The New York Times - Somewhat Recommended
"...Though the show uses the ancillary characters as the points of contact between Sara’s world and Sandra’s, the two women themselves don’t actually meet. “Confederates” creates this tension between its two parts but doesn’t do anything with it. If Morisseau has built her stories with this inherent magic of alternating settings, allowing us to time-travel with her through a discussion of racial politics then and now, why not try to allow the worlds of the two protagonists to extend a bit more? Why not go bigger? Get more bizarre?"
Vulture - Recommended
"...And in a farce this serious, direction is crucial. Stori Ayers keeps her cast almost airborne - the speed is so intense that the few moments of stillness hit the audience like brick walls. Lloyd's Sara is usually providing both the pace and the wall; her charisma onstage bends the show around her. Compared to the other performers, she's tiny; when she holds Abner's gun, she seems barely big enough to lift it. But then she dashes behind a column, and suddenly Lloyd is moving like a Marine, clearing her corners, checking her six. Morisseau's play also assumes there's an enemy at every turn. That suspicion applies to those of us watching too: The moment when even the most ruthless plays admit that they love the audience comes at the curtain call, and Confederates refuses to give us one."
New York Theater - Somewhat Recommended
"...Although both stories resolve a bit abruptly, the ending of the Sara plot is more satisfying than the end of the Sandra plot. This seems inevitable; I think most people would agree that the life-and-death choices facing a slave might be higher stakes than the possible lack of collegiality facing a tenured professor. It did dawn on me, though, that the playwright might want us to feel dissatisfied with what happens, just as Sandra is dissatisfied. Maybe that's supposed to be a point of the play: Freedom has taken on more subtle shades of meaning now - not just the escape from bondage, but the right to respect, the expectation of support, the ability to fulfill one's purpose in life - and so its attainment has proven more elusive."
Time Out New York - Recommended
"...Although she is outraged at the image that has been anonymously placed on her office door-her own face, photoshopped onto the body of a topless and nursing 19th-century Black slave-Sandra (Michelle Wilson) has a meticulous academic temperament, and she wants to be clear. "There is nothing slavery that is off limits for me," she says in the opening scene of Dominique Morisseau absorbing Confederates. "No shame in my own enslaved heritage." Morisseau adopts a similar stance in the play that ensues, which juxtaposes Sandra's position as a tenured professor at a mostly white university with that of Sara (Kristolyn Llloyd), a field worker on a Southern plantation during the Civil War. The playwright embraces her enslaved characters, with personal warmth and even humor; she imbues them, ŕ la An Octoroon, with flashes of modern attitude."
The Wrap - Recommended
"...Morisseau is at her best with the play's many verbal fights. Only George Bernard Shaw can make us change our sympathies faster. Handled with much less finesse is the easy symmetry of the past and the present stories presented here. Stori Ayes's blunt direction wisely emphasizes the radical jumps in time with amusing and flashy costume changes. Ari Fulton is the designer."
TheaterScene.net - Somewhat Recommended
"...Dominique Morisseau's Confederates, the second play of her Signature Theatre Residency 5, is a clever, but overly talky dissertation on race, power and family. She offers the audience parallel stories alternating between the Civil War era and modern day academia."
NY Theatre Guide - Highly Recommended
"...Dominique Morriseau’s Confederates is a spicy comedy that dissects the intricacies of racism that Black women are expected to endure. The recently opened production at Signature Theatre does so by framing the experiences of two Black women struggling through systems of white supremacy across two periods of time."
Theater Pizzazz - Highly Recommended
"...So writes playwright Dominique Morisseau in the program notes of Confederates, her high-spirited, high-stakes play that just opened at the Signature Theatre. And she's smart to alert us. There is more going on in this ambitious new work about the serious subjects of slavery and institutional racism than one play should be able to hold. And yet she pulls it off with aplomb, thanks to her numerous daring choices, of which comedy is only one."
Stage and Cinema - Somewhat Recommended
"...At Signature Theatre, Michelle Wilson plays Sandra, a tenured professor at a modern-day private university, whose office door has been defaced with her face pasted onto a historic photograph of an enslaved African wet nurse breastfeeding a white baby. Finding the responsible confederate fuels the play into action. Is it her white female student assistant? One of the six black students on campus? Or the only other black faculty member up for tenure? Tension fills every scene as prickly suspicions abound."
Theatrely - Highly Recommended
"...Ayers' impeccable direction here nails every beat, often creating haunting tableaus like an early one where Sandra ponders her role at the university downstage, while Sara aims a steady rifle upstage. She has the supporting characters cycle in and out of Ari Fulton's period costumes onstage, and leave more and more props behind as they transition between scenes and eras. Curtis Craig and Jimmy Keys' sound design highlight parallels between antebellum tunes like the shockingly racist "Oh! Susanna" and its present-day offspring. These are blunt but effective choices that keep the alternating stories inextricably tied, and each one lands like a shot to the chest."
New York Stage Review - Recommended
"...Directing all scenes as surely as Morisseau wants them treated, Stori Ayers commands an excellent cast and thereby presents an excellent dramatic treatise on a never-ending American crisis. Scenic designer Rachel Hauck cleverly designs a single set of white columns and balcony that simultaneously resembles a plantation mansion and college architecture. Ari Fulton’s double-period costumes are certainly up to the task, as are the Amith Chandrashaker and Emma Deane lights and the Curtis Craig and Jeremy Keys sound design."
