With its multiracial solid, curiosity in interracial and queer intimacy and emphasis on race’s psychosexual dimension, “Sally & Tom” echoes latest theater hits like “Hamilton” and “Slave Play” with a purpose 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 good to Sally,” Geoff says, nostalgically evaluating Jefferson’s supposed chivalry to the coldness of up to date hookups. “ ’Trigger, I imply, they did keep collectively 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. “Have been there any Korean Individuals in America in 1790?” she jokes. “How a lot pores and skin do I even have on this sport?” The play’s jagged humor cuts in lots of instructions without delay, poking enjoyable on the slender and simplistic phrases of our racial discourse. As an alternative, Parks asks us to reckon with the methods race confounds simple accounting.
In a hanging 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 lady. “I like you,” he whispers. “I thanks,” 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 basis of gratitude, be bestowed from slave to grasp? Might such heat feeling actually 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 identify is just not 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 baby, 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 pals and followers. The band, as Parks described it, is a “take a look at 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 aspect of her. She is the one lady within the band of “dudes,” as she calls them, carrying a miniskirt and pink-glitter-dyed boots that after belonged to a beloved deceased neighbor, and an identical pink ruffled guitar strap, together with her waist-length dreadlocks rolled up into large buns as if she had been a feminist superhero. Singing in a voice that appeared like what may occur if Bette Davis, Ida Cox and David Byrne had a child, she channeled completely different personae. In a single music, she embodied the spirit of a fugitive slave with a sardonic tackle self-emancipation: “I’ve misplaced myself,” she repeated, eliciting a energetic name and response from the gang.
The lyrics and state of affairs — a various crowd becoming a member of Parks to evoke the spirit of a runaway slave — felt just like the sort 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 slightly than that of the grasp.
