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THE WHIPPING MAN

WHEN THE WHIP CRACKS
Sunday, May 07, 2006
By NAOMI SIEGEL

ANYONE who tends to faint at the sight of blood may want to arrive late for performances at Luna Stage for the next several weeks.

''The Whipping Man,'' Matthew Lopez's quasi-historical drama that is receiving its world premiere here, features a grisly opening scene in which a wounded Confederate soldier has a gangrenous leg amputated by the slave who served his family in the years before Emancipation.

Even the most stalwart members of the audience can't help but be stunned by the horror of the moment, both as written by Mr. Lopez and as powerfully acted by the three-person Luna cast under Linnet Taylor's incisive direction.

The cast is made up of Douglas Scott Sorenson as the whiskey-soaked patient, Caleb DeLeon; Frankie R. Faison as Caleb's ''surgeon,'' Simon; and Brandon O'Neil Scott as the ex-slave and now radicalized freeman, John, who is charged by Simon with keeping a thrashing Caleb still during the life-saving mutilation.

''What about the person holding him down?'' John asks, giving audible expression to the thoughts of many in the theater. ''When does he pass out?'' Dark little secrets weave a tapestry of deceit, betrayal, brutality and death in Mr. Lopez's melodrama. This brooding saga, with more twists and turns than its fragile framework can sustain, evokes the antebellum and post-Appomattox worlds of the American South and introduces the DeLeon family, Jewish plantation owners in Virginia, for whom the seeming contradiction of being Jewish and owning slaves never created a moral dilemma.

Grandpa DeLeon, in a burst of paternalism many years before, had decreed that his slaves should follow the religion of the household. Simon accepted his Jewish faith, learning Hebrew prayers and creating his own back-kitchen Passover Seder within earshot of the family's formal dining-room celebration. Wearing a skullcap, his eyes struggling to focus on a prayer book he cannot read, the Tony-nominated Mr. Faison is magnificent in the role of this deeply spiritual, profoundly loyal ex-slave.

John, played with fire by the talented Mr. Scott, is less enchanted by the religious trappings imposed by his master. ''Were we Jews, or were we just slaves?'' he asks. ''The Bible states that Jews cannot enslave Jews.''

Simon responds: ''You don't lose your faith by askin'. You lose your faith by not askin'.''
But faith is hard to sustain in a world in which human beings are chattel and the Whipping Man awaits any defectors. ''That's when Caleb and I stopped being as close as you remember, Simon'' John interjects, referring to the day Mr. DeLeon sent John to the Whipping Man. Caleb, brought along only to observe, betrayed his friend by joining in the punishment.
''The Whipping Man,'' developed over two years at Luna Stage, is receiving a first-rate production. Amanda Embry has designed the abandoned plantation house to which Caleb returns as a deserter. Jill Nagle's lighting scheme and Margaret Pine's sound score that includes volleys of thunder and gunfire accompanied by gushing rain add to the aura of a world in which even nature has gone awry.

''The Whipping Man,'' Luna Stage, 695 Bloomfield Avenue, Montclair, through May 21. Information: (973) 744-3309 or on the Web at www.lunastage.org.