The company of the New York premiere of Sally & Tom. Photo: Joan Marcus

In an interview with American Theatre in 2022, when Sally & Tom was running at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre, Suzan-Lori Parks described the play as “a conductor. It’s a third rail, which can conduct us to some beautiful questions, and some conversations that might be difficult to have, but we need to have them.” The third rail, of course, will also electrocute you if you step right on it; it’s the power supply that runs the train but you also need the structure that stands between you and it. Which is perhaps one of the many reasons why Sally & Tom is structured as a play within a play: a container for the questions it asks, a lightning rod–to perhaps mangle a metaphor–to channel the energy of historical injustices we can’t fix and ground it in the very theater we’re in–a space that maybe we can change. 

Whether we walk away believing in that change is another question; Parks clearly does, and her own lauded career proves her right, in a sense–but also, as this play shows full well, proves her subject to the vicious cycle of art under capitalism that we see dramatized here. I find myself a lot less sure, after this play, than I have with other of her works.  

“I owned people. . . . I stand at the intersection of the horrible, and the splendid and the dizzy-making contradiction that is all of us,” says Thomas Jefferson, addressing the audience, lights half-up, right before the end of Sally & Tom’s. We, the audience at the Public, aren’t exactly who he’s addressing, though; Jefferson is a character in the play-within-a-play The Pursuit of Happiness, played by an actor named Mike (who’s also the director), and written by Luce (who also plays Sally Hemings). Jefferson’s monologue, encompassing the man in all his dimensions: American icon, author of the Declaration of Independence–and hypocrite who wrote “All men are created equal” while enslaving hundreds of his fellow men and women. Pragmatist who calculated his finances based on a certain percentage of return on those enslaved people–and a man who “did not have a brilliant head for business.” Romantic who lost his beloved wife and then had a thirty-year relationship with a woman who was probably his wife’s half-sister–and a forty-one-year-old man who began that thirty-year sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl who was also his property. It’s a monologue rife with all the bitter ironies of American history, and perhaps just a little too calculated, just a little too conscious of its own striving to remind the audience of our own human complexity and complicity after a scene in which we’ve seen Jefferson divvying up the enslaved people on his plantation to decide which he will rent out while he’s away serving in the new U.S. government. It’s the speech that ought to bring down the curtain with thunderous applause…except that it’s immediately followed by a message to Mike, delivered by the stage manager on a neon-pink Post-it, that their producer has quit. He wants the play to go in a different, more commercial direction, and he’s out. Nuance and complexity are great, but they don’t keep the lights on. Art vs commerce; art vs politics; love vs commerce–all those stakes play out in that one moment, and over and over throughout the piece.

Luce (Sheria Irving), a Black woman, and her partner in art and in life, Mike (Gabriel Ebert), a white man, have long run the political theater group Good Company, known for shows so confrontational they planned for the audience to walk out. (Listen Up, Whitey, ‘Cause It’s All Your Fault was one of their recent failures; no, it was not a hit.) Their vibe is starving artist all the way down. Each acting company member does double or triple duty: Luce writes, Mike directs, Maggie (Kristolyn Lloyd) does their PR, Ginger (Kate Nowlin) is the dramaturg/script supervisor, Geoff (Daniel Petzold) does sets and costumes, Devon (Nathan Fowler) lighting—and in one of the show’s most endearing jokes for theater folk, Scout (Sun Mee Chomet) has to figure out a system of hand signals to cue the light board as she both acts and stage manages. (The final character, Kwame–Alano Miller–is a longtime member who’s now found some success in television; they’re counting on his fanbase to fill the seats.)

But now, they briefly had a real producer, who’s charmed by their street cred and their scrappy aesthetics, but would also really love it if this play had a happy ending. If it was just a little bit more of a love story. (Exhibit A: the title switch from E Pluribus Unum to The Pursuit of Happiness.) And faced with that dilemma, it turns out Mike’s pretty comfortable with letting his principles be nudged, a little at a time, by his desire to succeed. (After their producer Teddy quits, he’s briefly trying to bring on a guy who sees the play as a revelation about Jefferson’s being on the autism spectrum.) Turns out Mike isn’t so sure he even believes those principles anymore. This play is both their sellout and their attempt to subvert the idea of selling out–to put “sugar on the vitamins” and sneak a message into a piece of commercially successful art. In the end, though, is the takeaway the vitamins or the sugar: the fiery exhortation from Sally’s brother James Hemings to “be ashamed by the lies this country was built on” or the quieter acknowledgment that Sally was “making the best of things”? Is it the work they tried to do, or the fact that their company is falling apart?

Parks is careful to say, both in a program note and several times in the script itself, that Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson do not, cannot, have a love story. He owned her. That’s the fact that cannot be negotiated away. And yet when she gets her turn to speak about it at the end—as does Jefferson in his own soliloquy—she acknowledges, just a little, a both/and. Was it rape? Was it love? She bore him seven children over thirty years. He didn’t free her. Despite that call to recognize the complexity and nuance, the incommensurable elements of which this country is made–to ask the beautiful questions– the one thing that can’t be shaded by nuance always seems to be money. Human beings who can’t make choices about their own lives because they are legally property. The Pursuit of Happiness, warped by the imperatives of whoever’s writing the checks this week. Monticello, where Jefferson rented out human beings to pay his debts. Mike and Luce’s relationship, which he’s willing to trade away for the money to do their show. 

Geoff has a design idea for their set–the thing they could do if they had had the budget, a way to pay tribute to the lives enslaved at Monticello. Sally & Tom ends with Riccardo Hernández’s set, at one of New York’s most well-resourced off-Broadway theaters, implementing that effect. Which works just as Geoff had envisioned it.  Is that reveal meant to be triumphant, or a cynical triumph of commerce over art? Or does neither of those things matter in the service of revealing a hidden history of people who were tokens in an economic exchange system, and who get entirely lost in the discussion of whether Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson could possibly have actually loved each other? It is powerful, and it’s also the rewards of selling out: Other. Both/and.

The play is carrying on two simultaneous conversations about how the world is made and how art is made, balancing principle versus money, money versus ethics, principle versus love. What are the conditions necessary to love in the first place, and who gets to experience them? What are the conditions necessary to sustain a national identity in the first place, and who gets to participate in that?

Yet in both, I kept getting the sense that neither The Pursuit of Happiness nor Sally & Tom had entirely figured out how to sustain that conversation, where to channel that lightning. The Pursuit of Happiness remains–intentionally, cleverly–not fully realized; it’s the play that blew its paltry budget on rented costumes before it’s entirely figured out what it wants to say. (No discredit intended to Rodrigo Muñoz’s costumes, which do excellent work at both giving us a lush but generic Revolutionary American and at sketching the modern-day characters.) Sally & Tom, too, is more a play about process, about working one’s way toward principles, about building the frame for conversations and choices, than about making them. 

For a writer normally so attuned to the elliptical possibilities of language, Parks’s writing here is unvarnished, plain, and straightforward, albeit with a period flourish for the characters within The Pursuit of Happiness. This is particularly true in the frame play, where the characters all have a comfortable fluency with their own emotional landscapes–sometimes past the point of obviousness–and no fear of sharing how they feel. If The Pursuit of Happiness is often about the constrained choices of the enslaved characters, the frame play of Sally & Tom revels in the casual revelation of a major choice: Scout declaring she wants to be an actor; Devon revealing feelings for another cast member. Mike confessing to Luce that he can’t “be better anymore” and just wants to be happy. He’s refusing to keep striving for a moral high ground—and like Jefferson, he can simply make that choice and have it be so. (Ebert and Irving are the heart of both layers of the play, but their relationship as Tom and Sally feels more lived-in, more resonant with the weight of a shared history, than their relationship as Mike and Luce.) 

Director Steve H. Broadnax III finds the humor in all of it–including a great deal of lightness and broad physical comedy inside The Pursuit of Happiness–and embraces the nitty-gritty details of the backstage process, in all its farce (which…as someone who has put in her hours in the no-budget theater, I can’t help but love, even if this version of is a little too ridiculous). Still, the piece sometimes seems to gloss over the emotional stakes for the members of Good Company. Their choices can feel too blithe. Because if there is a love story in this play, it’s the love that the members of Good Company have for one another and for their work. They’ve been doing this together for years, without glamor, without money, without success–and yet they keep coming back. But too often we feel their frustration with the compromises and ridiculous chaos of zero-budget theater more than we feel the passion and commitment that keeps them there, or the ideals that drew them together in the first place. Why did Luce write this play–other than to be a little more commercial? We don’t really know.

In a program note for Parks’s previous work at the Public, Plays for the Plague Year, she writes, “For me, plays celebrate our humanity and demonstrate the process of community.” Plays for the Plague Year built that community on a very personal level for Parks, and for all of us: the stories of Parks’s own family in the throes of COVID; the great national crisis we’d all just lived through. It was a mirror held up to our hearts to bring us back together. Sally & Tom is doing something more challenging: How do we build a community and celebrate the humanity in the whole of our history, with all these conversations yet to be had? But where Plague Year succeeded in its intimacy and its locality, its sense of playfulness, Sally & Tom can feel too abstract. It avoids the didactic, but I’m not sure it gets all the way to the dialectic.

“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,” says Mike. Is it the agendas that stop art from making a difference, though? Or is it Mike’s insincerity in pursuing them, or in the lack of artistry with which they’re pursued? Will Luce do better without him, her shows funded by Maggie’s rich husband, or will that just be a different series of compromises? Sally & Tom ends with The Pursuit of Happiness’s shiny trick of the scenery. I don’t know how I feel about that.