Jacqueline Goldfinger’s slip/shot is set in the 1960s and is populated with flesh-and-blood characters, but it started out as a ghost story. “Ponce de Léon showed up and drank a Coca-Cola,” the playwright confesses, describing an early draft.
Dead Spanish conquistadors no longer roam the Florida landscape of slip/shot, which premieres this month at Philadelphia’s Flashpoint Theatre and plays through May 5. But the past is still irrevocably present. Sins of fathers are visited upon sons; mothers are haunted by memories of dead children. And our complicated national history plays out through the intertwined stories of two couples—one black, one white—in the rural American South of the pre–civil rights era.
Like many of Goldfinger’s plays, slip/shot is decidedly southern gothic, with an ethereal lyricism that evokes Faulkner, McCullers, Williams. “You can taste the moss growing on the trees in her work. You can smell the rain,” observes Flashpoint’s artistic director Thom Weaver. “Her characters seem grown from their environment, not placed in it. Therefore their actions have a certain inevitability.”
Clem is determined not to follow in his father’s violent, racist footsteps; across town, Monroe and Euphrasie may both be the first in their families to go to college. But a fatal accident brings race and family history into the forefront of all of their lives, leaving them to wrestle with the notion that the past—like one’s parents—is difficult to escape. “History isn’t about winner and losers—it’s about individuals dealing with what’s come before,” Goldfinger notes. “And when is a small change in a person’s point of view actually an epic step forward in their family and legacy?”
“Change is not about revolution,” she argues. “It’s about small personal shifts in ideology.”
The world of slip/shot is informed by the onslaught of history and flavored with the thickness of dark southern nights. Its people are aching to progress, in spite of the ghosts of ideology and circumstance. And alas, Ponce de Léon will have to wait.
