September 21, 2022
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Oregon Shakespeare Festival King John & Confederates
Continued from Page 7
elements of breath and falling and repeti-
tive motion, for example, or a king whose
petulance is captured in the way he curls
his body on his throne.
The cast is phenomenal and consistently
strong. Most actors are inhabiting multiple
roles and all participate in collective scenes
where their bodies function to capture a
sense of the movement of armies and po-
litical factions. Jessika D. Williams chews
up every scene as the Bastard, an ambitious
opportunist who thinks he can capitalize on
proximity to power but who often registers
the most astute response to its manipula-
tions. Brenda Joyner is heart-breaking as
Arthur, a young man who is destined to be
a political pawn. Lisa Tejero as the Car-
dinal conveys brilliantly how a religious
leader employs potent symbols like weap-
ons. Aysan Celik communicates the fury
of Constance, a rare female character, with
movement as much as with words.
The entire cast works together to convey
a sense of how actions and rash decisions
of the powerful reverberate among those
with less agency; how violence spreads
exponentially; how justifications shift as
body counts rise. The production makes
smart use of projections, lighting, and cos-
tume design to realize the ideas with speci-
ficity. In the end, whether or not you want
to concern yourself with the historical spe-
cifics of the story, this production has left
you with a visceral sense of the themes im-
portant to the story. It’s as exciting an ex-
perience of theater as one can hope to have.
“Confederates” isn’t as successful, but
for complicated reasons that still coun-
sel engagement. Playwright Dominique
Morisseau, working on a commission from
Penumbra Theater and OSF as part of its
American Revolutions United States His-
tory Cycle, was invited to create a work
about the Black experience of the Civil
War and chose to focus on the experience
of Black women. Inspired by Dr. Joy De-
Gruy’s work in explicating what she de-
scribes as Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome,
Morisseau produced a set of parallel stories
set 160 years apart, centering a current-day
Black woman professor, Sandra, and an
enslaved Black woman, Sara, who spies
for the union army.
I say “parallel” because that is what
the playwright clearly intends—the wom-
en share similar attributes, including that
both must navigate a world in which the
expectations of them feel functionally im-
possible, where their agency and freedom
are very specifically impacted by the ac-
King John (2022). Photo by Jenny Graham
tions of a Black man, a white woman, and
a Black woman. The dangers Sara faces
are concrete, physical, and immediately
life-threatening; she seeks to support the
war effort for what she believes will be her
liberation, yet her brother Abner thinks that
is men’s work, her white mistress and for-
mer playmate Missy Sue seeks to exploit
and seduce her, and an enslaved wom-
an, Luanne, who sleeps with the master,
jeopardizes and complicates Sara’s aims.
Meanwhile, Sandra faces constant chal-
lenges to her agency and dignity. A Black
student, Malik, believes the grade she has
given him reflects favoritism toward white
students; her white student assistant, Can-
dace, offers support that feels like sabo-
tage; and a younger Black colleague, Jade,
questions Sandra’s solidarity in a tenure
fight. As things play out, Sandra comes
to suspect that any one of the three could
be responsible for an act of harassment—a
period photo of a Black wet-nurse with
a white infant at her breast, but photo-
shopped with Sandra’s face and posted on
her office door.
Both stories play out on parallel stages,
with the same actors pivoting between the
roles of Abner and Malik, Missy Sue and
Candace, and Luanne and Jade. The ten-
sion and the overlaps between the stories
increase and heighten, until the simple sets
for each begin to merge. Morisseau means
for us to notice, as she did in a discussion
of the play in the New York Times, that the
two Black women protagonists are “united
in being the most socially expendable.”
The play is strongest in telling Sara’s
story. Erika Rose embodies Sara’s power,
tenacity, and fear, conveys the sheer athlet-
icism necessary to navigate all the attempts
on her life and safety and to fight for agen-
cy over not only her life but over self-defi-
nition. Morisseau succeeds in presenting
this enslaved character as much more than
a tragic figure, even employing humor
strategically as highly resilient people do.
She wants us to know that enslaved people
were more than tragic victims, that they
fought back strategically and well.
The parallels with Sandra’s experience
don’t always connect. My own experience
as a Brown woman leaves me little room
for doubt that Black women face struggles
like those depicted here—the sense that
anyone can say anything about you, do
anything to you without much or any risk.
Yet the play doesn’t grapple well with how
Sandra’s exercise of her own power plays
into the dynamics of her situation. There
is no justifying what she experiences, and
I don’t question that institutions like these
peculiarly deny justice to Black women.
But Sandra has options that Sara does not,
and how she exercises them feels underex-
amined.
There is the additional problem of audi-
ence. I saw the play, as I often do, in a very
predominantly white audience at a theater
whose institutional dynamics I know well
from the inside; indeed, they have landed
hard on my own Brown body. Morisseau’s
use of humor in depicting the situation of
these Black women evoked laughter, but I
was not persuaded that that laughter indi-
cated recognition—which contributed to
my own disinclination to join in the laugh-
ter. I might well have felt different about
it in a different audience—a problem not
of Morisseau’s own making. There aren’t
easy solutions for BIPOC artists to exercise
agency in telling the stories they want and
deserve the opportunity to tell on stage.
All that said, Morisseau’s provocative
play, full of good performances, and in-
telligently directed by Nataki Garrett, de-
serves an audience. Stories like these merit
an audience, and some practice in the tell-
ing and in the listening.
Darleen Ortega is a judge on the Ore-
gon Court of Appeals and the first woman
of color to serve in that capacity. Her mov-
ie and theater review column Opinionated
Judge appears regularly in The Portland
Observer. Find her review blog at opinion-
atedjudge.blogspot.com.