Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, the author of last season’s The Harder They Come, returns to her artistic home with an edgy dramedy that celebrates the craft of theater while taking a hard look at history.
The off-off-off-Broadway theater troupe Good Company is putting on a play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Writer Luce is cast as Sally; her romantic partner, and the play’s director, Mike, is cast as Tom—really, people, what could possibly go wrong?
Ms. Parks knows what you’re thinking: Oy, another play (it could just as well be a movie, or a book) reducing a dead white man who did undeniably great things to his worst transgressions and judging him by standards vastly different than our current ones. “Sally & Tom” acknowledges this dilemma, openly and cleverly, by studying its central duo in a transparently modern context, thus allowing its playwright to nod to — and even have fun with — contemporary mores and hangups without letting historical demons off the hook.
The subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which “Sally & Tom” approaches the story of Hemings and Jefferson, dazzlingly doubled in the story of the troupe putting it on, come as no surprise at all. They are the hallmarks of an author incapable of writing a line unfilled with the bewildering burden — or is it the treasure? — of human contradiction. Indeed, Parks begins with an unprovable yet also undisprovable thesis. She has Luce, the author and star of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” decree: “This is not a love story.”
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