“Thomas and Sally” is full of depth, intrigue, and thought-provoking moments.

If Thomas Bradshaw were a writer of history books, then that subject might very well be THE favorite of school kids across America.  Instead, he is a playwright who has created a detailed, engaging, sometimes a bit shocking, and often quite funny timeline of our third president and the woman who was the love of his life for his final thirty-seven years.  That she also happened to be owned by him as his slave – although he preferred to call her and his the other of his one hundred thirty-plus slaves his “servants” – is now well known by most modern Americans.  However, few of us probably know the full story as so meticulously outlined in this three-plus-hour world premiere of Thomas and Sally now on the Marin Theatre Company stage.  The “n-word” spoken freely, a founding father prancing around in only his birthday suit, and statements like “Africans may not have the intelligence of the white race but you’ll not find people with bigger hearts” are all part of this telling that cannot help but make the audience squirm uncomfortably.  But after taking a few gulps of air and letting the story further unfold, audience members also cannot help but gain new insights about not only our collective history and one of the best-loved of our presidents, but also new insights into some of the messes we are in today that have their roots in yesteryears long past.

Sitting in their dorm room, two roomies struggle with the demands of college life.  Karen must finish a history paper due tomorrow, and Simone is seeking a private place to relieve tension via her dildo that Karen borrowed without asking (and did not clean).  When Karen (Rosie Hallett) discovers that Simone (Ella Dershowitz) is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson (the subject of her paper) and his slave Sally Heming, she is ecstatic and asks for more details of the family history.  Imagine her shock but soon fascination as closet doors open and that history begins to play out right in their dorm room. 

The time is suddenly 1735, and the owner of Sally’s grandma (Betty Hemings) – the white owner, Captain John Hemings, actually being Sally’s grandfather – is unsuccessfully trying to buy her from a plantation owner.  Time jumps ahead twenty-six years, and Betty is now caring for the motherless Martha Wayles (who will become Thomas Jefferson’s wife) while also becoming the mother of a number of children, several whose father is also Martha’s father, John.  The last of these is Sally, born at Monticello, having come there as part of the marriage bounty of over 100 slaves that Jefferson acquired when he married Martha Wayles.

That the bloodlines and relationships are all very intertwined in what could be a confusing mishmash is not an issue in the fast-paced parade of characters that continue to come out of closet doors of Karen’s and Simone’s dorm room.  Simone herself dons in front of us dresses of the eighteenth century and becomes Jefferson’s bride, Martha. Karen watches in full wide-eyed fascination from whatever perch on desk, shelf, or corner she can find to have a good view while also staying out of the way of her term paper being written right before her eyes.

Fifty-plus years of early American history continue to unfold before us as names familiar (Benjamin Franklin, John and Abigail Adams) and unknown (mostly slaves owned by Jefferson) appear in scene after scene where the story of Thomas and Sally slowly takes shape as a love story both sweet and sad.  Along the way, many ‘facts’ and lessons of both history and civics are pitched by the characters, making Mr. Bradshaw’s play at times feel like an experimental learning device aimed at normally bored high school students.  This is especially true during some of the conversations between the two college roomies where mini-lectures of Simone feel like footnotes to fill Karen (and us) in on some of the era’s details we may not know.  But, just when one feels maybe I should be taking notes in case there is a test, out of the closet doors come a whole new set of interesting characters who bring more intrigue to this mixture of families, relationships, and lovers who all somehow helped shape our country’s foundations.

Tara Pacheco takes the Sally Hemings who most modern Americans know in name only and brings her to full life as a young woman torn between her genuine love for the man who owns her as property and her driving desire to be free to pursue her own unfettered life.  Ms. Pacheco is brilliant in portraying both halves of Sally’s internal battle with much credible nuance.  Small shifts in her countenance reveal the complex, strong character of Sally’s personality as she weighs the pull of soft caresses and erotic pleasure and the counter pull of assuming her place in society as the intelligent, strong-willed woman she is apart from Jefferson.  (That latter choice becomes a possible reality for her during their years in France while Jefferson serves as the U.S. minister to a country that is willing to award any slave on its soil complete freedom.)

Equally stellar is Mark Anderson Phillips as Sally’s owner and lover, Thomas Jefferson.  With a new Mozart tune – Mozart being the current rave in American Revolutionary times – always only a hum away as he walks about, his Jefferson is slightly quirky and awkward with teenage boy mannerisms in a body of a thirty-something man.  Prone to bouts of silly laughter and sudden outbursts of enthusiastic declarations, this Jefferson is also clearly smitten with Sally Hemings in ways seen in his soft touches, kind voice, and starry eyes.  But Mr. Phillips’ Jefferson is also a troubling conundrum as he declares himself “the foremost abolitionist of the world” who sees slavery as a “moral blotch on our nature” but who cannot bring himself to free his own treasury of slaves, including the woman he most evidently loves.  In the end, Mark Anderson Phillips complicates in wonderful ways this American hero of heroes, leaving us questioning any tendencies toward our own blind admiration while also still finding ourselves liking this icon in new and different ways.

The cast of this premiere delivers excellence in all the many roles portrayed, with some members taking on as many as five persona.  William Hodgson is Sally’s brother, James Hemings, who gains the chance to be trained as a French chef and the opportunity to become schooled in the French Revolution concepts of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.  His James lights up with energetic zeal as he strives to please the man who keeps telling him, “Think of me as your father.”  But his eyes also show much skepticism of that same man’s true intentions since the supposed father is still his master. Those same eyes are also drawn longingly to a possible horizon where freedom exists in France to open his own restaurant.

Another Hemings sibling, Robert, is ably played by Cameron Matthews – a handsome and eager-to-please valet of Jefferson’s who replaces ol’ Jupiter, a sweet but less-educated butler (L. Peter Callender) who is literally put out to the pasture (or at least the stables) by a master who is more enthralled by the younger man.  Scott Coopwood and Robert Sicular each take on multiple roles, including respectively John Adams and Benjamin Franklin – roles that allow them to reenact a similarly funny scene from the musical 1776 where the two convince a reluctant Jefferson to pen single-handedly the Declaration of Independence.  Charlette Speigner provides a poignant picture of what it meant to be a slave woman, Betty Hemings, who sires child after child with her owner/lover, showing both the treachery and the tenderness of the situation Fate placed her.

As he has time and again on the Marin Theatre stage (Guards at the Taj, Anne Boleyn, The Whipping Man), Jasson Minadakis once again proves his skills as a master director as he orchestrates without a hitch two time periods separated by 250 years yet often played simultaneously.  He also ensures the fifty years of history flies by seemingly in a flash, even though the play itself is long enough to require two intermissions. 

Into all the serious and even troubling themes and threads of the play, he and his creative team have woven much humor, often tongue-in-cheek.  Sean Fanning’s scenic design is a big player in that accomplishment, with hot-breathing lovers being wheeled out in an upright bed or with members of a century long past using a dorm room’s desk as a cutting block (aided by a nearby, electric, gooseneck lamp) or pulling out a pitcher of ale from the dorm ‘frig. 

Ashley Holvick has performed miracles with costumes that bring authenticity of era but that also are often donned and de-clothed while characters are shifting both roles and centuries.  Theodore J.H. Hulsker’s sound design creates its own magic, with audience members having to look twice to be sure the still fingers of Jefferson are actually not playing the violin perched under his chin.  Finally, Mike Post’s lighting design helps change a dorm room’s stark atmosphere into the atmospheres of a number of other locations and time periods – from European parlors to Monticello bedrooms.

Fifty years is a lot of time to cover in one play -- especially with all the convoluted family trees, bedroom intricacies, moral dilemmas, and famed historical figures contained within Thomas Bradshaw’s Thomas and Sally.  However, as produced in world premiere by Marin Theatre Company, the years are literally a few minutes each in length while being full of depth, intrigue, and thought-provoking moments.

Rating: 5 E

‘Thomas and Sally’: How much did she choose?

A sign your show might be controversial: If, before you even open, your promotional artwork prompts demands that you cancel it. 

Wherever possible, Marin Theatre Company has replaced the artwork for “Thomas and Sally,” the opener of its 51st season. Original graphics depicted Sally Hemings, the slave who bore her master, Thomas Jefferson, six children, with a slight smile and a coy expression. Commenters accused the company of suggesting that slavery was enjoyable and of perpetuating stereotypes of black women as hyper sexualized.

After the staff received threats, MTC hired a private security guard for performances. The theater “wanted to make sure the cast and the audience felt safe,” Managing Director Keri Kellerman said after the Tuesday, Oct. 3, opening night of the world-premiere commission. 

The evening proceeded without incident, but in envisioning Hemings’ and Jefferson’s lives, Thomas Bradshaw’s play has exposed a political fault line, in the left-of-center Bay Area, about how we talk about the worst parts of our legacy as Americans. If the show spawns vitriolic arguments — and that’s how the Chicago-based Bradshaw tends to roll — isn’t it better that we’re having them in the open (so long as no one gets hurt)?

Here are some of the few things we can say with certainty about Hemings and Jefferson: Since Hemings was a slave, Jefferson could, with protection of the law, force her to have sex with him. She was also 14 or 15, three decades his junior, when he first made advances. Yet according to lore passed down through generations of the Hemings family, there was real love between the two.

We can’t ever know much more than that. Slavery was horror, to understate it, and yet we’re limiting Hemings, and ourselves, if, as the Jefferson scholar Annette Gordon-Reed wrote in the New York Times in August, we treat “Hemings’ legal status as the definitive answer to the question of what did and did not happen in her life.” She was legally property, “but she was also a human being.”

Or as “Thomas and Sally” puts it, to say that “because [Hemings and her family] were slaves, they never ever made a decision that was their own” is “simply not true. Slaves had very little agency, that’s a fact, but they used every ounce of it that they had.”
To put forth both points of view, Bradshaw creates an epic piece of theater that chronicles Hemings’ ancestry, Jefferson’s ambivalent (to say the least) relationship to slavery, and his journey to Paris to serve as ambassador to France on the eve of that country’s revolution. It was there that he saw Hemings for the first time in five years, after she accompanied his daughter there.

The show portrays Sally (Tara Pacheco) as both oppressed and with the agency to have complicated feelings about Jefferson (Mark Anderson Phillips) and the power to make some decisions about them. It’s a subjective take, of course, which Bradshaw makes explicit with a framing device. As the play opens, current-day college student Simone (Ella Dershowitz), a descendant of Jefferson and Hemings, starts telling her family’s history to her roommate Karen (Rosie Hallett), while repeatedly emphasizing that she’s “not a historian.” 
It’s mostly a clunky technique, but the pair’s incisive debate in the play’s last scene about how much agency Hemings had helps start post-show conversation. Also clunky, though, is the Hemings family history with which Bradshaw front-loads the play. Depending on how conscientious your grade school history teachers were, it will likely complicate how you think about slaves and their Founding-Father masters. Hemings was the third generation of master-slave coupling in her family.

It’s fascinating, especially when Bradshaw shows how slavery makes oppression the default mode of every relationship on his estate, and director Jasson Minadakis’ cast renders each role with such specificity that you see a full separate play for even minor characters. But it moves so quickly that it’s less development and dramatization of conflict — the stuff of great theater — than whirlwind survey.

The play gives comparatively short shrift to Hemings’ two big dilemmas, whether to run away from Jefferson while he’s ambassador to France, where she can petition for her freedom, and then whether to heed his pleas to return to him and to Monticello. But Pacheco finds strength in her character’s deep feeling and her pragmatism, her ability to efficiently assess her lot in life, which constantly changes, and then make strategic decisions about it. 
Phillips skillfully paints Jefferson as only dimly aware of his contradictions with regard to slavery. (Jefferson advocated for abolition and sending slaves back to Africa, even as he owned hundreds of them.) Above all, Phillips’ Jefferson is a man who probably shouldn’t have been a politician; he’s always humming Mozart or gazing adoringly at his architectural plans or waxing rhapsodic about plants and music. 

Excited or nervous, he squeaks out syllables or blurts out phrases at a volume much louder than a situation seems to require. He is a dreamer, an intellectual, but one whose fancies have been allowed to flourish because he is so seldom challenged on anything. It’s not just hard for him to imagine that slaves might not think of him as family, that the smiles they show him might be performed; it’s hard for him even to imagine that anyone might not feel the same about returning to America as he does.

Dominating the neoclassical portion of Sean Fanning’s set is a giant inscription: “Hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind.” That’s part of a quote of Jefferson’s, of course, and this play applies it broadly — to Jefferson himself, in ways the Founding Father couldn’t have imagined, and to anyone with preconceptions about Founding Fathers and their slaves.

Jefferson’s hypocrisy is stripped bare in ‘Thomas and Sally’

The play that opens Marin Theatre Company’s 51st season sparked controversy before it even opened. A commissioned world premiere by Thomas Bradshaw, “Thomas and Sally” explores the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore six of his children, starting in her mid teens.

A lot of people on social media have been upset by any hint in the play’s marketing that it might romanticize or in any way excuse a slaveholder having sex with someone he’s enslaved. Most pointed out that no matter how events might have played out, there can be no such thing as consent when one person is considered to be the other one’s property. Bradshaw had devastatingly depicted exactly that kind of exploitation in his play “Southern Promises,” so there was reason to hope he wouldn’t be handling this thorny topic with kid gloves.

As it happens, “Thomas and Sally” is pretty cautious with its subject, if immoderate in other ways. A sprawling three hours with two intermissions, it’s overstuffed with exposition on everything from emancipation procedures in France to smallpox inoculation to the Electoral College. It also features cute gags about unhygienic use of sex toys and a naked Jefferson whining about having to write the Declaration of Independence while the other Founders get to do all the fun stuff. Cheeky scenes with John Adams and Ben Franklin might as well be outtakes from “1776.”

It’s not presented as a love story, but not as straightforward exploitation either, except insofar as slavery is inherently exploitation. There’s a lot of tender talk from Jefferson and from Sally’s father (a placid Robert Sicular), but what little we hear of Sally’s own considerations is more tied to calculations of survival and freedom for her family.

The play is framed by two modern college roommates in their dorm room. A chirpy blonde played by Ella Dershowitz claims to be a direct descendent of Hemings and Jefferson and gushes the story to her rapt roomie, portrayed by Rosie Hallett with wide-eyed delight. They stick around and gawk throughout, occasionally taking on roles such as Jefferson’s wife and daughters.

Artistic director Jasson Minadakis makes playful use of the contemporary elements in his production. Historical figures pop out of closets, and the Jefferson Memorial looms over the curiously uncluttered dorm room in Sean Fanning’s set.

Entering in the second act, Tara Pacheco is a graceful and ingenious Sally Hemings, trying to make the best of her situation. William Hodgson is compellingly savvy and conflicted as her brother James, trained to become a master chef and introduced to revolutionary ideas in Paris, where they’ve accompanied Jefferson. Cameron Matthews is more generally bewildered as their brother Robert, who can’t fathom the deep resentment of others such as Jefferson’s longtime valet (L. Peter Callender’s quietly dignified Jupiter Evans) toward the Hemings family’s special treatment, kept apart from the rest of the enslaved. (Sally and her brothers were half-siblings of Jefferson’s wife Martha.) Scott Coopwood plays myriad parts such as Jefferson’s overseer and James’ abused apprentice chef, and Charlette Speigner exudes compassion as Sally’s mother Betty.

Mark Anderson Phillips is full of childish self-absorption and persuasive charisma as Jefferson. Though he believes himself sincere, the play exposes Jefferson’s hypocrisy at every turn. He spouts pieties about his deep belief in the abolition of slavery with no intention of freeing the more than a hundred people enslaved on his own plantation. He keeps patting himself on the back for how relatively well treated they are, but he keeps himself in denial that they’re enslaved at all, always referring to them as “servants.” He blithely babbles about their supposed love of manual labor and how he thinks intelligence in mixed race people is proportional to how much white is in the mix.

The play mostly explores why Sally and James ever came back with Jefferson from Paris, where slavery had been abolished. The framing device gives Bradshaw ample opportunity to explicitly debate the issues the story brings up, which he does in a noncommittal way, presenting an argument and a counterargument and just leaving them there to think about. He inserts a fair amount of humor and style, but ultimately it feels like he tries so hard to be fair to everyone that he doesn’t bring much of a perspective to the story at all.