Confederates
By Dominique Morisseau
Detroit Public Theatre
Through March 16
Just before the start of Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates at Detroit Public Theatre, audience members are invited to audibly react and even laugh during the production. This might seem a strange encouragement to make before a play – an experience where people are supposed to be moved. The subject matter is not often one where humor is welcome: the intersection of racism and sexism. While I still cringe to write this, it does turn out it can be pretty funny.
The premise of the play, which is directed by Goldie Patrick ,is straightforward: Two Black women at vastly different points of American history live paralleled lives fighting institutional racism. Sandra – played by Whitney Johnson – is a modern-day political science professor at a prominent university. Rebecca Rose Mims’ Sarah is a slave on a Southern plantation trying to fight for the North in the Civil War. While one seems obviously freer than the other, the women are faced with a series of similar encounters that asks the audience to question how far we’ve come as a society and who is really free. A singular black-and-white photograph of a slave woman nursing a White baby ties their stories together.
The balance of the show is soothingly symmetric. The set features a modern-day office on the left – Sandra’s domain – and a slave cabin on the right, where Sarah resides. With the exception of one scene, these are, separately, where the two leads live their stories, interacting with the remaining three actors who jump between the two sets playing characters who are period equivalents of the other. The other characters include a Black man (Will Street), a White woman (Meredith Parker) and a Black woman (Vanessa Mazhangara) – deliberately no White men are represented – that highlight the intersectionality of racism and sexism.
As the leads interact with each of three other actors, you see a clear difference in respect and tone and the complicated emotions that accompany having a somewhat – but not quite – shared lived experience.
When interacting with the Black man Abner/Malik, who is dismissive and sometimes outright disrespectful, the women take on supportive protective roles. There is an uncomfortable deference when the leads interact with the seemingly well-intentioned but woefully clueless White woman Missy Sue/Candice, to the point where Sarah and Sandra find themselves comforting her, while visibly dying a little on the inside. By contrast, their interaction with a fellow Black woman is one of mistrust and disdain based on their different approaches of survival. In all cases, the audience experiences the lengths Black women go to for self-preservation.
While the subject matter may seem un-appealingly heavy, Morisseau’s use of comedy makes watching the lived experience of American Black women engaging and accessible.
The play is full of sarcasm and snark. The actors are excellent, each tasked with portraying multiple characters – either literally or in the form of figurative masks. Johnson and Mims excel at playing the parts required of them for survival. While they cater to the needs of another character, you see their internal battles struggling among loyalty, compassion, doubt, fear, disdain, anger and utter frustration. Street, Parker and Mazhangara transition smoothly – literally within minutes – to characters who span two different centuries, nailing different accents and mannerisms.
Arguably the funniest characters in the play are Parker’s roles: Missy Sue, the plantation owner’s daughter, and Sarah’s toxic childhood “friend,” and Candice, Sandra’s vocal-fried, latte-holding, Taylor Swift-loving student assistant. They are caricatures of the Basic White Girl, which Parker aces, capturing someone who is both well-intentioned and utterly lacking in self-awareness but who also shares a common frustration with the men in her life.
Most of us have not experienced – or likely thought much about – what life is like as an American Black woman faced with overcoming the double challenge of racism and sexism. It would have been easy and likely justified for Morisseau – who said she wanted to make her story overt – to take an aggressive, accusatory approach to the narrative. Doing that, however, risks putting people on the defensive and shutting down – not opening their minds to new ideas. Her use of humor dismantles those defenses and offers audiences a safe space – deserved or not – to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and question their own roles in an oppressive system.
