Interview: Lance Gardner of SALLY & TOM at Marin Theatre

When Lance Gardner, Executive Artistic Director of Marin Theatre, first learned that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks had written Sally & Tom, he immediately knew he needed to produce it. Acclaimed for her works about American history like Topdog/Underdog and Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parks had crafted a metatheatrical story of a fictional theater company rehearsing a play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Back in 2017, Marin Theatre had commissioned and premiered a very different play by Thomas Bradshaw that had centered on the story of Hemings and Jefferson, and incited protests that fractured the Bay Area theatrical community. At that time, Gardner happened to be an actor in rehearsals for the next play in Marin Theatre’s season and felt strongly that the company had responded poorly to the outcry, inflaming the conflict and missing an opportunity to engage in deeper conversations with its community.

Thus, Gardner thought Sally & Tom might be the perfect vehicle to finally heal those almost decade-old wounds. Once he’d read the script, it certainly didn’t hurt that he found Sally & Tom to be just a flat-out a great play, thrillingly theatrical in its conception and eminently worthy of staging, regardless of his company’s history. As a mixed-race theater artist himself with deep roots in the community, he thought he would be the right person to direct the play. An award-winning actor and producer, Gardner is already very familiar to Bay Area audiences from the many leading roles he’s played onstage for companies like Marin Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, California Shakespeare Theater, Magic Theatre and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.

I spoke with Gardner by phone earlier this week, just a few days before final dress rehearsal. We talked about why it was so important to him to program Sally & Tom, how he was able to secure the rights to such a hot property and why he felt the need to direct it himself. We also touched on his origins here in the Bay Area and what he loves most about his job as a theater leader, despite the many challenges regional theaters have continued to face since COVID. I found Gardner to be an exceptionally thoughtful person who is comfortable making room for exactly the kind of complex conversations he hopes his production of Sally & Tom will engender. The following has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You’ve been Executive Artistic Director of Marin Theatre for around two years now. What led you to choose this play to make your directing debut with the company?

This play was really interesting to me for a few reasons. On its own merit, I think it’s a fascinating play that walks an interesting line between considering history and considering art and artists. And then of course here at Marin Theatre, back when the theater was known as Marin Theatre Company, there was a production of Thomas Bradshaw’s Thomas and Sally that caused quite a stir. In the context of that, I thought it would be fascinating to produce Sally & Tom.

I was rehearsing at Marin Theatre for another show, Shakespeare in Love, while Thomas and Sally was playing, so I was there while there were protests and while the theater was responding poorly to those protests and the frustrations over the material. So for me this kind of feels like a resolution, sort of in the musical sense – where there was this conflict that was created, this tension, and I think this play does a wonderful job of relieving that tension in an artistic way. And I’m always one to respond to everything through art. So - I just find it really interesting to do what I believe is such a good play, and one that is so well written, but then also in the context of these other events.

When you say the company responded poorly to the protests, what do wish it had done at the time?

I can’t speak deeply on that, but I do know that the theater responded poorly to the concerns of certain members of the theatrical community, and I wished the theater had responded in a more nuanced, less defensive way, and had a more intelligent conversation about the work. As a leader of a theater, I know what sort of finances are riding on making sure that a production is well-sold and well-attended, but I also understand the importance of selecting plays with care, and the importance of listening to people, both members of the artistic community and the audience. When you make a misstep, there’s a need for humility and understanding, and for complicated conversations, which is what this play, Sally & Tom, does so well. It has those very complications built into the play.

It’s the story of a small theater company trying to produce this play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Luce is the writer and she’s playing Sally. Her partner, Mike, is playing Tom and directing the play, and they have these conversations about what it means to tell this kind of story, and they consider the kinds of questions, in a very complicated way, that were considered I think in a less complicated way in Thomas and Sally.

What would you say to theatergoers who remember the unrest over Thomas and Sally and might be inclined to pass on Sally & Tom, thinking “Didn’t we already see this play?”

This is a completely different play, nothing like Thomas and Sally. It doesn’t attempt to do the same thing at all. Whereas Thomas and Sally sort of purported to be a work of historical fiction, this is very much a contemporary play that focuses on how individuals wrestle with the making of theater. It’s about art and artists approaching history from an artistic and personal standpoint. So while this is probably equal parts Sally and Tom in 1790 and Mike and Luce in the 21st century, it’s not in any way a work of historical fiction. It considers what it means to create a work of historical fiction, and it does it with humor and with care, and through modern personal relationships.

It also does that with a fantastically theatrical style. I feel that this is a textbook work of epic theatre in a Brechtian sense, and I think that that’s something that will be pleasantly surprising to astute theatergoers who see these highly theatrical elements being employed to justify this as a work of theater. You know, so much of what we put onstage either could be, or aspires to be, filmic or digital in some way, exist on a screen, and this play really exploits the medium [of theater] in a satisfying way, I think.

Circling back to what you said earlier about Sally & Tom walking an interesting line, it combines current-day concerns with early Americana, it contains a surprising amount of humor for a play exploring deeply serious issues, and it also grapples with the tension between what we think we know about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, and what can never be known about them. As the director, how do you make sure that all those elements stay in balance?

For me, just because of my own ancestral background as a mixed-race person who’s descended from enslaved Americans and white Americans, these are questions that I think of all the time, you know? I have to consider what it means to be an American in the most complicated sense, so it doesn’t really feel like a challenge for me personally when the material is also so nuanced. I really trust the words and the story to do the work. And then my own personal understanding of my own identity and American history sort of make it easy for me to share these kinds of questions that I’ve asked myself and others throughout my lifetime, to share those with audiences who I largely know to have not considered them in the way that I have considered them.

Sally & Tom is a play by a Pulitzer-winning playwright that any theater company in the Bay Area would love to have gotten the rights to. Did you have to fight hard to land it?

Well, I don’t know because they won’t tell you! [laughs]

So it’s not like you’re talking to all the other Bay Area theater artistic directors every spring as you’re putting your seasons together and warning each other, “Don’t touch this one. It’s mine!”?

Well… I haven’t had conversations like that, but there are conversations between artistic directors about what’s being planned. Sometimes you get a call and it’s like “Hey, I’m thinking about doing this play, but there’s a hold on it. They say somebody in the area is thinking about doing it. Is it you?” And then you can let ‘em know, “Oh, yeah, that’s me. I have a hold on that play, but I’m not gonna do it, so I’ll let it go and you can do it.” Or – you know [laughs] “Yes, it’s me, and I’m gonna hold onto it. I don’t know whether I’m going to do it or not.”

This play - I don’t know whether anyone else was considering it, but I jumped on it as soon as I learned about it. It was only recently done at the Goodman and the Public and I didn’t get to see it, but I read it shortly after it came down and immediately knew that we had to do it. Because of our own theatrical history, I also thought “If somebody in the area does this and it succeeds, boy am I going to look stupid for not [programming it]. And – it’s a good play, so I’m gonna do it.”

You asked earlier about me making my directorial debut, and I thought it was important for me to direct it because it reduces the number of variables. I trust myself to handle this work, for all the reasons that I’ve explained, and really didn’t want to put the theater or the community in a dangerous position by entrusting somebody else to handle something that felt so personal, both to the organization and to me.

You’re a Bay Area native. Where exactly were you born and where did you grow up?

I was born in San Jose, but I grew up in the Berkeley-Oakland area. I went to elementary school in Berkeley and then moved to Cupertino and went to high school there.

What is the first play you remember ever seeing onstage?

Omigosh… I don’t know if I saw anything before I was in a play. My earliest stage memories probably are of The Nutcracker. We would go on field trips and we would see the symphony and the ballet frequently. So those are my early stage memories, but I don’t know what the first play that I saw was. I think I was doing plays before I ever went to a professional show. I was doing them in junior high and high school.

What’s a favorite play you did in high school?

I have no idea who wrote it, but it was called “Happy Days” and it was about a high school kid who somehow – maybe he hit his head, maybe he just fell asleep – but he went back in time to some sort of idyllic 1950s high school environment, and learned some sort of lesson through that. I don’t remember what the lesson was! [laughs] But what I do remember is just how seriously I was asked to take it. That’s what was so fascinating to me. In high school, I had an incredible drama teacher who really both believed in me and pushed me in healthy ways to work hard and take the job seriously. She told me that she believed I could do this as a career, and that she didn’t feel that way about everyone. She was very honest about that, and that was what I needed to hear. I didn’t set off to make this a career right away, but I don’t think that I could have without her words of encouragement and her belief in me.

I love hearing stories like that about people who change the course of our lives by showing us who we really are. What’s her name?

Her name now is Marjorie Eddington, her married name. She was Marjorie Forester at the time.

You’ve had a very successful career as an actor here in the Bay Area. Did you ever want to relocate to New York or LA to “make it big?”

You know, I thought of it, but we had our first child when I was relatively young. I was 24 and I didn’t want to raise a child in New York or LA while trying to make it as an actor. So I set that idea aside for the sake of family, and ultimately it’s worked out in a different way for me. I don’t feel like I would have ended up in this position running a theater if I had focused entirely on acting and success in a different medium.

When I started out, I loved acting and took it very seriously, but I really wanted to be a director or a leader, and I didn’t have opportunities to do those things early on, even though I sought them out and asked for them. Really, the directing that I did in my career was all self-produced work or produced with friends through smaller theater companies or little companies that we ran. So I think staying here has really offered me an opportunity to become a specialist and a professional in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise have been, had I sort of dug into film or television or landed on Broadway.

The regional theater scene has been faced with so many challenges since COVID, though there are some hopeful signs here and there that we might be past the worst of the downturn. How would you characterize where Marin Theatre’s at right now?

Well, we have a lot of momentum right now because of our previous season which brought back a good deal of our audience, I think as much as we could salvage from the devastation of COVID. And then Eureka Day brought in quite a few new ticket buyers so we introduced ourselves to a whole new group of people. So we have a lot of momentum that I’m hoping to keep up. In terms of stability, we’re not where we need to be yet. Our donor base was really harmed by COVID, and the theater went for a year without an artistic director so there were some relationships that were lost because fundraising is so dependent on building one-on-one relationships. So we’re working toward sustainability, but right now nothing is guaranteed.

It's interesting to me that you mentioned Marin Theatre’s recent production of Eureka Day.  A couple of months ago, I interviewed playwright Jonathan Spector about it, and I remember thinking to myself at the time “Wow, this play is so timely in 2025. It was really smart of Marin Theatre to program it.” [laughs]

Yeah, that was great! That was the one that was really shocking that nobody else had picked up. That was a surprise. I don’t know the details, but I know for a fact that there were theaters that did pass on it. So we got very lucky.

Over the past two years that you’ve been leading Marin Theatre, what’s been the best part of your job?

I love to see the fruits of my labors come to life. So from both an organizational sense and from a theatrical sense, the satisfaction of seeing things work out, of seeing things improve, of having an idea of what might make an experience better for an audience and then having people notice those things and get satisfaction out of them is really satisfying for me. So I just love hard work that pays off. I don’t need praise in my life. [laughs]

(Header photo of Lance Gardner by Alain McLaughlin)

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