Round House Theatre wraps up its season with a timely, resonant selection timed to coincide with–and to comment on–the national observations of America’s 250th. Penned by the reliably thoughtful, and thought-provoking, Suzan-Lori Parks, the play, Sally & Tom, takes a hard and even uncomfortable look at the truth behind the myths, the reality behind the history we’re often taught.
It does this not in straight documentary form, but by using the frame of a play–not only to set the past within a modern context that provides parallels, echoes, and contrasts; but also to provide a mirror or recapitulation of the storytelling, the fantasy, the fabulation that it’s committed to exposing. It does this by putting the entire story inside the construct that an imaginary theater company has set out to tell this story, only to end up mixing up the personal with the professional, history with fiction, and combustible personalities with inflammatory material. In other words, situation normal.
Dubbed by the producers at Round House “a ferocious and funny dramedy,” Parks’s new play is characteristically hard to pin down for tone and genre; or, rather, is quintessentially generous in her embrace of a range of tones, styles, and approaches. Sally & Tom asks audiences to wrestle with substantial and thorny issues, along the lines of race, gender, identity, freedom, expression, identity, the economics of politics and the politics of economics. It also poses hard questions for itself such as who decides what History is, who gets included and who gets left out, and what we do with the differences. But it also offers laughter aplenty–at our expense, at its own expense, and at the expense of human beings being human.
As you can hear in my conversation with acting company member Ro Boddie, who joined me to reflect on the play and the dual singularity of his roles in it, Sally and Tom asks audiences to revisit what they thought was familiar and to hear, see, and think about it all in new ways.
