The issue of trimming and “drastic reduction” in word count comes up several times in “Sally & Tom,” which had its world premiere at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2022 and opened at Off-Broadway’s Public Theater on Tuesday.
Parks’ play has two stories. One of his takes place in 1790 and focuses on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson (a reedy-voiced Gabriel Ebert) and an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings (Shelia Irving), who bore him at least six of her children. I am. Jefferson’s Monticello plantation was half-heartedly proposed by set designer Riccardo Hernandez, complete with freestanding doors, military columns, and heavy curtains. The words “E PLURIBUS UNUM” are carved into a black wall sprinkled with white paint. This means his one among many. The play-within-a-play is titled “The Pursuit of Happiness” and will be performed by the downtown theater company Good Company, which has a “track record of putting on angry political plays that no one turns to.”
Another story begins with the actors rehearsing for “The Chase,” wearing sweats rather than starched 18th-century costumes (designed by Rodrigo Muñoz). Only days away from opening night, playwright Ruth (Irving) and her director and romantic partner Mike (Ebert) try to please the producers who hold the purse strings without sacrificing artistry. I keep thinking of ways to write my lines. vision.
Let’s create that vision. The “pursuit of happiness” does not allow for a single, unified interpretation. This is an incendiary inversion of “e pluribus unum.” The film’s creators can’t seem to decide whether Jefferson truly loved Hemings or whether he was a sexual predator. Was he “kinder” than other slaves at the time? Is there any evidence to support the claim that the producer of Moneybags had Asperger’s Syndrome?At least two actors consider Chase to be a “black play,” but Korean theater troupe Scout (Excited) Seung Mee Chomet, who has a strange personality, has doubts. In a precarious moment, she let out a question that had been smoldering in the back of her mind for weeks. “How much skin is there actually in this game?” she then asks, referring to colorblind casting. “Should only those people who were once or are now play those people?”
Those thoughts are sincere, but also a sign of “Sally & Tom’s” eagerness to spoon-feed viewers with already-chewed ideas. The self-consciously stylized “chase” scenes don’t work for another reason. Historical figures are simply being directed rather than posed. Moans of justice by James Hemings (Arano Miller), Jefferson’s enslaved chef and valet and Sally’s younger brother, occupy every page of the screenplay, echoing Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and the Philosopher’s Stone. , ending on a “breeding farm near Monticello” and predicting the following “liquidation.” “All the stars that articulate what you call your birthright will fade away and you will be left in the darkness of my colors and the songs in the air will sing my name”! ”
Ruth, on behalf of the skeptics in the audience, dismissed this declaration as a “manufactured moment” during rehearsals. “TJ will never let James go on and on like that,” she told the actor playing James before cutting her off. If “The Chase” often comes across as a warm-over Wiki-drama, with actors dutifully recounting how Jefferson owned enslaved people, rewrote the Bible, and renovated homes, Steve Broad Director Knux III’s “Sally & Tom” often looks like this. A note from the playwright on the flyer.
Parks describes himself as a “mythology head” who likes to color outside the boundaries of history. Paradoxically, the most colorful moments in her latest work are not historically inspired or masquerading as essays, but processual, reminiscent of a tense dress rehearsal. be. While changing costumes, applying makeup, and practicing swings and punches, the actors tell us about unexpected pregnancies, encounters with the police, off-the-book scares, and the prospect of appearing in an indie film. I’ll make you pay attention.
However, exposition also appears on the modern scene. Maggie (Christolyn Lloyd), who has praised their theater program, tells his fellow actors: “Thanks to Teddy, this is the first program we didn’t have to print ourselves. Low-budget, no-budget theater has never looked so great.” Pseudo-profound sentences like “Who are we?” The lyrics, “I stand at the crossroads of the terrifying, the wonderful, and the dizzying contradictions that we all are,” also drift into the footlights. In the case of lines like this, the question arises, “To cut or not to cut?” I can confidently answer in the affirmative.
sally and tom, at the Public Theater in New York until May 12. 2 hours 35 minutes including break. publictheater.org.