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| Marin Theatre Company photo by Kevin Berne |
Then today I was skimming Twitter and learned that a group of local theater artists, mostly African American, had written an open letter to Marin Theatre Company expressing their belief that this production "is an irresponsible, deeply harmful project with no accountability to black women and girls." Since I am neither a black theater artist nor affiliated with MTC, I won't get in the middle of that. But it is worth reading. I know quite a number of the writers and signers of that letter, and I respect their views.
What follows is my own thinking, based on my experience of the play, though obviously at least somewhat informed by the dialogue going on around me. It's probably safe to say this isn't the same post I would have written had I done so immediately upon coming home (which is probably good, because it was very late!), but I think most of the ideas are pretty similar.
The Play
Thomas and Sally is a very ambitious undertaking. It's a world premiere play, commissioned by MTC and written by Thomas Bradshaw. Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis (who also directed the play) hails from Virginia and has a passion for American history and particularly Jefferson and his relationship with the Hemings family, and he was really taken with Bradshaw's writing, so collaborating on this play made sense.If you've been living under a rock (and if Minadakis is to be believed, a fair portion of his audience has been), you might not know about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. The short version is that plantation owner Jefferson had a "relationship" with Hemings, who was one of his slaves. It's a fairly big topic in historical circles.
Jefferson (Mark Anderson Phillips) was one of the "founding fathers" of the United States, primary author of the Declaration of Independence, first Secretary of State, third president, provider of the initial stock for the Library of Congress, and so on. He was also a wealthy Virginia plantation owner, and among his possessions were over 600 slaves, including the Hemings family, including Sally. Nothing unusual there in colonial America, really. The kicker being that Jefferson had inherited the Hemings family on the death of his father-in-law, John Wayles (Robert Sicular). OK so far. But after the death of Wayles' third wife, he had taken a fancy to one of his slaves, Betty Hemings (Charlette Speigner), and fathered a number of children (eight, IIRC). Some of those children, including Sally Hemings (Tara Pacheco) survive and pass down to Jefferson. So Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha (Ella Dershowitz). So even by the standards of the day, to adopt modern parlance, it's complicated.
This means Jefferson has a group of "special" slaves that his father-in-law has told him to treat well, keep out of the fields, etc. But they're still slaves, and can't be freed because then they would have to leave Virginia, among other things (it's the law; that's complicated, too). Among other things, some of the new Hemings slaves displace other slaves, such as Jefferson's long-time valet, Jupiter (played brilliantly by L. Peter Callender). That act of casual cruelty is one of the more realistic scenes in the play. And the overseer (Scott Coopwood) foresees that it will be difficult having some slaves treated almost as free servants while others slave in the fields. There is a lot going on.
Keep in mind that we have to go through the entirety of Act I to get all this. From what Minadakis explained in the after-play Q&A session, the first draft of that act was about 80 pages long, or nearly what a full play often covers. Though it has been edited considerably, it has to move at a quick clip, but it does so rather awkwardly.
But the play has three acts, and we're just getting started. Heck, we haven't even met Sally yet. As Act I turns into Act II, the recently-widowed Jefferson has been named minister to France, so he and his daughter, Patsy (normally Rosie Hallett, but read by someone else on Saturday--sorry I missed the name), and James Hemings (William Hodgson) head for Paris, where James apprentices as a chef (because...it's complicated). Later they are joined by younger daughter Polly (Dershowitz), who is accompanied by Sally Hemings.
So now lonely, widowed Thomas, much like his late father-in-law, finds himself alone, but with "needs" that can be met by...one of his slaves! So he slides into a sexual relationship with Sally, being at least somewhat discreet, at least at first. Needless to say, it's complicated. There is sex. There is seeming affection, and eventually, the inevitable pregnancy, right about the time the French Revolution breaks out, and the Jefferson/Hemings party needs to head back to Virginia. Somewhere in here we've had a super-awkward intermission break, because it happens while Thomas and Sally are in bed, and though the lights drop and the bed turns around, the actors are still visibly in it, so it doesn't really feel like one should leave. Stage hands eventually roll the bed off, but wow...uncomfortable moment.
Act III covers the (complicated, of course) decision about who goes home and when. James wants to stay in Paris where he can be free and a great chef. Thomas wants him to return to Virginia and "pay back" his apprenticeship. Sally really wants her child(ren) to be free, which pretty much means staying in France, but she also wants to be with her family, and maybe with Thomas. But with a few twists and turns, everybody ends up going home to Virginia, amidst promises of freedom for some, eventually, sort of.
The Frame Story
What I've left out here is the frame story. The play opens in a modern college dorm room, occupied by two young women, Simone and Karen (Dershowitz and Hallett-or-her-reader, respectively). Karenis writing a paper about slavery or Thomas Jefferson or something. It didn't seem that critical, so I forgot exactly what the topic was. Simone conveniently turns out to be a descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and proceeds to launch into a (three acts worth!) retelling of her family history, all the way back to the Wayles family refusing to sell Betty Hemings back to the captain (Coopwood) who fathered her on the voyage over from Africa (yes, really, three generations of these complications). All punctuated by several admonitions that "I'm not a historian." Because what this complicated story desperately needed was an unreliable narrator.And to tie things up at the end, the two students have a little discussion about slaves and agency and love and such. Simone is quite adamant that slaves exercised all they agency they possibly could, all the time. Karen is non-committal about where she's going to come down on all this; she'll think it over. And she promises to do research to verify all the stories Simone has told her.
The Production
As with most MTC productions, the quality is high. The actors are capable, the sets well-designed and -built, good lighting, costumes, and so on. I don't have many complaints here. The bed, mentioned earlier, where Jefferson and Hemings ... er ... "sleep" is upright. As in they are standing up against an upright "bed" with bedding draped around them like a curtain. It looks really strange. It's especially awkward when Jefferson is lying in bed, having taken ill, and James comes in to talk to him, standing next to the bed. Combine that with the way Act II ends in the bed, and it's just way too weird. All the other beds (and there are a number of them, from the dorm room to Wayles' home to Monticello, to the rest of the time in Paris when Jefferson an Hemings aren't doing it) are horizontal, and we get along quite fine there.And for some reason, the scene changes are done quite abruptly and loudly, with rumbling, sliding and squeaking and actors shove things relatively short distances. This seemed often unnecessary and quite distracting.
The play, and especially the first act, is too long. 2:45 with two intermissions. I think it actually ran long, in addition to starting late. I suspect the late start was due to whatever kept one of the actors from performing. The understudy/replacement sat in a chair off to one side of the stage and read the lines from a script. She did it pretty well, but it definitely detracted from the overall performance. I'm sure there was a good reason for all this, but it made the start of the long evening just that much odder.
And then there is the sex. Obviously, sex is an important part of the story, because if it weren't for the three generations of masters impregnating their slaves, we don't have a story at all. Fine, we get that. But the opening scene starts with a discussion of a missing/borrowed dildo and then we get a fair amount of rather juvenile taunting about penis size and then way too much detail about the highly implausible first encounter between Thomas and Sally. The last got a lot of feedback in the post-show discussion, but it was clear there was never any notion of cutting or changing that scene, though they thought of ending it a little bit sooner.
The Problems
Clearly, I have some issues with this play and production. And it's a bit hard to separate whether my issues are actually with the play as written or with the play as produced, because I haven't read it. And since this is the world premiere of a work that was commissioned and developed by this theater and this cast and creative team, it's hard to say that a problem lies on one side or the other. I take it as given that this crew knows and expresses the wishes of the playwright pretty closely.Any writing about Jefferson and Hemings suffers from the tremendous imbalance of available information on the two subjects. Jefferson is extremely well-known and well-documented. About Hemings, very little is actually known directly. So virtually everything said or done by or about Jefferson we can weigh against what we know or believe. But with Hemings we don't have that luxury. Everything here is either an invention or an interpretation by Bradshaw, but we don't have a way to evaluate its validity.
In this story as related by Simone, we see and hear Jefferson do things that are clearly not correct. For example, there is a scene where Ben Franklin and John Adams essentially abdicate the job of writing the Declaration of Independence onto an unwilling Jefferson. But anyone who knows much about Jefferson knows that is completely out of character, and that he proudly drafted the Declaration. And in dialogue we hear him declare himself to be "the foremost abolitionist of his day." Is this Simone putting words in his mouth ironically? Or is this the family lore, that Jefferson desperately wanted abolition, but wasn't able to free his slaves because...take your pick of various reasons. Lots of signalling here that we can't take any of this at face value: Fine. But at no point does Bradshaw ever come down on any side at all. And indeed, he leaves us with Karen saying she'll think it all over before writing her college paper.
That's it? Three hours of play to leave us with "decide for yourselves"? Or, you can take Simone's strident defense of slaves acting with all they agency they could whenever they could, and take her Act III romantic scene at face value, that Sally and Thomas loved each other, that he couldn't free her because she would have to leave Virginia and basically go underground, or she would have to leave him (for example, staying in Paris during the revolution). Sure, it's complicated. But that's not a very effective message to express.
Furthermore, Jefferson was famously able to hold and profess at least two or three contrary positions on the question of slavery. So the fact that the play portrays those contradictions doesn't really do much to assist the audience is reaching any conclusion.
And then there is the language, particularly of Act I. I don't know if it's just the amount of editing that had to be done, or whether the playwright or the director really intend for all the historical characters in that act to come across as caricatures, but that is largely (yet not entirely) what happens. Are we supposed to take this as the playwright being ironic, signaling that he knows we know these are just simplistic expressions of complicated ideas? Or does the awkwardness and anachronism derive from the interpretations of the young college student (who is not, not, not a historian!). And if we don't believe the caricatures, does that mean we're supposed to believe the characters when they become more realistic in Act II?
Ultimately, the play tries to do too much, and ends up doing too little. By trying to condense the vast amount of information that is actually known about Jefferson, supplemented with all the cool research on The Wayles and Hemings families and the creative writing about Sally, and surrounding it with a fictitious frame story, Bradshaw seems to have lost track of what story he actually wanted to tell, and instead of telling a story just presents a lot of bits and pieces that never tie together. That's pretty unsatisfying.
The Q&A
I would be remiss not to talk about the Q&A session that followed the play. Director Jasson Minadakis came out on stage and took questions from the audience for a long time, and we learned a lot about the play, the development process, and some of the controversy that has surrounded the production. A lot of his stories were interesting and instructive, but ultimately not very satisfying. It doesn't feel like he's quite understanding what all the fuss is about. I was pleasantly surprised with the number of people who stayed to talk, and both the quantity and quality of questions they raised.As with the curtain speech before the show (which was delivered by someone else), Minadakis was pretty dismissive of the protesters outside, saying they haven't seen the show, so their view is invalid. I was impressed when one African-American woman spoke up to say she had basically been deputized by her reading group to come and see what this was all about. And she had some pretty damning comments about the production that really hit home. I kind of wish she hadn't framed it as "fake news," since that term is pretty overloaded at the moment. But I think it's fair to summarize at least part of her point as being that the story as presented, whether you want to classify it as seduction or mutual attraction and affection or whatever, cannot be true. I haven't even talked about the vast age difference between Thomas and Sally when they first "hook up," never mind the vast difference in power and influence (an oh, yeah, the whole owner/property thing), but the essence of the message was that any portrayal of a relationship between a master and slave that suggests the two are even remotely in a consensual relationship is deluded. Again, my words here.
One question I asked related to the unreliable narrator, and why hand the story over to her if it's not going to result in a modern interpretation of the situation. The answer, such as it was, dealt with Bradshaw's musings over how to explain the situation to his own mixed-race children. Not very illuminating. Perhaps more disturbing was Minadakis' insistence that Bradshaw doesn't want to give us a conclusion, that he's presented us with enough clear examples to reach our own conclusions. Indeed, from the program notes from the dramaturg and an online interview with Bradshaw, the recurring message is that there is no message, that it's an exploration, that we can never really know the truth.
That feels like a serious cop out. Even if we can't reach absolute metaphysical certainty, we can certainly draw some meaningful conclusions. Or we can explore different avenues and see where they lead. But this play doesn't do that. It just presents, without comment or evaluation, a quite implausible scenario. And it has certainly irritated a lot of people, so I guess if that's what one means by "provocative," it has certainly provoked. But to what end?
The Inevitable Comparison
Here's the thing: I've already seen this "exploration" done much more provocatively, and much more effectively. Last season at Berkeley Rep, we saw An Octoroon, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. I won't rehash it here, since you can just click over to my earlier comments. But the point is that Jacobs-Jenkins masterfully manipulates his audience, doing things that are outlandishly offensive (and thus, "provocative"), and then stepping back and examining how that works. Time and again we got pulled into a point of view, only to have it invalidated. And the thing is, it deals with the love between a white slave owner and a woman he nominally owns. It's complicated, too, but Jacobs-Jenkins doesn't let that get in the way of really making his audience face up to the questions presented.If I hadn't already seen An Octoroon, I might have been more impressed with Thomas and Sally. But having seen a production that not only "explores," but genuinely examines issues, taboos, and prejudices, I know that it's not enough to just present some (im)possible scenario and let people think about it. The playwright's job is to take us somewhere, and if the playwright doesn't have a point, he really doesn't have a play, he just has a bunch of people watching a show.
No wonder people get upset. There are some clear and obvious lessons one can learn from giving even cursory analysis to a situation like this. To simply ignore that and say "this isn't what I believe, it's just something to think about" is insulting to the audience and even more insulting to those whose views, agency, and very personhood are denied by the scenario presented.
The Bottom Line
It seems only reasonable to ask what the point of this endeavor really is. If the playwright and director don't want to have a point of view, why are they producing this play? I suppose the answer might lie in my initial statement about this being an ambitious undertaking. MTC saw an opportunity to raise its profile by commissioning a work from a hot New York writer, and everyone perhaps took their eyes off the finish line in the excitement of working together. There's plenty of interesting material here, but it seems irresponsible to merely stir things up if you have no actual reason for doing so, and no way to help resolve the inevitable frustrations of those who see the play and those who feel they are hurt by the presentation.Talk-backs after the show help. Indeed, I don't know that I've ever seen a show that needed a talk-back afterward like this one did. But if you find that you have to talk people down after every show, perhaps that's a sign that you should have incorporated some of that into the show itself. And I do give Minadakis full credit for sitting up there on stage taking questions from all comers. He made it pretty clear that he was there as long as people wanted to ask. discuss, vent, or what have you. That's not easy, and he did it with equanimity. Still, I have to think that a bit of awareness earlier in the process could have saved a lot of the current angst.
Originally scheduled to end this past weekend, it appears MTC has extended the run another week, through October 29. I wish I could endorse going to see this show, as it has some good talent and some interesting bits. But on the whole, I didn't find the show itself particularly interesting. I admit that I'm glad I saw it, as it gives me better insight into the controversy. But as far as theatrical productions, I'd give it a pass. There are plenty of shows out there that are more worth your time.
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