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Photo by Michael Lamont

THE WHIPPING MAN

Playwright Matthew Lopez’s powerful drama, which takes place just after the Civil War, concerns a pair of slaves who confront one of their former masters in the ruins of the old family manse.  This is a rather unusual play in that the work focuses not just on the atrocity that was slavery, but also on the idea that all areas of American society were complicit in it – including, in this case, slave-owning Jewish Americans of the Civil War South. In director Howard Teichman’s solid and evocative production, the events are told with a decided Jewish sensibility, with striking parallels to the Biblical story of Exodus.

Just after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Jewish rebel soldier Caleb (Shawn Savage) returns to his former family mansion, now deserted, except for one elderly slave, Simon (Ricco Ross), who was left behind to look out for him when the rest of the family fled further South.

Simon is now a free man, but it’s hard for him to shake the relationship he had with his former master, particularly after having raised Caleb since he was a boy.  Caleb, the only son of a Jewish slave owner tycoon, is suffering from a gangrenous leg wound that requires immediate amputation – and Simon is the only man available to perform the chore.  Add to the emotional friction the arrival of another freed household slave, John (Kirk Kelleykahn), with his own, more bitter memories of being abused by Caleb and his family, and the ground is laid for a number of harrowing secrets and revelations.

One particularly involving aspect of Teichman’s production is the sometimes eerily evoked sense of the inveterate perversity of slavery – a fairly straightforward sentiment, it’s true, but one which is powerfully articulated through the idea that there are no situations wherein a righteous man should own another man.  Lopez’s text makes it clear that both Caleb and his former slaves consider themselves Jews, and in one sequence that almost borders on the surreal, Simon and John both don yamulke skullcaps to mark a Passover Seder, which celebrates the Jews being freed from Egyptian bondage. 

As Ross’s fiercely passionate Simon tells the story of that other great emancipation, he takes on the furor of a Baptist minister – it’s a remarkably evocative sequence that leaves one thinking about both morality and history.  Yet, there’s something oddly tragic in the former slave characters’ adoption of their oppressor’s religion. 

Performances are subtle, with the actors portraying ambiguous personalities that are far more multi-dimensional and complex than Lopez’s occasionally straightforward and didactic writing would suggest.  In a towering turn, Ross’s Simon presents a portrait of a downtrodden man, who nevertheless feels an indefinable connection to the family he served.  By contrast, Kelleykahn’s flamboyant-dressing, ever-smiling John is superficially genial but possessed by depths of twisted bitterness that become increasingly disturbing. Savage, as former slaveowner and damaged war veteran, offers a movingly guilt-wracked turn.—Paul Birchall 

West Coast Jewish Theatre at the Pico Playhouse, 10508 W. Pico, West Los Angeles.  Thurs.- Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. through April 13.  (323) 821-2449, www.wcjt.org