Review: Sally & Tom Takes On Thomas Jefferson and His Relationship With Sally Hemings

Judging from its title alone, Suzan Lori-Parks’s new play Sally & Tom sounds like it might be a lighthearted romance, with those two informal names paired jauntily side by side. But then you realize: Oh, that Sally. That Tom.

Parks, who won a Pulitzer in 2002 and a Tony last year for her play Topdog/Underdog, has never shied away from taking the hot air out of history and deflating sacred icons. The relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, his enslaved servant with whom he almost certainly fathered six known children, gets some of that treatment here. In the process, Parks and director Steve H. Broadnax III also take metatheatrical aim at the theater itself and the easily offended sensibilities of audiences who prefer cheerful, nonthreatening plays, and she does it all with a lot of humor. But with a boatload of storylines jostling for space in two and a half hours, Sally & Tom’s punch often gets blunted behind its shagginess.

The troupe of actors in Sally & Tom face a similar problem as they frantically rehearse, revise, and rewrite a tenuously financed play about Jefferson’s affair with Hemings called The Pursuit of Happiness (Riccardo Hernández’s set imagines the romanticized grandeur of Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello). Mike (a poised Gabriel Ebert) and his partner, Luce (an electric Sheria Irving), are an interracial couple who have used their past theater pieces to wake people up to social injustice, with the result that their audiences have dwindled. They have a loyal but exhausted team of actors around them who also handle lighting, sets, and costumes, and a temperamental investor who’s happy to bankroll the production — if one controversial speech in their production is cut.

That’s something that actor Kwame (Alano Miller) cannot abide; he sees the defiant, if fictional, words of Sally’s brother James as the play’s only value. As we watch the actors grind through their scenes (all of them decked out in Rodrigo Muñoz’s gorgeous period costumes), we see the past begin to blend with the present as Mike and Luce’s relationship begins to mirror Jefferson and Hemings’s, and the other actors begin to question their own sense of what it means to be free.

Parks picks at a slew of historical scabs and asks uncomfortable questions through it all. Jefferson doesn’t get any Founding Father valorizing. He was a bit of a coward in battle and didn’t free any of his slaves when he died. But often, he’s depicted as pretty nice, and Sally, even though we do hear occasional words of dissent, appears … well, happy. Is it possible that they were in love?

It’s a bombshell question that Parks’s play-within-a-play asks, then answers unsatisfactorily. To be fair, it’s impossible to know, since Hemings left no writings of her own, but the play forces us to consider the question whether we like it or not in two separate scenes. For both of them, designer Alan C. Edwards raises the house lights to a warm glow in that overused technique that says to the audience, Pay attention, this part is about you.

Ultimately, the only speech that does pack a significant wallop is Kwame’s. Miller delivers the fiery diatribe on freedom with gusto and gets a well-deserved ovation for it. The other actors give terrific performances too. Kate Nowlin and Sun Mee Chomet are a hilarious pair as Jefferson’s spoiled daughters Patsy and Polly and the actors Ginger and Scout, who realize they’re both too old for their roles. Kristolyn Lloyd captivates as the enslaved servant Maggie, who stalks the stage with a repressed rage. Leland Fowler deserves special mention for his hilariously frenetic performance as Devon, a Black actor who campily professes his love to white castmate Geoff (a comical Daniel Petzold) in one of Sally & Tom’s underdeveloped subplots.

Overwhelming as they are, the play’s multitude of conflicting ideas and story lines do tie in with the sobering conclusion of Sally & Tom. The original title of The Pursuit of Happiness, we are told, was E Pluribus Unum (“out of many, one”). “Forgiving is not forgetting,” says Maggie. “It’s just letting go of the hurt.” In our divided country, Parks’s idea of interrogating the past together and joining hands as one people does indeed sound revolutionary.