Thomas Jefferson was in his forties when he began having sex with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, who was 14.
Had they fallen in love? The question is absurd.
But did they eventually fall in love?
That’s one of the several intriguing questions that Suzan-Lori Parks explores in “Sally & Tom,” her play about a present-day theater troupe that is putting together an original play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, which they’ve entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness.” The play-within-the play is led by an interracial couple: Mike (Gabriel Ebert) is the director and portrays Tom; Luce (Sheria Irving) is the writer and portrays Sally.
The two plays, “Sally & Tom” and “The Pursuit of Happiness,” in effect unfold simultaneously. Scenes of intimacy and tension that take place in Jefferson’s household in Monticello in 1790 alternate with moments of intimacy and tension among the cast during rehearsals.
The framing makes the play feel overlong and sometimes confusing, and the parallels can feel forced. But the historical scenes are fascinating and thought-provoking, and the pairing of the historical and present-day scenes turns out to be cleverer and more stimulating than I at first took in.
Parks has some fun satirizing indie theater. “The Pursuit of Happiness” is a change of direction for the troupe, which is called Good Company and was formerly a radical theater collective whose previous productions had titles like “Patriarchy on Parade” and “Listen up Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault.”
“We’re looking forward to getting embraced by a wider audience,” Mike says.
“A whiter audience?” Luce asks.
“Wider – more wide.”
Good Company is still the kind of low-budget theater where the actors do double duty as stage manager or costume designer, and relationships among company members are complicated, not least between Mike and Luce. These dynamics feed into the company’s new dilemma. Kwame (Alano Miller), who’s playing James, Sally Hemings’ brother, wants to make a long confrontational speech in Jefferson’s face, fist raised. (“A reckoning is coming and the likes of you will be crushed by the likes of me! “) The producer Teddy (whom we never see) is demanding that they nix the speech, and is threatening to stop funding the play if it remains. Meanwhile, a woman named Pam (also unseen) is willing to fund the show, and keep the speech. But Pam is Mike’s ex-girlfriend, and Luce doesn’t think she’s over him. This makes Mike resent Luce, especially since Kwame is Luce’s ex-boyfriend.
The company’s dilemma pales beside that faced by James and Sally Hemings, and the hundreds of other enslaved people on Jefferson’s estate. James and Sally had accompanied Jefferson to Paris when he was appointed American Minister to France, which had abolished the slave trade. So Jefferson made them paid employees; Sally became a skilled seamstress, and James a French chef (indeed – although this is not explicitly mentioned in the play – James Hemings reportedly was instrumental in introducing French cuisine to America some two centuries before Julia Child.) In “The Pursuit of Happiness,” Jefferson has recently returned to Virginia, along with the Hemings siblings, since he had promised to free them on their return. But he hasn’t done so – which James and Sally consider an affront, although Sally expresses herself to him with a strange formality: “We build our castle on the foundation of your promises,” she says to him.
“Public life corrupts the private man,” Tom replies to James, which sounds like a non-sequitur. “Great things take time…Which is to say, James, that your Master does intend to liberate you.”
But he has just received a letter from George Washington, urging him to New York, then the nation’s capital, to become Secretary of State. He intends again to bring James and Sally, but, again as he did when he was in France, he will “lease out” many of his other slaves in order to raise income to pay his debts, breaking up families. We meet one of the potential renters, a lascivious Colonel Carey who requests “gals suitable for evening company. “
“You debase yourself,” Tom says with dignity.
“And you strike a noble pose, and yet you’re not,” the Colonel replies.
He has a point. But Parks is not content with simply pointing out Jefferson’s hypocrisy. There is a telling exchange between Tom and Sally:
“I love you,” Tom says to her.
She replies: “I thank you.”
And, we’re led to understand, she does have practical reasons to be grateful.
Later, Mike and Luce discuss the relationship between the two historical figures they’re portraying. They are ambivalent about it, Mike at first thinking “it could have been love” then adding
Mike…. even though “Love cannot exist in the absence of freedom.”
Luce: You’re wrong. Enslaved people, while enslaved, also loved. The absence of freedom does not imply the absence of humanity.
Mike: Yeah. That’s what I meant. So we agree.
Luce: But what if Sally didn’t love Tom. What if it was just grooming and then rape and then “Stockholm Syndrome” and –
Mike: And maybe it was.
Luce: This is not a love story.
Mike: It’s more like a truth and reconciliation story.
But they don’t wind up as certain as they sound.
The eight members of the cast give their most absorbing performances as the 18th century characters. Rodrigo Muñoz’s authentic-looking costumes – surely better than Good Company could afford – help make the scenes at Monticello feel you-are-there real, not a rehearsal.
The performers’ many interactions as the present-day members of the troupe (too minor to be considered full-fledged subplots) are less interesting as a whole.
But I started to suspect that Parks put these two eras together as a riff on what W.E.B. DuBois referred to as “ double consciousness” in which the Black American is forced to look at himself through his own eyes and simultaneously through the eyes of others (white people.) The 18th century Black characters were forced to do this, but the 21st century characters arguably have a dual consciousness as well — of the past and the present. Luce, for example, begins to look at her relationship with Mike through Sally’s eyes (“Sally didn’t have a choice. I do.”) Kwame wants James Hemings to have thought and felt the way he would if he lived now.
“Sally & Tom” is not a work of history. But it is a play about history, and history’s weird and present hold on us.
Sally & Tom
Public Theater through May 12. Extended through May 26
Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes including one intermission
Tickets: $75
Written by Suzan-Lori Parks
Directed by Steve H.Broadnax III
In Association with The Guthrie Theater
Scenic design by Riccardo Hernández; costume design by Rodrigo Muñoz, lighting design by Alan C. Edwards, sound design by Dan Moses Schreier, music composed by Suzan-Lori Parks and Dan Moses Schreier, hair, wig, and make-up design by J. Jared Janas and Cassie Williams, prop management by Rachel M. F. Kenner, fight and intimacy direction by Kelsey Rainwater and Michael Rossmy, choreography by Edgar Godineaux; and dramaturgy by Jesse Cameron Alick. Norman Anthony Small serves as production stage manager and Jessica R. Aguilar as stage manager
Cast: Mee Chomet (Scout/Polly), Gabriel Ebert (Mike/Tom), Leland Fowler (Devon/Nathan), Sheria Irving(Luce/Sally), Kristolyn Lloyd(Maggie/Mary), Alano Miller( Kwame/James), Kate Nowlin (Ginger/Patsy), Daniel Petzold (Geoff/Cooper/Colonel Carey/Mr. Tobias)
Photos by Joan Marcus
