In Breaker/Fixer Production’s latest play a long-dead Confederate widow confronts her sins in a curious underworld, forcing the audience to reconsider notions and attitudes about violence of the old South that still resonate today.
“A Confederate Widow in Hell” presents a whirlwind deconstruction of historical revisionism, with Southern folklore continuing to consume this Fayetteville-based theatre duo of folk singer-songwriter Willi Carlisle, who plays the title role in drag and director/producer Joseph Fletcher, who appears in a non-speaking role as the widow’s headless husband.
This performance takes place inside the intimate Fenix Gallery--a narrow, well-lit space with high wainscoted ceilings--now darkened and appointed like a plantation living room, complete with lace drapes and shaded lamps, and backlit to deliver a sense of otherworldliness. An audience of twenty five to thirty is situated immediately before the stage, plainly visible even in the dim light, with the widow Dolores Snodgrass treating the audience like a guest in her infernal home- with appropriate sickly-sweet Southern hospitality.
Carlisle’s portrayal of the widow is a slow burn, at first all smarmy smiles and snobbish quips as she glides across the stage in her billowing black skirts. The play’s first moments feel glib as Carlisle plays into the part’s effeteness and sense of unreality. With her oversize bonnet and exaggerated falsetto, the performance nearly slips into caricature. I worried how Carlisle intended to address the elephant in the room- the brutal legacy of the South. He does, in the form of the Snodgrass plantation ledger, whose sterile documentation of a morally repugnant economy contrasts tellingly with Dolores’ unwitting arrogance.
The ledger, a kind of bridge between Dolores’ world and ours alternates between dismissal of a house slave’s fever and the increasing quotas to meet English demand. Carlisle reads from it with relish, grand smiles descending into melodramatic hysteria when the slave ultimately dies, leaving behind 9 children- but this is a mere footnote. Within a few lines, Dolores proudly remarks how the plantation’s cotton clothes the world. In a short span the play captures the cold, calculated and globally-oriented nature of the slave-based economy, one that could not succeed without international demand for cheap comfort.
This point and the very modern ghosts of Southern revisionism haunt the play like the widow haunts hell. By taking on race, the play could easily go down a heavy-handed route, preaching to the choir about the clear cruelties of slavery. Instead “Confederate” doesn’t go for the low-hanging fruit of the Snodgrasses and the evils of the plantation South. Rather, the concern lies with the unlearned lessons of Reconstruction, and how an entire villainous way of life escaped it unscathed.
Like their previous play “There Ain’t No More,” which won “Best of Show at Orlando Fringe, “Widow” is minimalist. Simple props such as a book, a stool, and most memorably a harmonium and slide projector, effectively channel the widow’s past. Through these, it’s clear that the only brutalities afforded to the Snodgrasses and the Southern aristocracy were the loss of minor comforts and the indignities of defeat, affording them the status of victimhood they had once enforced upon others. Dolores scorns her revisionist children- proud Confederate descendants who “put on hoods and chased away good labor” or “spent their money on statues for a lost cause.”
In a particularly biting and funny sequence, Carlisle rapid-fire channels the widow’s distant progeny, playing six roles in the span of two minutes and displaying the full spectrum of modern nostalgia for the Old South and its cognitive dissonance. At the tail end of this sequence, which sees Carlisle changing from one role to the next with a gesture, an accent, a surly or prideful expression- he takes on the role of a modern-day Snodgrass as he takes a selfie over Dolores’ burial place. Carlisle alternates between toothy grandstanding and then falls to the floor as Dolores, literally rolling in her grave.
Instead, it’s our current system Dolores delights in. To her, the Confederacy definitively lost; its economic system, however, did not. In a hallucinatory vision of the present, Carlisle affects a wide-eyed reverie, his face glistening with sweat as he speaks lustfully of Apple and the enshrining of creature comforts, of ruthless exploitation of resources and the divine hand of the free market, before collapsing on the floor. He rises to face the audience, seemingly playing himself as he pleads- what is there to do? What are the right answers to the difficult questions of the past? Like the widow, we live in a well-appointed salon floating through a void, doomed to constantly re-interpret and be re-interpreted in the wreckage of our actions.
“A Confederate Widow in Hell” confronts a wide spectrum of themes successfully in little over an hour. Carlisle’s energy is relentless as he cascades through unctuous and flamboyant display to wide-eyed horror and hysteria. Though the play wavers early on in whether to treat its title character as flesh-and-blood buffoon or allegorical indictment, by the end, the message was clear, and no one was laughing at the Widow’s antics any longer. The ignorance and folly of her way of life seems all too real and present.
