“Confederates” takes us two steps forward, one back, at Curious | Theater review
What, I wonder, would you want to know about the latest production by the city’s doggedly bold Curious Theatre Company?
admin
What, I wonder, would you want to know about the latest production by the city’s doggedly bold Curious Theatre Company?
Would you want to hear that Dominique Morisseau’s “Confederates” — which juxtaposes the life of Sara, an enslaved woman (Tresha Farris) who begins passing purloined intel to the Union, with that of Sandra (Kenya Mahogany Fashaw), a tenured professor grappling with a bigoted incident on campus — is amusing? If so, the answer is, “Yes!”
Well-acted? Ditto.
Or might you be a theatergoer aching to see the angst of doing well in a system not built for you reflected in a funhouse fashion? To laugh yet know the playwright recognizes the perils and hurt of that peculiar situation? If so, this production, nimbly directed by Marisa D. Hebert, sees you. And the play’s heady and satirical moments may feel like a stinging salve.
Curious has in its two-plus decades seldom failed to nudge — or shove — a theatergoer’s thoughts toward the challenges of being human in this moment, and doing so formally or in terms of subject matter (often both). It has done the vital work of theater by featuring contemporary playwrights who are up to the task, engaged in the language of our existential woes (less often our delights): Tony Kushner, to be sure, and more recently Morisseau.
Described by the Macarthur Foundation as “a playwright whose works portray the lives of individuals and communities grappling with economic and social changes, both current and historical,” Morisseau was awarded its genius grant in 2018. That was also the year Curious produced “Detroit ’67” about two fictional siblings whose beloved underground nightclub is endangered by the paroxysm of violence that occurred after the police raided one such joint in Detroit in 1967. The next year, it mounted her play about auto workers, “Skeleton Crew.” It, too, was set in the Motor City, where Morisseau was born. “Paradise Blue,” yet to be performed in Colorado, completed her Detroit-set trilogy.
With its movement between centuries, and an otherworldly finale, “Confederate” is a departure for Morisseau. Intricately structured, it eschews social realism — and the warmth and connection that can come with it — to engage ideas about power, systems and agency.
At the start of “Confederates,” poli-sci professor Sandra (Kenya Mahogany Fashaw) stands in front of a large wooden desk, towering shelves of books behind her. She begins speaking with a debater’s skill about the ways in which she — a gifted academic, a Black woman — has long grown comfortable with myriad images of slavery.
“Before this becomes a complete misinterpretation of intent, I’d like to say that I am not averse to images of slavery. They do not embarrass or fatigue me,” says the professor to her invisible colleagues. Her list of supporting examples is far-reaching. There are movies, museums and monuments; there is a knowing wink at Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.”
The prompt for this direct address was an image Sandra found affixed to her office door. The image was altered so that her face replaced that of an enslaved woman wet nursing a white infant. Sandra demands an investigation and disciplinary action.
The play then shifts focus and era. In a cabin on a plantation, Sara (Tresha Farris) stitches the wound of her brother Abner (Cameron Davis). Having escaped the property, Abner has returned from a Union army regiment with news of a nascent fight that could gain Sara freedom. But, full of energy, gumption and interest in learning to shoot Abner’s musket, Sara wants to be an actor in her own liberation.
When Missy Sue (Rachel Turner), the plantation owner’s daughter, returns home from the North, a divorced woman with new ideas about her father, slavery and her childhood “friend,” an alliance (of a sort) ensues.
“They are fighting for your freedom.” Missy Sue tells Sara of the Union Army’s efforts. To which, Sara says, in one of the great retorts in the play (as funny as it is pointed), “Without me?”
With her Rorschach test of that one-word title, Morisseau wasted little time putting us on notice about the play’s presumptive terrain: slavery. But even though the Confederacy and the Union are mentioned in Sara’s portion of the play and Sandra riffs on slavery, Morisseau is reanimating the word itself. She takes from its association with the subjugation of millions back toward its essential notion of, if not friendship, alliances.
There are plenty of alliances here — uneasy, prickly, shifting and unexpected. The least encumbered is the most loving, that of siblings Sara and Abner.
The rest offer lessons about trust and mistrust, about the ways individuals understand each other and themselves within institutions. Kristina Fountaine does deft work as both LuAnne, an enslaved woman who works in the big house and is having an affair with the master, and Jade, an instructor seeking tenure at the university.
Turner plays both Missy Sue and Sandra’s intern, Candice. In addition to Abner, Davis portrays Malik, the talented student who is disgruntled with the grade that Sandra gave his comparative political science paper about the kinship between the Emancipation Proclamation and affirmative action. Their exchanges, which aren’t purely about academics, reflect their own complicated power dynamics within the university.
The elegant stagecraft, beginning with Matthew Crane’s set design, sutures the bygone with the contemporary. In their dual roles, Cameron, Fountaine and Turner move between the antebellum to the present, switching beneath in a betwixt space bathed by soft light (designer Richard Devin) from the clothes of the 1800s to the garb of the university (costumes by Nicole Watts).
Across that span of a century and just a few feet downstage from Sandra and Malik’s office visits, Sara is beginning her work as a Union spy. LuAnne wants to help, but can she be trusted? Missy Sue has helped already — getting Sara moved into her father’s home where meetings are taking place and war plans forged — but can she be truly trusted?
In “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin offered his own bit of space-time philosophizing when he made use of the French adage “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Or, “the more things change the more they stay the same.” In an instructional if brainy way, this is the “one-step forward, two steps back” continuum that Morisseau and her characters defy and succumb to, embrace and rebuke.
Malik’s paper — with its initially iffy analysis of the past as present — offers a clever key to the ambitions and challenges of “Confederates.” As it leaps back and forth in time, it questions what was, what is and how has it changed (if indeed it has) for those tangled in its space-time realities. Sure, it’s rather meta on the playwright’s part, but that doesn’t make it less wise or, sigh, less timely.
The play doesn’t end with a heady argument but with something akin to a cri de coeur in which two characters break the invisible plane of the centuries to offer each other solace but also stamina. They are going to need both.
Lisa Kennedy is a Denver-based freelancer specializing in theater and film.
IF YOU GO
“Confederates.” Written by Dominique Morisseau. Directed by Marisa D. Hebert. Featuring Kenya Mahogany Fashaw, Tresha Farris, Cameron Davis, Rachel Turner and Kristina Fountaine. At the Curious Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma St., through Dec. 8. curioustheatre.org or 303-623-0524
