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Writing Down the Bones: Sally & Tom

A curiously muted Hemings-and-Jefferson meta-story by Suzan-Lori Parks.

It’s not just the damask and lace of Rodrigo Muñoz’s late-18th-century costumes, or the well-mannered minuets and sprightly fiddle tunes that score much of the piece (Parks also co-composed the music with Dan Moses Schreier): There’s something soft about the play, a little ingenuous and underbrewed. In all fairness, I’ve been coached to expect it: If there’s anyone who knows how to break a play in two, it’s the current generation of Black American playwrights from Jackie Sibblies Drury to BrandenJacobs- Jenkins and Jeremy O. Harris, all part of a blazing writerly lineage in which Parks is, at 60, a respected elder. Irving, sincere and focused, fares a bit better as she navigates her side of the play’s arc, which is fundamentally about the intersection of race, ambition, and integrity: how a theater company or a play—or a nation—can lose track of its mission, or begin in hypocrisy, tainting the whole endeavor to come.

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