When I met Jay Wilkison last fall, I had no idea he was an accomplished actor (you may have seen him performing in Rent on Broadway, doing various stints on daytime and nighttime TV, or rapping as the prepped-out frontman in Smirnoff’s Tea Partay viral video). We struck up a conversation, discovered we were both from the South, and, as so often happens, the beginnings of a friendship developed from there. Fast-forward four months, and a handful of emails later, Wilkison invited my husband Will and me to a new play he’s starring in, and I realized that he is, in fact, kind of a big deal. The Whipping Man, playing now at City Centre in Manhattan, focuses on a Confederate soldier and two of his family’s newly freed slaves as they come to terms with issues of loyalty, deceit, and freedom in the days immediately following the Civil War. The New York Times called it “an atmospheric period drama [that] surely has few equals in its arresting strangeness.”