I had just finished E.L. Doctorow’s epic novel The March, which traces Sherman’s bloody campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas that ended the Civil War, when I caught up last weekend with The Whipping Man. The play, which opens the summer season at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, begins almost exactly where The March leaves off, just after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.
After the sack of Richmond, Virginia, near the end of the war, three men gather in what’s left of their home (the sooty walls of Sandra Goldmark’s set lean inward, suggesting imminent collapse). The men, all members of the de Leon “family,” are Caleb, a young rebel soldier who has dragged himself home from the war with a bullet in his leg, and two emancipated slaves, young John and old Simon, still marveling at their newfound freedom. All three of them—and here the play departs from all other treatments of the Civil War I’ve seen or read—are Jewish.
Playwright Matthew Lopez draws on an ironic peculiarity of “the peculiar institution”—the fact of Jewish slaveholding—underlined by the coincidence of the war’s end in April, 1865, at the time of Passover, the commemoration of the ancient Jews’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt. Notwithstanding their own history of bondage, many well-to-do Jews in the urban South owned slaves, imposed their faith on them just as the Christians did, and supported the Confederate rebellion when war broke out.
The Whipping Man begins with a gruesome makeshift amputation and ends with an improvised seder, the Passover table furnished with collard greens for bitter herbs and army hardtack for matzo. Between these scenes there are old scores to settle, resentments to air, secrets to hide. But the play is saved from both melodrama and sentimentality by Lopez’s complex understanding of the three men’s situations, fraught with danger and opportunity, at this turning point in the nation’s history and their own lives.
And the production soars with three stirring performances. LeRoy McClain, who impressed two years ago at Shakespeare & Company, is John, an unruly child who was regularly sent to “the whipping man” for punishment and has grown into a brash young fellow who is busy looting the city’s abandoned houses of fine clothes, whiskey—and books, as he was secretly taught to read by the master’s wife and holds that ability as his mark of pride.
Nick Westrate is Caleb, who was like a brother to John but also his owner, and who carries that conflicted bond into their reunion as supposed equals. And Clarke Peters gives grace and gravity to Simon, the older man for whom the Israelites’ story is his own. “Tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go!” he sings at the seder.
The script’s crisp writing and compelling ideas and the vibrant ensemble performance under Christopher Innvar’s taut direction make BSC’s season opener a rich experience. If this is a foretaste of the quality we can expect from theater in the Berkshires this season, it will be a memorable summer.
The Whipping Man: Through June 17 at Barrington Stage Company’s Stage 2, 36 Linden St., Pittsfield. (413) 236-8888, barringtonstageco.org.
