Director's Notes
In the summer of 2016, I was given a grand adventure when I sat down between Suzanne Bradbeer and Lisa Rothe to assist them as they developed this script at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. The previous summer, Confederates, an audience favorite, had won the New Works Festival and earned its place in the 2015-2016 TheatreWorks Season. For several weeks I absorbed the scintillating discussions about what makes a good script, what makes a well-staged play, and how crazy our country can be when it comes to race. I learned a lot and was profoundly inspired. When Axiom Repertory chose Confederates for their 2018-2019, I jumped at the chance to direct it.
The title Confederates refers literally to the Confederate flag but it also evokes the connections between questing human beings. A confederate is an ally, or someone in league with you, a comrade. In some sense we are all confederates because we share the need to be significant and we share the struggle to navigate the trade-offs with which this reality forces us to grapple. Will, Stephanie, and Maddie make choices that seek significance and all of those choices require trade-offs that result in loss and gain. Such is the nature of our condition; every choice has upsides and downsides. And how we chose determines who we are. Confederates is in part a play about Will’s maturation. He discovers what he is made of and who he wants to be as he faces the challenges of journalist, father, and friend.
Confederates is also a play that reveals the fissures in our society between blue and red, media and public, black and white. Without preaching, Confederates makes clear the way in which race is under-discussed. Will comments on how the Eskimos have so many words for snow because to understand snow is to be able to survive it. In our discussion of race in America, we have too few words to help us precisely communicate about this issue that is for some a matter of survival. We need more words to safely talk about race. There are people who are racist, people who have racist myths undergirding their thoughts about race, and there people who have a profound enough understanding of the realities of difference to find a way clear of racism. Maddie, like many people of goodwill, does not understand how the myths about race influence her understanding of privilege, difference, and identity. Her encounter with Will reveals that people can be both ignorant and act with good intention. Yet her actions have consequences and this play does not shrink from those. Confederates is play that offers us a way to examine how we think and talk about race.
Written in the last decade, this play still rings true. It asks questions and delineates challenges that as a country, we still face. I invite you to watch, with an open heart and a keen mind, Suzanne Bradbeer’s nonstop and ever-human jaunt through America during presidential campaign season.
Carolyn Murray, Director
