Among contemporary playwrights, you’d think Suzan-Lori Parks would be the one to have an original and startling take on the complicated relationship of founding father Thomas Jefferson and enslaved Sally Hemings. But, with Sally & Tom, Parks has created an intermittently lacerating but mainly mild play about one of the most fraught subjects in our fraught national history.

 

To grapple with and have a contemporary dialogue with the historical subject at hand, Parks introduces a scruffy off-off-Broadway troupe putting on a play titled The Pursuit of Happiness—it was originally called E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One), something that Parks gets some decent mileage out of—in which the relationship between T.J. (as Jefferson is so-called) and Sally is dramatized from a distinctly 21st-century point of view. 

 

The play-within-a-play is written by Luce, who plays Sally, and directed by Mike, who plays T.J. Luce and Mike are a couple bound by their art and their advocacy but who are starting to get tired of begging for money and shouting their words into mostly empty theaters—perhaps belatedly realizing that leftist politics onstage is an echo chamber.

 

Parks would seem to the perfect playwright to dig into these parallel provocations: studying a beloved American’s indefensible personal life and if it’s possible to make genuine art in these divided times. But she instead creates distance from the task at hand. Sally & Tom has three distinct levels: T.J. and Sally in The Pursuit of Happiness; Luce and Mike as lovers and artists; and the other players in the troupe, whose backstage interactions might be amusing to those who work in the theater but which are a combination of easy laughs and cheap melodramatics that simply pad the running time.

 

Such a dramatic and comic imbalance dilutes what Parks is saying about the pedestal our Founding Fathers have been put on; the unfairness of history being written by white men; and the agency of a woman like Sally, who bore seven of Jefferson’s children but was never freed by him, even on his deathbed, unlike both Washington and Franklin, as is mentioned in the play. (Jefferson’s daughter Patsy freed Sally and others after her father died July 4, 1826—significantly the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—along with John Adams in one of history’s best coincidences.)

 

To be sure, there are fleeting moments of precise observation and ringing insight, but Sally & Tom really only flashes to vivid life in the speeches that climax each act. Act one ends with a long and winding soliloquy by T.J. (of which Gabriel Ebert, who’s most engaging as both Mike and Tom, gives a persuasive reading), which treads the fine lines of self-pity, self-absorption, and self-analysis, thanks to Parks’ acuteness at studying this extraordinary man with extraordinary flaws. 

 

Even better is the monologue Parks has written for Sally (the gifted Sheria Irving, who’s superb as both Luce and Sally, rises to Shakespearean heights here), in which she—and by extension Parks—grapples with her own place in a history she has officially never been part of, even if recent Jeffersonian history has started to grant her space there. Sally eloquently describes her conflicting emotions:

 

 

Sally’s thoughtful, poignant plea overcomes some of the preceding two-plus hours’ repetitiveness.

 

Steve H. Broadnax III’s direction nicely corrals the three disparate story threads into a nearly cohesive whole, and the ensemble amusingly handles the doubled roles of the other performers and their characters. Riccardo Hernández’ scenic design, Rodrigo Muñoz’ costumes, Alan C. Edwards’ lighting, Dan Moses Schreier’s sound design and Schreier and Parks’ music adroitly dip us in and out of each segment. 

 

But the final coup de theatre, a list of Monticello’s enslaved names appearing on the back wall, is a visual sledgehammer that unnecessarily underscores the play's bluntness, despite its lofty intentions.