New Jersey Jewish News
Life and Times Feature
Civil War seder
Play recalls unlikely moment in Jewish-American history
It’s a story seldom told. It’s a bit of an embarrassment, actually, a dirty little secret: Jews owned slaves in the pre-Civil War South.
How odd for a people so historically oppressed to be among the oppressors.
The anomaly is the subject of The Whipping Man, a play
by Matthew Lopez.
The story is set during Passover 1865, the very time American slaves had been set free throughout the South. A Jewish Confederate soldier returns from the war to find his home in ruins, his family gone, and only two former slaves present. As they each contemplate an uncertain future, they are forced to face the truth about their past and the complexity and challenges of freedom.
The Whipping Man premieres at the Luna Stage in Montclair Thursday, April 27, and runs through May 20.
Lopez, who lives in Queens, inherited his interest in history from his father, Frank, a high school assistant principal, whom he describes as a “huge” American history buff. “My brother and I were raised especially on the Civil War,” he told NJ Jewish News in a telephone interview.
But his parents — his mother, Kathryn, is an assistant principal for a primary school — are more than just aficionados: They’re “reenactors,” dressing in the regalia of the Civil War era and participating in commemorations throughout the area. “They’re lunatics but they’re very dedicated lunatics,” he said. “Their adherence to historical accuracy is really admirable and amazing to behold.”
Lopez, 29, said he first came up with the concept for The Whipping Man in his teenage years, after looking through his father’s considerable library of history books and discovering an odd title: The Jewish Confederates.
“At the time, I was certainly aware that there was a vibrant Jewish community in the South, but it never dawned on me the extent to which Jews were involved in that society,” he said. “While some did own plantations, most lived in urban areas, as they did in the North,” earning their living as doctors, lawyers, and in other professions.
The play developed from a short story he wrote as part of a trilogy about race and identity in America. “I don’t know where the idea of Jewish slave-owning — which I knew at the time was a fact — came from.”
Later in his research, he had what he described as a “eureka moment,” when he discovered “that Passover began two days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox….. What a great coincidence to have Pesach going on at that exact same time. It was probably the first time in all those millennia that you have such a migration from bondage into freedom.”
Lopez, who was born in Manhattan and raised in Florida, began working on the play “in earnest” in 2000, refining and expanding it from a one-act, two-character play to its present form. With the premiere less than two weeks away, he was still tinkering with it.
While he doesn’t have any hard evidence that slaves took part in seders in that era, Lopez said, “I can’t imagine it’s too far outside the realm of possibility…that perhaps in a Jewish home — and also within a Jewish community in which these slaves know only Judaism — a few of them might adopt and identify with the religion itself.”
Lopez is not Jewish, although he has Jewish relatives. “I wasn’t raised in the faith, but I was raised around the faith,” he laughed. “As a kid, I went to that side of the family whenever they had something important. If I never did completely understand it, I certainly was aware of it and sensitive to it and interested in it as a part of who my family was. That’s another reason I was interested in writing the play.”
Lopez read “a bunch of different Haggadas” to fashion the seder that takes place in his play. “I wanted to honor the ceremony and honor its importance to the characters, but I knew going into it I couldn’t do a whole seder. I was able to improvise because in the play the seder is improvised. The character performing the ceremony for the most part is illiterate and is going from memory, and by virtue of that, it would be very improvised. I gave myself a lot of room to play. Then I was able to pick out the relevant parts of the service.”
Lopez admitted his faux seder was still a bit long. “I bet you a million dollars it’ll be even shorter by the time we start rehearsing it.”
While historically themed movies and TV shows like HBO’s Deadwood strive for linguistic accuracy, Lopez acknowledged that in writing The Whipping Man, he did not strive for that level of authenticity.
“I looked at several sources but took the language primarily from one published in the 1930s. I suppose if I dug deeper I could certainly find text they would have used. In this case, I wanted to sacrifice a little bit of authenticity for a bit of ease on the actors’ mouths and the audience’s ears.”
Lopez offers another potentially embarrassing admission:
“I’m totally going to lose a lot of credibility [but] I have yet to go to a seder. I have done everything that one can do in a library…. I think we’re planning to do that because Passover will be going on during rehearsals.”
The Whipping Man premieres at the Luna Stage in Montclair Thursday, April 27, and runs through May 20. Frankie R. Faison,
a Tony nominee and featured actor on HBO’s The Wire, stars as Simon, an older slave.
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