Writing Down the Bones: Sally & Tom
In the introduction to her collection The America Play and Other Works, Suzan-Lori Parks writes, “Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to ‘make’ history — that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as playwright is to … locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.” Both The America Play and Parks’s haunting, satirical pageant The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World take place at the edge of a gaping void, a gurgling existential drain that’s “an exact replica,” Parks writes, “of the Great Hole of History.” Though in her more recent work that I’ve seen, Parks has ostensibly moved closer to realism—her characters in 2019’s White Noise, for instance, have names like Leo and Ralph, not “Yes and Greens Blackeyed Peas Cornbread” and “Before Columbus”—she’s still excavating the great hole, which, it turns out, isn’t always in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes it’s located underneath a stately mansion.
Sally & Tom—now at the Public under the direction of Steve H. Broadnax III after its premiere at the Guthrie Theater in the fall of 2022—is as concerned as Parks has ever been with bones and graves. But this time, there’s a good deal of padding to cushion our drop into the pit — too much padding, perhaps. It’s not just the damask and lace of Rodrigo Muñoz’s late-18th-century costumes, or the well-mannered minuets and sprightly fiddle tunes that score much of the piece (Parks also co-composed the music with Dan Moses Schreier): There’s something soft about the play, a little ingenuous and underbrewed. I kept waiting for the turn, the slap in the face. In all fairness, I’ve been coached to expect it: If there’s anyone who knows how to break a play in two, it’s the current generation of Black American playwrights from Jackie Sibblies Drury to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Jeremy O. Harris, all part of a blazing writerly lineage in which Parks is, at 60, a respected elder. A play doesn’t have to do anything it doesn’t want to do, but it can’t help existing in a context, and even in the context of Parks’s own work, Sally & Tom has the feeling of walking back and forth on the diving board without ever leaping. It’s got a long view, but it never really leaves the comfort zone.
The pair of the title are of course Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, the latter of whom has previously gotten to look way too cool at the Public. It’s not 2015 anymore, and it’s time to cut T.J. down to size. The shears Parks chooses are metatheatrical: Her Sally and Tom are characters envisioned by a playwright named Luce (Sheria Irving), who’s also playing Sally in her own show, while her partner—also the show’s director—Mike (Gabriel Ebert) plays Jefferson. “Really, people, what could possibly go wrong?” reads Sally & Tom’s own press copy — and yet the tension on stage feels muted, the tone straddling the fence. For one thing, it’s never quite clear how seriously we’re supposed to take the protagonists’ scrappy, striving ensemble, or indeed, Luce’s writing. The troupe is called Good Company, and they’re known for being “really radical and disruptive” — Luce and Mike used to “march in the streets” and “protest against the Suits,” and Luce’s previous plays include Patriarchy on Parade and Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault. Everyone in Good Company wears multiple precariously balanced hats, from Ginger (Kate Nowlin), who acts and dramaturgs and choreographs, to Geoff (Daniel Petzold), who acts and does costumes and sets. “Being the Cast and the Crew is our feature,” insists Scout (Sun Mee Chonet), the company’s stage manager who’s also playing Jefferson’s younger daughter Polly.. “It makes us … Authentic.”
But there’s a quasi-cartoonishness in the way Parks and Broadnax portray the harried, multitasking company members almost, though it feels strange to say it, like the picture of a hand-to-mouth theater troupe that someone not all that familiar with theater would draw. It’s stuck in an awkward middle place: Sometimes, the portrayal sidles up to Christopher Guest–ian parody, though it’s never as sublimely funny; other times, it feels as if we’re being asked to sit somberly through moments that aren’t as profound as they’re meant to be. Luce and Mike’s central debate swirls around whether or not to cut a certain speech delivered by the character of James Hemings, Sally’s brother (Alano Miller plays the actor Kwame, who’s got the role of James in Luce’s show): The company’s one bigwig producer wants it gone because it’s “too woke.” It gets hyped and hyped and then, when we get to hear it, it falls flat. It may be—as Devon (Leland Fowler), actor-and-lighting-designer who’s moved by the speech—assures Kwame, “saying All The Things,” but Luce’s writing, as rendered by Parks, is mannered in a way that leaves us uncertain of the level of satire involved. Are we supposed to think she’s really good or not?
It’s entirely possible to create a story about performance where the talent on display is questionable and yet we’re still, amidst and through the laughter, deeply moved — see Shakespeare’s Rude Mechanicals. But Sally & Tom, trying to have it both ways, neither releases us fully into humor nor truly grabs us by the throat. Ebert’s performance is most beset by this ambivalence: A marvelous actor, he feels tentative and uninterpretive here, as if he’s playing through a lack of internal clarity by simply trying to be as straightforward and unshowy as possible. It’s not a bad impulse—whole schools of acting are built around just saying the words and trying to be present—but here it has no teeth. When Mike breaks stereotypical-shitty-white-guy in Act Two, Ebert feels still more strained — and how can he help it, when Parks has given Mike and Luce dialogue that, at this point, verges on stale?
Mike: I am tired of circling around the same relevant issues and meaningful points and button-pushing agendas that we have explored over and over and over. Thinking that we could make a difference. But we don’t. And I’m tired.
Luce: I wish I could be tired. I wish I could afford to be tired. What do you even believe in?!
The debate is too binary, too expected. Irving, sincere and focused, fares a bit better as she navigates her side of the play’s arc, which is fundamentally about the intersection of race, ambition, and integrity: how a theater company or a play—or a nation—can lose track of its mission, or begin in hypocrisy, tainting the whole endeavor to come. But Luce still feels surprisingly recessive overall, and it’s the show’s secondary characters who, one step removed from the heart of the drama, bring the most poignancy to the proceedings. Fowler and Petzold are lovely together as Devon and Geoff stumble into a one-night stand that may—to the self-contained Devon’s surprise—turn out to be something more. Kristolyn Lloyd finds toughness and brightness in Luce’s friend Maggie, who’s playing Sally’s sister-in-law Mary Hemings in their play. And as Scout, Chomet outshines her surroundings every time she enters. Stomping around in an oversize black hoodie and a headset on top of her hiked up rococo gown, she’s the only one who’s fully balanced, crafting a character that’s both broad and totally believable. She’s braving caricature and emerging triumphantly on the other side.
“I’m Thomas Jefferson and I owned people,” Ebert’s Tom says to us at the climax of Act One. “I owned them. Contemplate for a moment, if you will, the depth of what that means.” He tells us that at Monticello there were more than 600 enslaved people and that, on his deathbed, he didn’t free them. He tells us about Sally: “I was in my 40s when I met her. She was just 14. Hate on me. Go ahead. I’m Thomas Jefferson. My face is on Mount Rushmore. I am the Man. Love me. Hate me. Go ahead. I stand at the intersection of the horrible, and the splendid and the dizzy-making contradiction that is all of us.” As he spoke, I heard Parks most clearly, and I wondered whether, in this moment, the Jefferson that was speaking to us had dropped beneath the Jefferson of Luce’s play — whether this voice was emerging not from Mike or from Luce but from the Great Hole of History. What might Sally & Tom have been if its ambiguities always felt so charged and deliberate? It’s strange that the play’s potential resonates most strongly through Tom’s voice, not Sally’s. Though Luce—wrestling with her breaking relationship, her personal and professional exhaustion, and her fears over selling out—keeps rewriting her own show’s ending, nothing she (i.e. Parks) shows us on that front ever clicks into sharp, sure focus. If anything, what we do get feels overly tinged with sentiment. Sally was a human being bound to a life of providing comfort, pleasure, and assurance to a man with power over her, her family, her people, her country. There may well be full intention in the fact that, in a play where her name comes first in the title, the men still get the big speeches, but if so, why do things still feel a little too comfortable? Why are we left awaiting an impact that never comes?
Sally & Tom is at the Public Theater through May 12.
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