Confederates by Dominique Morisseau

It feels like a bad sign for a play to start with a page-long instruction on how it is to be interpreted. And decidedly off-putting for that instruction to include the anticipatory condemnation that if you don’t find it funny, then you must just be too stupid to get it, especially coming from a writer so arrogant as to assert about her own writing that it “hits every humorous funny bone.” (And doesn’t the redundancy of that statement alone call into question the writer’s brilliance?). 

However, putting that initial irritation aside, the play is quite engaging. It captures the attention right from the start with the formal plea to address an offensive (but also perplexing) act. The academic conversations around bias and priveledge are stimulating (it puts me in mind of “Third” but with more intersectionality). But, while I appreciate the parallels being drawn between plantation life and academia, I still found myself eager to get through the historical scenes and back to the intellectual conversations of the present. Perhaps that is that lack of humor that the writer is warning against at the start. Absurdity is clearly present in much of the play, but absurdity is not inherently funny. Especially in the contexts present in this play, much of it is just disheartening. 

That being said, there is certainly humor. As comic relief, I enjoy Candice, as a character, a great deal—her overly-blunt chattiness, her plethora of post-it notes and labyrinthine e-mail folders. It’s possible that the right set of actors and director could draw out more humor in the rest of the show (or, at least, do so for an audience more versed in “Gone With the Wind” or more appreciative of farce than I am), but it seems like a challenge that could well go awry.