BWW Reviews: WHIPPING MAN Delivers Extraordinary Theatre Experience at Gulfshore Playhouse

Biko Eisen-Martin stomps on the stage. His character John hits his fist into his hand; it makes a popping sound. John winces. John notices blood seeping through the bandage there. .

Stomp. Slap. Crack. Wince. (boom-smack)

Gulfshore Playhouse explores the Civil War in frightening, fascinating, thrilling, daresay even extraordinary fashion in this Matthew Lopez show. "The Whipping Man" covers a few days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. A Jewish soldier returns home to find his house in ruins, just two former slaves left and his family gone. As the starving, uneasy trio celebrates Passover with a makeshift Seder, bitter truths come out. (Read an interview with "The Whipping Man" director Matt Pfeiffer)

Don't be put off by the fact that this show is about slaves, the Civil War, Jews or the traumatic scene in the first half where Cody Nickell's character exposes a gangrenous leg. "The Whipping Man" delivers a captivating evening of theater that seizes you, holds you transfixed, rattles your brain and rearranges the way you look at the world.

The defining scene, a tossed-together Seder using stolen wine, "discovered" eggs, a brick instead of bread and the shank bone of Caleb's dead calvalry mount might be the most powerful, transformative, few minutes of theater you witness this year.

Staged to feel and sound like a Bible-thumping tent revival with a preacher up begging for souls, this was the definition of a scene. I half-expected someone to jump up and yell "Hallelujah." Except we were in a theatre. And these actors were reading from the Haggadah.

As Johnnie Hobbs, Jr. recites passages about slaves escaping from Egypt, sings "Go Down Moses" or speaks of bitter herbs being a reminder of slavery, the scene takes on a life of its own. This is theatre - bold, assertive, visionary. Just twice before I've felt the transformative power of theatre, when you realize that the performance on stage has gone beyond mere acting into something that can shift your soul, move your heart and change your life. "The Whipping Man" joins that select group.

Hobbs brings a soft-spoken servility to his Simon, giving audiences a glimpse of the bowing, scraping manner forced on slaves as a survival tactic. Eisen-Martin delivers a delicate, subtle, layered acting job that contains every hint of John's enormous rage at being a literate slave. Watch for the panther-like physicality he gives to the character, even while revealing John's inner hollowness.

Nickell captures the audience from the very second Captain Caleb DeLeon hops through the moonlit door of Ken Goldstein's eerily bare, hauntingly gorgeous, mostly destroyed Southern Gothic townhouse. He hops, hops, screams. Faints. There is not a sound. We are in this world. Completely.

David M. Upton bathes the stage in beams of softest silver, filtered through cracked and crackled windows that suggest Twelve Oaks or Tara, but with an urban sophistication. The dramatic, bombshell ending and stark, wordless, contemplative finale, with characters pondering the chains that enslave them, accomplishes the task that great theatre sets out to do - it makes you think.

Chris Silk is the arts writer and theater critic for the Naples Daily News. To read the longer version of this review, go to: http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2013/mar/17/review-gulfshore-playhouse-the-whipping-man-naples/

PHOTO CREDIT: Pedro Zepeda / Gulfshore Playhouse

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