Theater review by Raven Snook
An indie theater company is staging a depiction of the highly fraught relationship between liberty advocate Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved lover Sally Hemings. But this period drama extends into an ellipsis thanks to metatheatrical echoes: Its writer, Luce (an excellent Sheria Irving), and its director, Mike (Gabriel Ebert), play the show’s leading roles and are also romantically linked in real life. That’s the premise of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Sally & Tom, and it’s a pregnant one.
Luce is losing control of her creative vision, thanks to a meddlesome unseen producer who delivers inane suggestions via Post-it Notes. So it’s no surprise that her play—titled The Pursuit of Happiness, at the benefactor’s insistence—is a stodgy snooze. Unfortunately, it constitutes much of Act I. There are amusing depictions of downtown theater's DIY aesthetics, and of the microaggressions that underlie the multicultural troupe's camaraderie; and Luce’s play includes searing monologues for Jefferson and for Sally's brother James (Alano Miller). But most of this first half feels like a slow setup.
Sally & Tom | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus
It’s in Act II that the two stories begin to intertwine in discomfiting and revelatory ways, as Luce fights for her freedom: from selling out, from white male fragility, from the legacy of slavery. Her spellbinding 11- o’clock monologue, which graphically describes what Jefferson did to the teenage Sally—"Reparations? Please. They owe us more than money”—elicits passionate responses from the audience; along with designer Riccardo Hernández’s climactic set reveal, it serves as a vivid reminder that we can never shake off the shackles of history.
The actors in this Public Theater production deliver uniformly solid performances under Steve H. Broadnax III’s straightforward direction, but the supporting characters in both plays feel underwritten; even Ebert’s Mike seems like a representation of white patriarchy rather than a flesh-and-blood man. Still, an evening of provocation by Parks always has pleasures as well as pain. She raises tricky questions about power, consent, liberation and even love—though this is decidedly not a love story—and she doesn’t pretend to have any answers. We’re all still collectively writing this story.
Sally & Tom. Public Theater (Off Broadway). By Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III. With Sheria Irving, Gabriel Ebert, Alano Miller, Daniel Petzold, Leland Fowler, Kristolyn Lloyd, Kate Nowlin, Sun Mee Chomet. Running time: 2hrs 40mins. One intermission.
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Sally & Tom | Photograph: Courtesy Joan Marcus