“Sally & Tom” by Suzan-Lori Parks at the Public Theater doesn’t quite live up to its concept.
Sheria Irving, Gabriel Ebert and the company of “Sally & Tom” at the Public Theater in New York. NEW YORK — “To cut or not to cut? That is the question,” mocks an actor in Suzan-Lori Parks’s leaden, overworked “.” While rehearsing a play within the play, she concedes that the lines in question are “finger-waggy” but realizes that axing them might cause their mouthpiece to quit the show.
There are two storylines in Parks’s play. One takes place in 1790 and centers on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings , the enslaved woman who bore him at least six children. Jefferson’s Monticello plantation is halfheartedly suggested by set designer Riccardo Hernández with a free-standing door, military-issue columns and a ponderous curtain. Etched on a black wall spackled with white paint are the words “E PLURIBUS UNUM”: out of many, one.
Make that visions: “The Pursuit of Happiness” doesn’t admit of a single unifying interpretation. It’s the seditious inverse of “e pluribus unum.” Its creators can’t seem to decide: Did Jefferson really love Hemings, or was he a sexual predator? Was he “kinder” than other enslavers of his time? Is there evidence to support the claim, made by a moneybags producer, that he had Asperger’s? At least two actors think “Pursuit” is a “Black play,” but Scout , a Korean company member, has doubts.
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