On an overcast Saturday afternoon, I attended a press showing of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Sally and Tom at the Public Theater in Lower Manhattan. What I anticipated: a historical play, dark and complex, about the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Parks’s oeuvre, after all, includes rich and complex plays inspired by the darkest portions of American history, including Topdog/Underdog and Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3. What I did not anticipate: a frame story, a play-within-a-play, filled with humor and contemporary issues. Sally and Tom is not only a story about enslavement; it is also a story about the Good Company, a failing acting troupe which attempts to stage a play about Hemings and Jefferson while maintaining a difficult balance of approval from both their audience and funders. As Parks explains in a note in the playbill, “A hunger for cash-money bread overtakes their need for daily bread.”
Sally and Tom does not immediately reveal its levity. The audience is introduced first to Hemings and Jefferson as they stare out into the distance and contemplate the future of the United States. Jefferson monologues about the destiny of the nation, laces his fingers through Hemings’s, and smiles out at the nothing. Suddenly, the scene is cut short, and actors scurry around the stage. What the audience was seeing was not the bizarre start to a Jefferson-centric play but the ending of the Good Company’s play, The Pursuit of Happiness, an ending that remains controversial among the cast.
Luce, the actress playing Hemings (a luminous Sheria Irving), is also the show’s playwright. Her white boyfriend, Mike (an unnerving Gabriel Ebert), plays Jefferson and acts as the group’s manager. While Luce finds the play’s current ending insulting, Mike worries that starker messaging would alienate its main producer. The Good Company has a history of putting on radical political pieces that never seem to turn much of a profit. Where Luce yearns to capture the true nuance and horror of Hemings’s story, Mike wants a romantic cash cow. Luce’s close friend, Maggie (Kristolyn Lloyd), the actress who plays Hemings’s sister Mary, remarks flatly, “The revolution has been gentrified.” And so it goes: Luce begins to accede to Mike’s demands.
“While there is a lot of love in the play,” writes Parks in her author’s note, “this is not a love story.” Indeed, it’s impossible to overlook the uncomfortable dynamics of Luce and Mike’s relationship. Their bickering about the play turns to full-fledged arguments. Luce wants to reveal the oppressive power structures that serve as the skeleton for Hemings and Jefferson’s relationship; Mike wants to believe that they really were in love, and that Jefferson was, deep down, a sympathetic figure. As the play progresses, many of their arguments take place half-costumed, either dressing or undressing for performances, and the lines between then and now are blurred beyond recognition. Luce’s disgust for Mike’s apologetics metamorphoses into resentment, only furthered when he sleeps with an ex to gain more funds for the show—an act he sees as noble. He’s near obsessed with the play, or what he thinks is the play: a perverted love story, a white erasure of black suffering. The insidious nature of modern racism is here in full force, and with each moment, it becomes clearer how similar it is to the poisonous prejudice of men like Jefferson.
Parks’s writing is both weighty and poetic, painful in its lyricism, especially during certain monologues. The first of note is Jefferson’s. He stands before a hushed, uneasy crowd, a half-smile on his face—rueful, but in a haughty, what-can-you-do way—and proclaims, “I’m Thomas Jefferson. I owned people.” He pauses. Then repeats: “I owned them.” Later, Hemings’s brother James (Alano Miller) snaps while listening to an associate of Jefferson make sexual remarks about his sister. James begins to furiously describe a future in which enslaved individuals have risen up and taken over the world, exerting such power that, he says, the sky turns “a dark the color of me.” Then, toward the end of the play, Hemings brings us our final soliloquy, one in which she describes the first time Jefferson raped her. “If that makes you uncomfortable,” she says softly, “just pretend you’re somewhere else. That’s what I did.”
Sally and Tom is, in some sense, a search for the beauty that lies beneath suffering, for “the joy of making theater even when the subject is the stuff that nightmares are made on,” as Parks writes. When solemn, the words are substantive, the pace perfect; when humorous, some of the jokes don’t land. I couldn’t help but wonder, watching, if the comedic bits were included out of fear that primarily white audiences wouldn’t be able to stomach the reality—the responsibility.
On the whiteness of the audience: it was certainly noticeable. It was certainly discomfiting. It felt wrong, a mistake. We white critics laughed raucously at each joke (like the overly “woke” titles of Luce’s past plays, Patriarchy on Parade and Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault), but sat in absolute silence as Hemings described the abuse she’d suffered for years at the hands of her enslaver. Could we have behaved otherwise? I don’t know. But I do know that when asked if The Pursuit of Happiness is a “black play,” Devon (Leland Fowler), the actor playing Sally’s brother-in-law, answers emphatically: “Of course it’s a black play!” As this black play played on for a primarily white viewership, whiteness—the long-upheld structures of racism and privilege themselves—became apparent in each sentence Mike spoke, just as it was apparent in each of
Jefferson’s.
After scenes packed with jokes, Sally and Tom’s ending has no humor. Following Luce’s backstage breakup with Mike, we witness the rewritten final scene of The Pursuit of Happiness. Hemings tells Jefferson her life is not his, and that she will find her freedom, before turning to look somewhere past the audience. She says, “Look—the sun is rising,” and instantly, the names of the more than six hundred people enslaved by Jefferson are illuminated in orange and yellow against the backdrop. This is the truth. Parks gives it to us, tells us to do with it what we will. And as the crowd rushes out, chattering, I walk back into the cold, wet Manhattan afternoon, feeling as if every time that has ever been is right now.
‘Sally and Tom’ By Suzan-Lori Parks The Public Theater, March 28–June 2, 2024
