Theatre in Review: The Whipping Man (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center) It's always a pleasure to meet a new playwright with a real gift for narrative, and, based on the evidence of The Whipping Man, Matthew Lopez has it in spades. From the minute the lights come up on a ruined, rainswept Virginia mansion -- a tumbledown gothic monstrosity that is one of John Lee Beatty's most distinctive recent achievements -- Lopez unfolds his Southern Gothic tale of race, religion, sex, and family secrets with a remarkably sure hand. It is April 1865. The Civil War has been over for only a few days. The South -- its social order totally overturned -- remains a chaotic, dangerous place, plagued by an epidemic of looting and killing. Simon -- a middle-aged black man -- is holed up in the gutted home of the family that owned him. A storm rages and Simon waits, gun loaded, ready to drive out intruders. This time, however, the interloper is Caleb, formerly his young master. Caleb has a grievously injured leg; he collapses ---and Simon says a prayer over him, in Hebrew. This is the first - and arguably the most provocative -- of the many surprises that Lopez has up his sleeve. Apparently, there was a small number of Jewish slaveholding families in the antebellum South, and, in many cases, their slaves converted to Judaism. It's a fascinating piece of lost history, and Lopez examines it skillfully, delineating the conflict between Jewish ethics and the demands of the South's peculiar institution. This is by no means the only attention-getter in the opening scenes. We quickly learn that Caleb's leg has a nasty case of gangrene, and Simon, aided by John, another ex-slave, performs the necessary amputation before our horrified eyes -- a sequence staged, like so much else in The Whipping Man, with considerable brio by Doug Hughes. In an early demonstration of the author's way with words, Simon convinces Caleb to submit to the operation, offering such a nerve-shredding description of how the gangrene will kill him that it seems all too possible that the play has reached its dramatic climax in its first 15 minutes. As it happens, the author has trickier games to play. The three men settle into an uneasy domesticity, as Simon tends the house, Caleb convalesces, and John roams the neighborhood, stealing everything that isn't nailed down. It's a new world, and nobody knows how to proceed. Caleb is no longer the master, and Simon and John are no longer the slaves; they live in a state of mutual dependency, with no obvious future. Worse, all of them are concealing terrible secrets. As the conversation becomes pricklier and potentially more violent, The Whipping Man probes the changing power dynamics among these men, while -- in a scene set at a Passover Seder -- detonating a series of bombshells that reveal them to be more intimately connected than anyone ever thought. At issue is the family religion -- does it make them different from anyone else in the South? It's hard to believe so when Simon removes his shirt and displays the scars on his back, the fruit of an enforced visit to the man in the play's title. "I got your family tree on my back," he tells Caleb, quietly and menacingly. "Were we Jews or were we slaves?" Simon asks -- a question that Lopez leaves tantalizingly open-ended. The author's storytelling knack is so assured that my only complaint about The Whipping Man is that, at times, the characters are less vivid than the story they inhabit. We don't get enough of a sense of what their lives were like before the war, especially for Simon and John and their awakening to Judaism. And there are moments when the plot twists click into place just a tad too smoothly. At a tense, compact 90 minutes, this is one play that could probably stand to be 10or 15 minutes longer. Nevertheless, under Hughes' expert guidance, all three actors deliver first-rate performances, especially André Braugher, whose Simon is the play's dominating presence and moral force. André Holland's John is an appealingly shifty character, thoroughly adept at inventing good excuses to do whatever he wants, and Jay Wilkison easily conveys Cable's frailty and less-than-trustworthy nature. Beatty's set -- a cavernous, twisting assemblage of fire-scarred rooms, the walls pockmarked with holes -- is lit by Ben Stanton so as to maximize its haunted-house qualities Catherine Zuber's costumes have a thoroughly authentic feel. Jill BC DuBoff's sound design blends storm effects, eerie voices, and various types of period music to create a most unsettling soundscape. In some ways, the best thing about The Whipping Man is how it builds to a climax that has you wondering what can possibly happen next to these beleaguered souls. This is a drama that leaves you satisfied, yet eager to hear more. For a new playwright, that's not a bad start at all.--David Barbour 
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