New plays from acclaimed playwrights habitually seem to arrive as discrete events—the new play from Eugene O’Neill, from Arthur Miller, from August Wilson. They aren’t usually considered as popping up in the context of their time.
Perhaps they should be. Look at Dominique Morisseau’s new Confederates. Through the last couple of decades, she has been offering significant works with the gathering result that the next one is much anticipated. Now it’s here, but hardly opening in the abstract. It presents its bold face just as the Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson have been held. In that context it’s as if Confederates is a significant footnote—no, a powerful appendix to how several Republican senators turned the historic event into an attack not just on the nominee but a demonstration of how Black women continue to be viewed in a racist society.
Morisseau’s satisfyingly troubling play takes place in two sometimes overlapping periods: today, as dominated by political science professor Sandra, and in the 1860s. as observed through the eyes of plantation slave Sara.
Sandra (Michelle Wilson) appears first, calling attention to two images on a lowered screen. The initial one shows a Black slave with a suckling white baby. The second has the image altered so that Sandra’s face has been transposed over that of the Black woman. That version has been tacked to Sandra’s office door, and she’s determined to find out who’s responsible for the offence.
Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd) is seen tending to brother and soldier Abner (Elijah Jones) who needs stitches after suffering a Civil War wound. Their charged conversation includes talking about their constricted lives, the trouble Sara could encounter because she’s learned to read, her known barren condition, and running for their freedom.
From then on and as the 10 Confederates scenes shift, various examples of what constitutes freedom is mooted, with more than the freedom from slavery that Sara has heard might be announced by the man in the tall hat. (She means Abraham Lincoln, of course.) Indeed, the catch to speaking one’s mind freely as a Black woman is introduced—and few in today’s audiences won’t hear an echo of nominee Jackson holding her tongue as Ted Cruz asked for a comment on racist babies.
From sequence to sequence through the 1860s and the currently ambivalent early 21st-century, Morisseau deals with blatantly racist issues, not missing many. In the first example, student Malik (Jones doubling) comes to Sandra complaining about the B- he’s received for a paper and questioning whether she’s holding him to standards different from other students. His arguments as well as hers are solidly, engagingly nuanced.
They’ve barely concluded the contretemps when Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), daughter to plantation owner Dan, comes to Sara’s cabin with the promise of making her a house slave. At the same time Missy Sue indicates she’d like to expand their longtime childhood friendship into something more.
Then, with Ross dropping her outer clothes as Missy Sue, she’s—presto-chango!—Candace, Sandra’s student and office assistant. As such she flibbertigibbets around spreading unconsciously biased remarks as if they were rose petals.
Morisseau doesn’t keep only to Black-white exchanges. Jade (Andrea Patterson, also doubling as house slave LuAnne), bolts into Sandra’s office to ascertain she can count on her colleague’s vote for attaining tenure. She accuses Sandra of wanting to remain the sole Black women in the department.
For the most part, the playwright forcibly goes to the heart of racism and its white supremacist roots. Occasionally, she interrupts her committed pursuits for laughs. At least that’s what she appears to be after. The sticky point is that she has established such an intelligent tone (a familiar Ketanji Brown Jackson tone?) that when she tries out the slippery-banana-peel forays, they register less as satire than as unexpected silliness.
Directing all scenes as surely as Morisseau wants them treated, Stori Ayers commands an excellent cast and thereby presents an excellent dramatic treatise on a never-ending American crisis. Scenic designer Rachel Hauck cleverly designs a single set of white columns and balcony that simultaneously resembles a plantation mansion and college architecture. Ari Fulton’s double-period costumes are certainly up to the task, as are the Amith Chandrashaker and Emma Deane lights and the Curtis Craig and Jeremy Keys sound design.
When Morisseau began Confederates, she couldn’t have had any inkling of its particular timeliness when it reached the stage. Then again, maybe she did.
Confederates opened March 27, 2022, at Signature Center and runs through April 24. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
