Theater review: ‘Whipping Man’ studies complexities of Civil War history

In the smoky gloom and immediate aftermath of the Civil War, a young Jewish soldier stumbles home to Richmond with a gangrenous leg. Over the course of a day or two, surrounded by two newly freed slaves who have served his family over the years, he will undergo a series of agonizing jolts that rip to the core of body and soul.

Matthew Lopez’s “The Whipping Man,” running on the Alliance Theatre’s Hertz Stage through April 7, is an intensely dark drama, gothic in every contour, chilling to the bone. Just two years old, it is already one of the most produced plays of the regional theater season and feeds an audience hungry for tales of love, war, faith and the epic wrong of slavery, from Biblical times right up until 1865.

As sepulchral in tone as any 19th-century spine-tingler by Hawthorne or Poe, yet informed, too, by the work of Suzan-Lori Parks, Athol Fugard and Sam Shepard, “The Whipping Man” is a tricky twist of storytelling in which all three characters harbor secret passions, motives and agendas.

“The Whipping Man” may be an investigation of the complex power struggle between master and servant. But “The Help” it is not. It explores that great perennial theme of American literature, our racial divide, as a festering sore. Healing and redemption are absent. So by the time the curtain drops and you reflect on the business before you, you realize things aren’t what they seemed. What appeared to be ministering and compassion may have been torture and revenge.

Director Alexander Greenfield, who recently staged Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” for Fabrefaction Theatre, has a strong visual eye and riveting sense of the theatrical. But we can’t pretend the production, or the play, is perfect.

The actors sometimes seem to direct themselves and while Jeremy Aggers’ account of the prodigal Jewish son Caleb is finely calibrated — understated, visceral, eloquent — I’m not sure I understand the casting decision. His Caleb has an aching voice. As preternaturally wise as he is wounded, he reveals his anguished romantic heart in an epistolary soliloquy that opens the second act. But this 19th century Southern Jew, like the language of the play, seems more informed by the present than the past.

Smith’s flamboyant, scenery-gnashing performance pretty much hijacks Passover supper. To his credit, John Stewart, as the young slave John, doesn’t seem to take himself so seriously as his acting partners, yet he gives a deeply felt performance. John is a drunken clown and a wise-cracking powder keg ignited by the terror of his truth.

No matter your response to “The Whipping Man,” it’s impossible not to admire the veiled, claustrophobic, Faulknerian atmosphere. As designed by Jason Sherwood (sets) and Liz Lee (lighting), the DeLeon family manse is a burned-out ruin of its former self. As Richmond smolders and gasps, the axis of power shifts on an intimate scale. A house falls, spilling secrets and ghosts.

Theater review

“The Whipping Man”

Grade: B -