atmosphere and spirit of this original and compelling drama.

“The Whipping Man” runs through May 21, at Luna Stage, 695 Bloomfield Ave. Tickets range from $20 to $30. For reservations, call the box office at (973) 744-3309, or visit online at www.lunastage.org.

http://www.montclairtimes.com/page.php?page=12046