"The Whipping Man' at the Arden

The Whipping Man is a 19th-Century drama written for 21st-Century sensitivities. The dialogue is peppered with more four-letter words than you'd hear in any rap song, much less from a Southern gentleman.

The set is the interior of a bombed and burned-out antebellum mansion after the bellum. It looks amazingly like what Tara would have looked had the Yankees got there. Only one thing: This house is in Richmond, Virginia, not on the Georgia Piedmont. It's equivalent to plunking a Greek revival plantation down among the carriage houses of Delancey Street in Philadelphia.

Richmond has fallen, the South has lost and, amid a thunderstorm, a Jewish Confederate soldier, Caleb DeLeon (Cody Nickell), has come hobbling home. Caleb has a festering gunshot wound in need of immediate attention. But Caleb's mother has fled to Williamsburg and his father, in true Gerald O'Hara fashion, has gone out on a bender. Simon's wife and daughter have also left. So the only human left in the hulled estate is the faithful man slave Simon (Johnny Hobbs, Jr.).

Returning to the fold in the nick of time is the errant houseboy John (James ljames). Why has this rebellious soul returned, now that he's free? Good question— and one of several that Lopez fails to answer. Against his wishes, John assists Simon in amputating Caleb's leg.

Jews owning slaves?

Once this gruesome scene is out of the way, the drama shifts to the trials and tribulations of three men trying to run a kosher household after a war. Caleb must learn not to give orders to his former slaves but to understand how to ask. Simon, for his part, is determined to have a traditional Seder.

At this point, presumably, the audience is supposed to chuckle at the irony of emancipated slaves celebrating a Seder, and to wonder how Jews who were once enslaved themselves could justify owning slaves in America. But the short answer, which The Whipping Man ignores, is that everybody was doing it, and for thousands of years.

The mandate against slave ownership followed Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, not Biblical teaching. The Hebrew Scriptures contained no injunction against owning slaves— only reminders to treat them nicely and instructions on how to go about freeing them. Slave-owing Christians cited the teachings of St. Paul to justify the practice. As for the Indians— once they captured you, you were theirs.

As the first act ends and the thunder started clapping, I felt like going out to the kitchen for some hot chocolate, because the music sounds like one of those commercial breaks on "Hallmark Theatre."

Ultimately, Simon advises John and Caleb that, in the end all of us must take responsibilities for our own lives— the sort of faux profundity you can hear these days just by tuning in to a Herman Cain campaign speech.

Emotional depth

What surpasses the banal story line is the emotional depth of the actors. Whether it's Caleb's gut-wrenching cries as his leg is severed, John's story of the abuse heaped upon him from the plantation's whipping man, or the gentle Simon finally revealing the marks branded on him by those whippings, each actor rises above the triteness of his dialogue (e.g., "You'll never know what it is like to be a slave"). ljames's jive-talking John is especially noteworthy, even if it's totally inappropriate for the place and time.

Suffice it to add that the three characters' conflicts reach heaping crescendos minutes before the curtain falls, as the umpteenth storm stops and the sun appears. When the mansion's front door opens, each man must find his own way into an outside world whose rules have turned upside down.

The intended message of the play, like the message of a Seder, is that people can be enslaved in more ways than one— for example, by ignorance, bitterness and prejudice. Also, I would add, by theatrical conventions.♦


To read a review of the New York production by Carol Rocamora, click here.