With its multiracial solid, curiosity in interracial and queer intimacy and emphasis on race’s psychosexual dimension, “Sally & Tom” echoes current theater hits like “Hamilton” and “Slave Play” with a view to ironize each starry-eyed multiculturalism and cynical provocation. At one level, two members of the solid and crew — Geoff, who’s white, and Devon, who’s Black — are speaking concerning the relationship. “Tom was nice to Sally,” Geoff says, nostalgically evaluating Jefferson’s supposed chivalry to the coldness of up to date hookups. “ ’Cause, I mean, they did stay together for over 30 years.” Devon retorts: “She was his slave, yo.” The corporate’s stage supervisor, Scout, is an aspiring Asian American actor who performs Jefferson’s youthful daughter, Polly. In a nod to the vexations of nontraditional casting, she wonders whether or not she actually has a task to play on this story. “Were there any Korean Americans in America in 1790?” she jokes. “How much skin do I actually have in this game?” The play’s jagged humor cuts in lots of instructions directly, poking enjoyable on the slim and simplistic phrases of our racial discourse. As a substitute, Parks asks us to reckon with the methods race confounds simple accounting.
In a putting scene from Luce’s play throughout the play, after Sally begs Jefferson to not ship her household away, he makes an attempt to elide his energy over the teenage woman. “I love you,” he whispers. “I thank you,” Sally responds. On the efficiency I noticed, the viewers laughed at Sally’s reply. When Parks recounted the scene to me throughout a dialog, although, I didn’t interpret it as a joke. I heard it as each an assertion of a strategic transaction and an open query in Sally’s thoughts. By no means thoughts love: Might good will and favor, the foundation of gratitude, be bestowed from slave to grasp? Might such heat feeling truthfully coexist with the bitterness of unfreedom? Or was it simply an act of bitter piety to get alongside?
In March I noticed Parks carry out at Manhattan’s Rockwood Music Corridor — not a play, however a set together with her band, Sula and the Joyful Noise. (The band’s title isn’t a reference to Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel, “Sula,” as I first thought, however a childhood nickname Parks’s father gave her.) Parks isn’t new to music — she has performed piano since she was a toddler, and has written songs for and performed music in her performs. Contained in the venue, as she met up with the opposite band members, the power was heat. The room stuffed up with a multiracial and multigenerational group of associates and followers. The band, as Parks described it, is a “test kitchen,” and this was their first reside gig.
Onstage, Parks was petite however mighty, with an electrical guitar strapped in entrance of her. Her husband, Christian, armed with a perennially amused countenance and a deeply grooving bass, stood on one facet of her. She is the one girl within the band of “dudes,” as she calls them, sporting a miniskirt and pink-glitter-dyed boots that when belonged to a beloved deceased neighbor, and an identical pink ruffled guitar strap, together with her waist-length dreadlocks rolled up into enormous buns as if she have been a feminist superhero. Singing in a voice that gave the impression of what may occur if Bette Davis, Ida Cox and David Byrne had a child, she channeled totally different personae. In a single music, she embodied the spirit of a fugitive slave with a sardonic tackle self-emancipation: “I have misplaced myself,” she repeated, eliciting a full of life name and response from the group.
The lyrics and scenario — a various crowd becoming a member of Parks to evoke the spirit of a runaway slave — felt just like the type of productive provocation Parks’s work insists on. She delivered a message from the American underside, welcoming all comers. Within the venue, the fabled “e pluribus unum” was the music of the slave moderately than that of the grasp.
