In This D.C. Area Play, Sally Hemings Is Given a Voice

Before she portrayed Sally Hemings on stage, Renea Brown took a visit to Monticello and found herself frustrated.

“There is so much information on how there is very little information about her, really – [it] just didn’t sit well with me,” she recalled.

It was clear from the tour that residents of the house had to know about the relationship between the enslaved woman and Thomas Jefferson. It is believed to have started when she was as young as 14 and he was in his 40s, and it lasted for decades. So where were the letters? The gifts? Were they all destroyed?

When Brown stood in one of the rooms that Hemings was thought to inhabit, she felt the space didn’t quite convey the weight of what happened to her. “It felt very much like a facade,” she said.

Now Brown stars in “Sally and Tom,” which runs through Sunday at Round House Theatre in Bethesda and attempts to fill this historical gap. Premiering in 2022 and running off-Broadway in 2024, it’s written by Suzan-Lori Parks, a celebrated playwright known for stories that show how America’s past shapes its present.

“Sally & Tom” is the latest in a long line of artistic works about this relationship. Most of them explore the contradictions of the founding father whose “all men are created equal” proclamation turns 250 this year, and give voice to the woman who was forced to bow to his desires.

“There’s a quote that I love: ‘I don’t know this for a fact, but I know it’s true,’” said Timothy Douglas, who directs the Bethesda production. “We have Thomas Jefferson facts, but with Sally Hemings, Suzan-Lori Parks tells the truth.”

The Jefferson-Hemings relationship was hazily reported by the press in Jefferson’s lifetime, but awareness has grown in recent decades through books such as Fawn M. Brodie’s 1974 Jefferson biography and Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer-winning book “The Hemingses of Monticello” from 2008.

The foundation that runs Monticello acknowledges Jefferson fathered at least six of Hemings’ children, and in 2018 expanded its exhibits to include more material on Hemings and her family.

The playwright Sandra Seaton has explored Hemings in three different stage works, including a solo show in which she plays Hemings and tries to persuade Jefferson to free their children.

“The biggest challenge I suppose was thinking [through] the argument about whether she could have her own agency, whether because she was a slave did she have any kind of power on her own to create a life, make choices,” Seaton said. “I think the Sally Hemings, hopefully, that I created — I show that she does, that she is powerful.”

Arguably the most notable take on the pair came in the play “Thomas and Sally,” which premiered at the Marin Theatre Company in California in 2017. That show attempts to speak to the present by having a descendant of Hemings recount the relationship to her college roommate. But when it premiered, its depiction of the relationship sparked protests, angry comments online and an open letter released by 13 Black artists and signed by 1,600 people demanding that the venue apologize for what they viewed as an irresponsibly romanticized portrayal.

The Marin Theatre Company mounted “Sally & Tom” this fall, revisiting the topic that had once mired the organization in controversy. Executive artistic director Lance Gardner, who directed the production, said it wasn’t meant to be a healing or an apology — he believes the two works are in conversation.

“Whereas ‘Thomas and Sally’ created this tension in our artistic and theatrical community, ‘Sally & Tom’ sort of musically resolved that tension,” he said.

Gardner said one thing he likes about “Sally & Tom” is “acknowledging that life is complicated and we don’t really know why we love people and maybe we don’t even know what love is, and maybe in these situations, in power imbalances, maybe there’s no such thing as love.”

The play explores these tensions through a unique framing device: A contemporary theater company is staging a play about Jefferson and Hemings, and the plot bounces between their rehearsed scenes and their offstage lives. The performers taking on the two main roles also contend with a stormy offstage romance and an unseen backer who wants to cut a particularly explosive speech by Sally’s brother James.

Parks told American Theatre in 2022 that the work is “an opportunity to develop our skills at having a nuanced conversation about deep and perhaps difficult things.”

In Bethesda, Brown especially enjoys getting to perform a climactic scene in which Sally finally gets to state how she really feels, including the line, “The horror of him wanting me keeps me from other horrors.”

“It feels like if you were to picture Sally carrying a trash bag and you just stuff all of this hate, you stuff all of these high emotions into this bag, eventually you’ve got to take the bag out because it’s going to burst,” Brown said of the scene.

She added that, ultimately, “I don’t think it’s love – it’s ‘how do I survive?’”