There’s a moment in “Confederates,” the play by MacArthur Genius Award-winning Dominique Morisseau, when a white student observes to her Black professor, “I was completely racist just there!”
Her voice full of surprise — even wonder — she adds, “Just sort of creeps up on you.”
The moment comes as one of many in which humor and a kind of hard, relentless truth unspool from the same source.
On its own, the play is a brilliant exploration of institutionalized racism, the legacy of slavery, our allegiances to one another, and what it might mean to get free. In an ongoing production staged by the Detroit Public Theatre (through March 16) and directed by Goldie E. Patrick, Confederates is a masterpiece. It is the third show (and the first in 2025) of the theater’s 10th anniversary season.
Patrick, a playwright, television writer, and native of Detroit as well as a director, describes the play as “genre-bending,” entwining threads of farce, satire, drama, and something utterly unidentifiable.
Scenes cut back and forth across more than a century and a half, between Sarah’s story and Sandra’s: Sarah is a woman enslaved on a Southern plantation; while her brother has run off to fight for the Union, Sarah must find her own, more subtle ways to fight for freedom. Meanwhile, Sandra lives more or less in the present day, where she teaches political science at an elite university.
The play, which was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Penumbra Theater and debuted in New York in 2022, opens with the disturbing announcement that an image has been attached to Sandra’s office door: a Black woman is shown suckling a white baby. As if this weren’t enough, the woman’s face has been pasted over with Sandra’s own.
Patrick, who refers to herself as “a child of educators…a grandchild of educators, and…a sibling of educators” (Patrick’s father, Lawrence “Larry” Patrick, was formerly president of the Detroit Public School Board) says she was first drawn to the play because Sandra’s experiences “mirrored my own experiences in some capacity.”
“The higher my pursuit was for education, the more often I was isolated because of my identity — both as a woman and as a Black woman,” Patrick says.
As an undergrad, Patrick studied at Howard University, but she later went on to an Ivy League school where she realized “that the culture and the rules and the expectations…[were] not in service of my freedom.”
Over the course of the play, Sandra makes a similar realization. Whitney Johnson, who plays her, is brilliant in the role.
But it’s Rebecca Rose Mims as Sarah who steals every scene she appears in. Her performance is exquisitely nuanced: witty and vulnerable, intelligent and deeply felt.
Morisseau, who also serves as the Detroit Public Theatre’s Executive Artistic Producer, “writes in the voice of a Detroiter,” which, “as a Detroiter, I love,” Patrick says. “There’s a flavor to her language that I personally think sits very naturally and beautifully in the mouths of native Detroiters. It’s the rhythm, it is the cadence, it is the style of the joke. It is the style of the preach in the moments that are testimony.”
(Mims and Johnson are both natives of Detroit, as is Will Street, who is perfectly cast as Malik in Sandra’s story and Abner in Sarah’s.)
For Patrick, Confederates reflects the “audacity of knowing you deserve the world, knowing you’ll create the world — not asking anyone to create the thing for you, just demanding that everybody move out your way while you’re creating it. That’s so Detroit. … That’s Detroit music. That’s Detroit art. That’s Detroit style. …It’s just saying, ‘Let me do my thing.’”
As Patrick points out, it’s Morisseau’s tremendous generosity as a playwright — her generosity toward both her characters and her audience — that makes Sandra and Sarah, despite and because of all they experience — neither “the butt of the joke, nor…the hero.”
Instead, the play’s intensely intimate scrutiny is thrown back upon the audience itself.
“You watch the characters experience all of this and then you ask yourself, ‘Dang, do I do that?’” Patrick says. “‘Did I exhaust somebody today? Did I interrupt somebody? Was I so privileged that I didn’t even know that I did that to a Black woman?’… And then,” Patrick adds, “You figure out what to do after that.”
“What am I supposed to do,” Sandra asks at one point, “with the shattered f—-ing threads of myself?”
Morisseau hasn’t offered up any easy answers, neither to Sandra nor anyone else.
As it turns out, while her audiences sit upright, gazes trained toward the stages she’s constructed for them, Patrick is looking right back.
“I’m always watching the audience to see who laughs at what,” she says. “I want people to clutch their pearls. I want people to laugh out loud. I want people to say, ‘I know that’s right.’”
Get tickets to Confederates at detroitpublictheatre.org.
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