By Mathew
Lopez
Directed
by Meredith McDonough
Review
by Rachel White
Copyright
2013 by Rachel White, all rights reserved.
 |
| Frankie Alvarez as Caleb, Michael Genet as Simon, Biko Eisen-Martin as John in The Whipping Man. Actors Theatre of Louisville. Photo by Alan Simons. |
I was completely
hooked by the opening scene of The
Whipping Man, the blasted out old plantation home, an ex-slave alone caring
for what’s left, and a young confederate soldier, Caleb (Frankie J. Alvarez),
home and injured with a gangrenous leg, his family clearly gone. It’s up to
Simon (Michael Genet), an only slightly educated ex-slave, to do a job that any
of us would only ask of a trained surgeon in a sterilized hospital room after being
powerfully anesthetized. As Simon pours liquor over the agonized Caleb’s leg to
numb and “clean” the wound, I suddenly wondered how any of us are here at all. Worst of all, Simon, newly freed, does not
want to be told what to do. It’s a pretty stunning opening, beautifully set up,
tense and emotional, rich with possibilities.
Simon’s
son, John (Biko Eisen-Martin), soon returns home fresh from looting the local
houses that have been deserted during the war. Eisen-Martin plays him with
snappy young buck energy tinged with anger. We learn something else – all of
these characters are Jewish. John was taught to read some of the scripture as a
child until he began asking too many apt questions and was cut off.
From
there, the play began to lose its grip on me. It might have been that the first
danger was averted too quickly. Caleb comes out of his stupor with a stump leg,
disabled completely. Yet he doesn’t seem in grief over this, and the loss of
the leg is never really dealt with again in a significant way. The subtle and
not-so subtle changes in the master/slave dynamic that must have caused such
grief and confusion for both the ex-slave and ex-master alike are overshadowed
by skeletons pouring out of every closet and relatively conventional plot
twists.
I
wondered if this production could have benefitted from a quieter, more
realistic interpretation on the part of the director. If the director had
allowed more silences into the play, I might have felt the anguish of the
characters more deeply. There is nothing subtle about the McDonough’s style or
the play itself, and so the characters begin to feel more like types rather than
a group of people living in a truly critical situation. Everything is delivered at such a fever
pitch, that some of the more important moments of the play are overwhelmed. John’s
painful account of his abuse at the hands of the whipping man was shouted at
Caleb with such shrill force and accusation. But many moments are delivered
with this kind of ferocity, and so some of the more tragic nuanced implications
of John’s monologue got lost. Its connection to John’s impulse to steal, for
instance, or his grief over never learning to read could have been more clearly
connected to his experiences with the whipping man.
Yet, The Whipping Man is a play worth seeing.
The themes and questions raised are important ones about family, responsibility
and freedom. In one haunting scene, Simon leads a Passover Seder that the
characters perform together with recitations from Exodus. The scene was
extremely theatrical and resonated from a deep ancient place, a place of
suffering, ritual and hope in the future. There is enough richness and tragedy in
the story itself; the artists need not work so hard to show us it’s there.
The Whipping Man
January
8 – February 2, 2013
Actors
Theatre of Louisville
Bingham
Theatre
316 West
Main Street
Louisville,
KY 40202
(502)
584-1205
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