L-R: Justin Ivan Brown (Caleb DeLeon), Ron Himes (Simon), Ronald L. Connor (John). Photograph by Stewart Goldstein.
As spring weather threatens to break (yeah, right), the 2012-13 arts season is winding down, but some theatrical moments on local stages are slam-bang awesome, and mustn't be missed by lovers of great drama.
The St. Louis Black Repertory Company's production of Matthew Lopez's The Whipping Man is electrifying. The plot circles slowly like a boat on the edge of a hurricane, and as the characters reveal more of their pasts and their secret struggles, that action accelerates toward an ugly doom that the audience bears mute witness to, mesmerized and horrified both.
The first act opens on a ruined Richmond, Va., mansion, having been looted by desperate soldiers passing through the area during the denouement of the Civil War. Caleb, the grown son of the homeowner, has come home from the war hobbled and exhausted to the bone.
Though war is ostensibly over, Simon, the head slave of the mansion, has stuck around. He soon sees that Caleb's gangrenous leg must be removed if the young man wants to live. A wrenching scene depicting that surgery is painful to watch and hear (but a delight of sorts for fans of the horror genre).
Lying supine near center stage for the remainder of the play, Caleb is now completely dependent on Simon and another former slave, John, to care for him for the foreseeable future. He cannot (yet) walk. The slave-master dynamic has been completely upended.
Simon waits for the return of Caleb's father, and news of his own wife and daughter. John, who's never been far from trouble, loots neighboring mansions by night and repairs back to the house where he grew up a slave; it's a place where he endured all manner of humiliation and violence, even as he became Caleb's best friend. John takes a perverse pleasure in the new power he has over his immobile frenemy.
Simon and John are slaves given a very unusual gift by their former master; it seems that several generations of slaves have been raised Jewish by Caleb's father. They know Hebrew prayers, and with the coming of spring, they expect to celebrate Passover—and they do. The Whipping Man features a long and deeply affecting ritual Seder meal where themes of slavery and freedom in the lives of both Biblical characters and 19th century slaves careen back and forth between outrageous hypocrisy and absurd hope.
We gradually learn that the three characters' shared, precarious existence in the shell of a home cannot last. Both Caleb and John know something terrible about Caleb's family that Simon does not. The truth will out, and when it does, this haunted house will shrink to a new nadir of moral decay.
The estimable Ron Himes, also the Black Rep's founder, projects a gravity as Simon that finds Caleb and John circling about him for assistance and approval. Simon's thousand-yard stare into the audience offers something of the soul of a long-suffering man, a long-suffering people, and an ugly war brought to an insecure conclusion. Justin Ivan Brown as Caleb and Ron Conner as John both convey a vulnerability mixed with bravado that never feels wrong. Direction by Ed Smith is more-than-capable.
The set, a nightmare of broken floors and walls, an absence of furniture, and holey roof, is a dilapidated marvel, and the dim, spooky lighting is just right for a world spinning into nihil.
Simon, John, and Caleb's compromised moral universe has been carefully constructed so each man must serve another, and before the play's end, each will feel his own fragile power over others deteriorate into uselessness. Do not miss what may very well prove the plum show of the Black Rep's season.
The Whipping Man runs through April 13, with performances at the Grandel Theater, 3610 Grandel Square. Tickets are $35, $37, and $42. For more information, visit theblackrep.org.
