The Whipping Man,” now playing at Kansas City Repertory Theatre is one of director Eric Rosen’s favorite plays because it’s about Passover, an intensely personal holiday for him.

“This play is right up my alley in a lot of ways,” said Rosen, who has been the artistic director at Kansas City Rep since 2008.

“Passover is sort of my horror story. I’m from a mixed marriage. My mom converted before I was born. She was a Southern Baptist from North Carolina and my dad is the son of Eastern European immigrants who also grew up in North Carolina. They secretly married four or five months before they told their parents. It all came out at Passover in 1966. So Passover is always a really big deal for my family,” he said.

Passover is so important to Rosen that he chose to major in Jewish studies and theater at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

“I wrote my thesis on the Passover seder as a theatrical ritual, taking the seder as a script that is improvised through different cultures and different historical periods,” Rosen said.

“So when I read this play in which there is an actual Passover seder performed in this most unlikely way that inspires major revelations with the characters and history, I was just blown away by it. The way playwright Matthew Lopez uses the inherent theatricality of the seder as a dramatic means to get to the climax is pretty cool,” he continued.

The play is about a Jewish Confederate soldier who returns to his childhood home, only to find it in ruins and occupied by his former slaves. Though a new chapter of history is unfolding, dangerous secrets of the past threaten to destroy their family, their connected history and their shared faith. In keeping with their religious beliefs, the three characters in the play celebrate Passover in 1865 with a seder dinner.

It is set in Richmond, Va., at a time when one in five Southern Jewish families owned slaves, though more typically a smaller number to support an urban household rather than the hundreds or thousands owned by plantation owners.

“The Whipping Man” first premiered in 2006 at Luna Stage in Montclair, N.J., and has become one of the more regularly produced new American plays. Playwright Lopez was awarded the John Gassner Playwrighting Award by the Outer Critics Circle for “The Whipping Man” and holds new play commissions from Roundabout Theatre Company and The Old Globe, where he is also artist-in-residence.

Director Rosen had a glimpse of audience reactions to the play during preview performances, and he noticed they were at the edge of their seats at each plot turn.

“They were really dying to know what comes next, and that is a sign of really great storytelling, he said.

Rosen noted that the play is very intimate with just three characters.

“It’s two hours long but it feels like it’s just five minutes and it’s pretty intense,” he said.

Rosen said the playwright, Lopez, is Puerto Rican and his inspiration to write this was the historical coincidence that the end of the Civil War and the Lincoln assassination happened on days four and seven of Passover that year.

“When I talked to him about it, the liberation of the southern slaves in the southern states, the metaphor of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt coinciding with the actual reality of freeing the slaves in Richmond gave him the idea for this play,” Rosen said.

Rosen explains that one of the characters is from a prominent Jewish family and the other two characters are two of his former slaves who were brought up Jewish and are very religious.

“So the three of them go through this experience of Passover at the end of the war when they are in very dire straits. It’s like the first seder ever.”

“The part of the seder where we are celebrating our freedom from bondage is taken to an extreme height in this play,” Rosen continued.

He said watching Jewish audiences devour this play is really fun.

“You have to know Passover pretty well to get some of the jokes,” he said. “We’re really pleased that we are finding a Jewish audience for the play and that they are enjoying it.”

The Whipping Man

The play runs now through April 5 at Spencer Theatre in the James C. Olson Performing Arts Center, located at 4949 Cherry Street at the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus. For ticket information call 816-235-2700.