Pasadena Playhouse: Los Angeles Times: "The Whipping Man" Playwright: "I saw two groups not seeing their shared history" of enslavement and persecution

On November 22, 2014 AfriClassical posted:

South Coast Repertory's 'The Whipping Man' Set For The Pasadena Playhouse 2014-2015 Season

Los Angeles Times

January 3, 2015

By Mike Boehm

Martin Benson deferred his enlistment in Civil War drama for half a century, but now the stage director is bringing a zeal for realism to "The Whipping Man," his first assignment concerning America's bloody — and far from finished — reckoning with the consequences of slavery.

Matthew Lopez's play is set in a ruined, looted mansion in Richmond in the days immediately following the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. In the opening scene, a downpour engulfs two newly freed slaves who've spent their lives in the house, serving the masters and sharing their Jewish faith.                                                                                                                                                

It's a small irony that "The Whipping Man's" playwright grew up in Pensacola, Fla., rolling his eyes at people caught up in reenacting moments from the War Between the States in meticulous detail — namely his parents and younger brother. They were Civil War buffs and battle re-creation enthusiasts who gradually filled the house with muskets, uniforms, tents and everything else needed to impersonate a combatant.

"As a teenager, I was absolutely mortified they were doing this," Lopez, 37, recalled from his home in Brooklyn.

            

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What the 1989 film "Glory" and Ken Burns' 1990 documentary "The Civil War" had done for the rest of the household, early exposure to his family's stage connections had done for him: He caught the theater bug from his aunt, Priscilla Lopez, a Tony Award-winning actress who starred in the original 1975 Broadway production of "A Chorus Line," singing its signature song, "What I Did for Love."

Lopez said his roundabout path to the Civil War and "The Whipping Man" began later in the 1990s, when he was a student at the University of South Florida in Tampa and saw a video of the TV version of Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman documentary play "Fires in the Mirror," about fatal confrontations between blacks and Hasidic Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn."The Whipping Man" has been one of America's most frequently staged dramas.

"I saw two groups not seeing their shared history" of enslavement and persecution, said Lopez, who was raised a Christian but had gotten a window on Jewish life after an uncle married a Jewish woman.

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The upshot, many years later, was a play that was developed and first staged by a New Jersey theater, Luna Stage, in 2006, then took off after subsequent productions in Minneapolis in 2009 and at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2010, where Lopez made final revisions.

Comment by email:
Wonderful! Thanks so much, Bill!  [Jonathan White]