Play criticized:
Play on Jefferson’s slave criticized over race, rape portrayal
Marin production spurs debate over its portrayal of race and rape.
For more than two weeks, before every performance of “Thomas and Sally,” Tracy Camp has stood outside the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley handing out flyers as guests arrived, essentially asking them to turn around and boycott the play.
At the very top, in bold, the handout reads: “Please help us put an end to harmful stereotypes; do not support this play or Marin Theatre Company. Ask for a refund and let Marin Theatre Company know why.”
The play in question — a fictionalized account of the relationship between founding father Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who was made to bear him six children — has been a lightning rod for controversy since before it opened. But what began as complaints on social media about a single image has spun out into a fierce debate about representations of black women, the dangers of historical revisionism and rape.
Several black women, and their allies, have been protesting the play — in person and online — saying it minimizes the repeated rape of a young enslaved girl by the man who owned her, and that there’s no ground for ambiguity in Hemings’ experience. Marin Theatre Company, which commissioned playwright Thomas Bradshaw to create the play in 2014, says the story, however ahistorical, should be told. “Sally Hemings and her family deserve to be part of our national story,” Jasson Minadakis, the artistic director, wrote in a letter posted on the company’s website.
The first hints of what would unfold came when advertise-
“We’rethe same still conversationshaving of sexualizing women of color. I think if people had an idea of what we still face today and how it is affected by the past ... people might not write, might not say, might not view certain things.” Regina Evans, who is protesting “Thomas and Sally” at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley
ments began appearing on Facebook. That’s how Camp first learned of the production. In the promotions, the actress who plays Hemings stares straight ahead, with an unmistakable coy smile on her face. Behind her, Jefferson looks off into the distance.
The ad immediately hit Camp as inappropriate.
“The picture of Sally Hemings looked seductive and in control,” Camp says. The actress was much older than Hemings would have been during the time in her life the play depicts — 14 years old, according to historians — and her come-hither look, based on the actress’ head shot, gave the impression that somehow an enslaved child held leverage over the decades-older man who owned her as property.
“I assumed the play was fine,” Camp said. “I had heard it was written by a black man.” So she focused on the image itself.
Camp went to the theater’s Facebook page and noticed others had been commenting on the image as well. At first their concerns were met with dismissive responses from the company — one was simply an image of a cowboy tipping his hat. (The image has since been deleted, but Camp saved a screenshot.)
Eventually, though, the theater company apologized and agreed to remove the image wherever possible (though it still appears as the cover art for the play’s handbill).
That was victory, Camp thought, until she received an early copy of the script. Several scenes bothered her, especially those that implied Hemings enjoyed having sex with Jefferson — an act Camp says can only be viewed as rape given the circumstances. “I think that’s dangerous for women, dangerous for black women.”
Bradshaw is known for crafting explosive and controversial pieces. In an earlier interview with The Chronicle, he said he hoped “Thomas and Sally” would complicate the narrative that “all slave owners were evil, and that all slaves were noble martyrs . ... I try not to portray anyone as good or evil. Everyone exists along a spectrum of gray.”
“I think that’s dangerous for women, dangerous for black women.” Tracy Camp, on the portrayal of Sally Hemings in the play “Thomas and Sally”
It’s also made explicitly clear, both in the play and on Marin Theatre Company’s website, that the story is not meant to be historically accurate. “‘Thomas and Sally’ is a work of historical fiction. You may recognize many of the names in this play, but others are pure invention. History is highly malleable and subject to interpretation,” Bradshaw wrote in a statement.
For Camp and others, a disclaimer is no justification for suggesting that Hemings’ enslavement and rape were anything other than evil. “It bothered me that the playwright says up front this is fiction and we’re making it up,” Camp says. That’s especially true given the many racist writings produced by Jefferson and the undisputed fact that he owned some 600 slaves. What’s more, last year, historians uncovered Hemings’ slave quarters at Monticello, Jefferson’s estate near Charlottesville, Va. It was a single room with no windows.
“If you’re bearing witness, then bear witness to the truth,” says Regina Evans, one of the women who has protested in person at the theater. “The theater has a huge voice. Why not use that in a healing way? A way that brings about compassion and empathy?”
The issue hit Evans particularly hard. She’s a survivor of sexual assault and works to end human trafficking. She sees those issues as bound to Hemings’ story. “We’re still having the same conversations of sexualizing women of color,” she says. “I think if people had an idea of what we still face today and how it is affected by the past ... people might not write, might not say, might not view certain things.”
Minadakis, the artistic director, says he understands the protesters’ concerns but that the play is much more layered than that, and “it’s been difficult to have a conversation around that subject with people who have not seen the play.” He pointed to efforts on the theater company’s behalf to hold discussions and panels around the work as evidence that he and others are invested in making the controversy productive. “We’ve learned a lot through this process ... and how things are going to be different next time.”
Camp never expected the protests to shut down the play. She says she never let herself get that optimistic. Instead she’s hoping that people will see her and others standing there, will read the flyer, full of the words of several black women describing the harm caused by the play, and will turn around or, at the very least, watch it with a critical eye, “rather than just taking it in unconsciously.”