Confederates
Joel Ashur as Abner and Deidre Staples as Sara in Mosaic Theater’s production of Confederates by Dominique Morisseau. Directed by Stori Ayers, Scenic design by Nadir Bey, Lighting Design by John D. Alexander, Costume Design by Moyenda Kulemeka, Props Design by Deb Thomas, and Projection Design by Deja Collins. Credit: Chris Banks

Confederates, the title of MacArthur Fellow Dominique Morisseau’s latest dramedy, is a loaded word. So is the one that most succinctly describes her play’s subject: intersectionality.

Borrowing a structural trick from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Morisseau’s narrative tracks two sets of characters in vastly different eras, taking wry note of what has and hasn’t changed over the centuries. In Morisseau’s scenario, an enslaved woman named Sara, who has been secretly (and illegally) taught to read, struggles with how best to aid the Union cause during the Civil War. One hundred and 60-ish years later, Sandra, a tenured and semi-famous professor, must reevaluate how students and faculty regard her after someone posts a racially inflammatory Photoshopped image of her on her office door. 

Deidre Staples and Nikkole Salter play Sara and Sandra, respectively. These two actors remain in the 19th and 21st centuries while the other three members of director Stori Ayers’ sprightly company fill dual roles in both eras. Sturdy Joel Ashur is Sara’s brother Abner, a runaway who has joined the Union Army but has yet to see combat, and also Malik, a hot-tempered student who confronts Sandra with an accusation of bias after she gives his paper a B-minus. Caro Dubberly appears to be having more fun than anyone doubling as Missy Sue—Sara’s kindly, horny, otherwise overly familiar mistress (also the daughter of Sara’s owner)—and as Candice, Sandra’s high-strung, loose-lipped student assistant. And Tamieka Chavis plays both Luanne, an enslaved woman with a “desirable” position in the big house on the plantation where Sara is held in bondage, and Jade, an adjunct professor whose tenure application may depend on Sandra’s vote.

Morisseau has built an ingenious latticework obligation among these parties wherein only rarely does the schematic structure of her story upstage its emotional payload. Morisseau’s suggestion that even outwardly successful Black women like Sandra are judged according to contradictory and unattainable standards is clear, but her observation is more nuanced and existential than that. Sara has intellectual and emotional resilience but no freedom, while Sandra—tenured, respected in her field, and recently divorced—would appear to have no constraints on how she chooses to live. But both women are shaped to varying degrees by others’ expectations of what they ought to believe and what choices they ought to make. Even when these expectations are rooted in solidarity and admiration, they are still a form of pressure.

Caro Dubberly as Candice and Nikkole Salter as Sandra in Mosaic’s Confederates; Credit: Chris Banks

As she did in her Black blue-collar drama Skeleton Crew, which got a memorable staging at Studio Theatre in 2017, Morisseau has created a dramatically rich petri dish wherein there’s no villain—not onstage, anyway—and everyone has a point at least some of the time. She also shows she’s just as adept at conjuring the eggshell world of 21st-century academia as she is at channeling the concerns of much-devalued 21st-century factory workers. As though anticipating that some might object to her thematic linkages between a private college and a plantation, Morisseau even makes a clumsier version of that idea the subject of the paper Sandra has offered Malik the opportunity to rewrite for a shot at improving his grade. (Malik is comparing the plantation to corporate America as experienced by its Black workers—“That’s some Peculiar Institution shit!” he rails—but the point stands.)

Revision is a virtue, after all: Ayers previously directed Confederates’ world premiere run at Manhattan’s Pershing Square Signature Center in the spring of 2022, an experience that presumably helped her figure out how to prevent Morrisseau’s academia-set drama from seeming too, well, academic. Her Mosaic Theater production has a wholly different cast, and one notable not merely for versatility but for its full embrace of illuminating contradiction: Sandra’s cause—to see whomever subjected her to evidently racially motivated public embarrassment punished—is just, but Salter isn’t afraid to show us the chinks in her moral armor. Ashur’s cheap bravado as a kid spoiling for a fight with his professor registers as strongly as the fear he displays contemplating his death in battle. Dubberly resists the temptation to make Candice a Karen, letting her comic insight spring from the character’s sincere, if inevitably clumsy, drive to acknowledge and reckon with her own privilege. And Chavis was fully persuasive and dimensional in the press performance despite performing some scenes with a script in her hand. 

That just leaves Deidre Staples’ Sara, the enslaved woman who yearns to be a soldier but is ideally positioned as a spy. The character is young, but the way Staples seems to age her by decades in her final scene is a kind of tiny miracle we’re all hoping for each time the lights go down. That makes Confederates more than the sum of its impressive parts, a show where in Morisseau’s big ideas and the human-scale performances accrue into something like a union.

Mosaic Theater Company’s Confederates, written by Dominique Morisseau and directed by Stori Ayers runs through Nov. 26 at Atlas Performing Arts Center. mosaictheater.org. $20–$70.