Review: Absorbing and flat, 'Sally & Tom' adds to complicated history

All the world's a stage, yes, but does that mean that the making of a play can be equated with the founding of a nation?

That's one of the questions that swirls around "Sally & Tom," Suzan-Lori Parks' alternately brilliant and flaccid backstage drama that premiered Friday at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. The parallels between creating a theatrical world and a real one are readily apparent in Steven H. Broadnax III's stately yet blithe production whose stop-start pacing shows that it is clearly a work-in-progress.

Theater professionals all over know the scenario at the heart of "Sally & Tom" — all hell breaks loose when a production goes up. Such antics animate everything from "The Royal Family" and "The Producers" to "Noises Off" and "The Play That Goes Wrong."

In "Sally & Tom," the antics start days before opening their period piece called "The Pursuit of Happiness" — a play that director Mike (Luke Robertson) and his playwright partner Luce (Kristen Ariza) have maxed out their credit cards to put on. Mike and Luce are a couple in real life who play Tom and Sally in "Pursuit." Their real lives echo what's going with their characters — sometimes facilely — but the real drama comes when their self-enamored star Kwame (Amari Cheatom) threatens to walk out just before opening.

Adding more tension to the mix, the show's producer is flaking out and Mike may have to seek the backing of an ex-flame with whom he has boundary issues. For her part, Luce is up in the air about rewrites of a major speech.

Parks has described her theatrical device as a super-collider, smashing together 1790, the year that "Pursuit" is set, and today. Jefferson was in his 40s and a widower at midlife when he returned from Paris with Sally Hemings, the enslaved teen who would go on to bear at least six of his children.

In the play-within-a-play, Hemings tries to have some agency, using the fact that she shared a bed with Jefferson to help ameliorate some of the pain caused by the peculiar institution, including the sudden separation of families. Jefferson enslaved 600 people on his plantation, and their names palpably haunt this production, whose set, designed by Riccardo Hernández and lit mysteriously by Alan C. Edwards, feels like concealed catacombs.

Broadnax directs "Pursuit" with a sort of formality that suggests a lost Rembrandt Peale painting come to life. In this chiaroscuro world of waistcoats and French dresses, the captive characters move about Jefferson's Monticello plantation with cheek and slyness.

The contemporary scenes have an ease to them, as the characters get to revel in their relative freedoms. The Black people get to say what they wish. The white ones are unburdened by history. And there's one Korean American character, Jefferson's daughter Scout (the clever Sun Mee Chomet), for the sake of e pluribus unum.

They're all just putting on a play, after all, a set-up that leads to the show's most exclamatory moment — a speech by James Hemings (played by Cheatom's Kwame), Jefferson's valet who also was Sally's brother. The soliloquy is a blisteringly poetic companion to Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" and a vehicle through which the playwright gets to vent seemingly centuries of pent-up rage.

The genius, though, is that the speech doesn't have to lead to a resolution or conflict.

Parks lets the others have their due, and Robertson's Mike, who plays Jefferson in "Pursuit," offers a passionate defense of his character's troubled humanity, even if Mike's behavior echoes Jefferson's. Luce, surprisingly, does not have the best speeches in the show and her character is underwritten. She gets a sympathetic portrayal by Ariza, who's so conscious of her lines that they did not always flow naturally.

Ultimately, Parks' meta theater is a device for the delivery of hard de Tocqueville-esque truths — and a way to wrestle with the indelible contradictions that haunt the soul of a nation trumpeting freedom but grounded by its practice of human bondage.

'Sally & Tom'
Who: By Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III.
Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.
When: 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 1 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 1 & 7 p.m. Sun. Ends Nov. 6.
Tickets: $20-$79. 612-377-2224 or guthrietheater.org.
Protocol: Masks required for all Sunday performances and encouraged for those Tue.-Sat.