Past Reviews

Regional Reviews: Minneapolis/St. Paul

Freedom proves troubled in Penumbra's powerful
The Whipping Man

Also see Ed's reviews of Romeo and Juliet, Hitchcock Blonde, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers and Dreamboys

It's 1865. Into a pillaged but once fine house in Richmond, Virginia, drags Jewish Caleb De Leon, a badly wounded young Confederate soldier. The Confederates have surrendered at Appomattox, and Caleb has returned to his abandoned family home, which is still guarded by elderly Simon, the family's loyal house slave, now a free man. Simon looks at Caleb's leg wound and recognizes gangrene, but he can't persuade the sick soldier to go to the Federal Hospital to have the leg amputated. Capable Simon plies Caleb with whisky, fetches a bow saw, hooks the damaged leg over a chair and begins sawing.

Dramatic stuff!

So begins Mathew Lopez' powerful play, The Whipping Man. Under the direction of Lou Bellamy, in Penumbra Theatre's impassioned style, the play locked me in its painful story of family, confused identity, miscegenation, betrayal, secrets and the irony of once-enslaved Jewry becoming slave owners.

The master fled, taking Simon's wife and daughter with him, as the Civil War grew hot in Virginia, and Simon protects what is left of the house, waiting for his own family and Mr. De Leon to return. Simon is dignified in his simplicity, his values rooted in family and the Jewish faith of the De Leons. Also hanging out in the ruin is young John, a freed house slave, who grew up alongside Caleb De Leon. Bright, literate, resentful and directionless, John radiates the possibility of unpredictable violence. Less bright and aware is Caleb De Leon, now an invalid, dependent upon his two former slaves, whom he and his family used as property.

Caleb, played by Joseph Papke, gives orders to Simon as though he were still a slave. "All these things you telling me to do," coaches Simon, "by rights now you need to be asking me." In James Craven's gifted hands, Simon emerges from the brutish loom of slavery as whole cloth, rough woven but a complete and sufficient man.

Not so, Caleb and John. Both are damaged by the institution of slavery, both self-centered and cruel, adrift in the new reality. Quietly expressive, Papke captures Caleb's inner struggle to adjust to his changed relationship with his former slaves. Duane Boutté's John, snarls, teases, steals and reads Dickens. Boutté gives John a steely edge but allows the emotional room to see the hurt that has sharpened him, and to see this clever young man's potential.

"Were we Jews, or were we slaves?" asks John. In Leviticus he read that a Jew might buy another Jew for a servant but must free the servant after six years. The issue of mutual Jewish identity reaches across the chasm of slavery, linking the lives of these unlikely men as they cope with post-war hunger.

Secrets emerge like maggots, and intermission left me in a confusing tangle of lineage. But sit tight. All becomes painfully clear in the second act, in which Simon conducts an improvised Seder that celebrates the freeing of the Jews from enslavement in Egypt and almost ties three disparate men in the knot of family.

Playwright Lopez inserts two views of just-assassinated Abraham Lincoln into The Whipping Man, and Caleb's speech feels consciously informational. Otherwise, this compelling production rings true and demands to be seen, demands that we acknowledge both the potential for baseness and fineness inherent in all of us.

The Whipping Man February 19 - March 8, 2008. Tickets $18 -$38. Wednesdays - Saturdays 7:30 p.m. Sundays 2:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Call 651- 224-3180 for tickets, or go online at www.penumbratheatre.org. Penumbra Theatre, 270, North Kent Street, Saint Paul.


- Elizabeth Weir

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