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?
There’s another thing going on, not around the edges of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” but of “Sally & Tom.” At times, the plays recalls one of those vintage Hollywood movies where the wealthy couple upstairs carries the moral weight of the story and the domestics downstairs are there for comic relief or merely to comment on what the lead characters are doing. Whether Irving and Ebert are playing Sally and Tom or Luce and Mike, they are meant to be taken seriously, which is more than can be said for the gay couple, played by Fowler and Petzold, who just happen to be the two worst actors in the Good Company.
Parks manages to locate touch points between the 18th and 21st centuries in ways that audiences should find provocative and even thrilling. Gently chiding TJ for hiding his intentions, Sally reminds him, “We build our castle on a foundation of your promises.” Well, isn’t that the foundation of the nation? The structure Jefferson et al so hopefully wrought has lived up to its potential for few if any of its citizens, just as Mike and Luce are far from firmly establishing their personal and professional relationship as a Good Company. The promise of full freedom is always just out of reach, yet the attempt to shape our reality to the ideal must be never-ending. We hold that truth to be self-evident.
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