Confederates

by Dominique Morisseau

Sara, an enslaved rebel turned Union spy, and Sandra, a tenured professor in a modern-day private university, are having parallel experiences of institutional racism, though they live over a century apart. Confederates leaps through time to trace the identities of these two Black American women and explore the reins that racial and gender bias still hold on American educational systems today.

Genres: Plays

84 pages, Paperback

Published November 30, 2022

About the author

Dominique Morisseau is an American playwright and actress from Detroit, Michigan. She has authored over nine plays, three of which are part of a cycle titled The Detroit Projects. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship for 2018.

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ultimately, what started as a premise ripe with potential by comparing slavery times with modern day institutionalized racism quickly becomes a bland, severely heavy-handed drama with the nuance of a spoonful of medicine.

The characters speak to each other using stale social platitudes, their conflicts are built on stale social platitudes, and the ending is the two main characters sending off the audience… with monologues shaped by social platitudes. Very little of this story houses any genuine commentary on a very important subject matter beyond the shallow idea that “black characters = dialogue about racism”.

Instead, if Morisseau had used the themes as building blocks in the world building instead of the characters and their dialogue (and the resulting “plot”), I think the themes she was trying to express would have a profound impact. Ultimately, we are told that these characters face racism over and over, which makes this play a well-structured, theatrical sermon. Instead, we should have been shown that these characters face racism to make the overall truths land on their feet with more of an impact.

The only exception that I find interesting is how the modern characters never truly learn who put the picture on Sandra’s door, despite all of them being complicit in its creation. That has some interesting commentary that would have been stronger had the rest of the play been built on the same strengths.

[Ethan Glattfelder · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really smart and tricky play that has me wanting to read more plays! It read darker than I was expecting having seen it described as a comedy. There is a lot here that really isn’t funny at all, which could actually be the genius of the play if it can still make you laugh, then cringe.

[mengwe · Rating 5 out of 5]

damn that was good 😭

[Simon Levy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrific dialogue and characters. Theatrical examination of slavery, academia, gender and bias. Two time frames: contemporary and Civil War. Familiar tropes, but engaging.