The
Skidmore College
Department
of Theater and Office of Special Programs
Proudly
Present
Sally
a New
Play by Sandra Seaton
with Mizan Nunes as
Sally Hemings
directed by Robert Graham Small
Sally
Hemings, a slave who served as Thomas Jefferson's mistress, accompanied him
on his diplomatic assignment to Paris, and (according to recent DNA evidence)
bore him at least one child.
In order to bring this enigmatic and fascinating figure
back to life, Sandra Seaton created a fictitious diary for Hemings.
In SALLY, an aged Sally Hemings recalls her life with Jefferson, reliving
and re-evaluating the dilemmas she faced and the choices she made.
The Janet
Kinghorn Bernhard Theater
Skidmore
College, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
Saturday,
February 2, 2008 8:00pm
Admission Free
Call 518-580-5430 for information
SANDRA SEATON is a playwright and librettist. Her plays have been performed in
cities throughout the country, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles,
Cleveland, Ann Arbor and East Lansing. She has been chosen for inclusion in the
upcoming Gale Thomson standard reference work Contemporary Authors. In 2005 her Reflections
on the Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. premiered at Michigan State University Great
Hall of the Wharton Center for the Performing Arts. In 2005 her play The
Bridge Party,
winner of the Theodore Ward Prize for African American Playwrights, was
performed at Cleveland's Karamu Theatre, the oldest African American theater
company in the United States.
Seaton has explored the relationship between the president and Sally
Hemings in a number of works. She first dramatized the relationship in her
libretto for the song cycle From the Diary of Sally Hemings, a collaboration with Pulitzer
Prize-winning composer William Bolcom, who set Seaton's text to music.
The work, for voice and piano, recreates the thoughts and feelings
of Sally Hemings throughout her long relationship with Thomas Jefferson by
means of fictional diary entries. Seaton's text presents Sally Hemings as
a complex individual who refused to be defined only as Jefferson's mistress.
From The Diary of Sally Hemings premiered at the Coolidge Auditorium
of the Library of Congress in 2001 with acclaimed mezzo soprano Florence Quivar
and was praised by the Washington Post for its "subtle, penetrating power."
In the one-woman drama, Sally, an aged Sally Hemings recalls her life
with Jefferson, reliving and re-evaluating the dilemmas she faced and the
choices she made. Sally premiered at the New York State Writers Institute
at the State University of New York in Albany.
Sandra Seaton's plays have been performed in Chicago, Los Angeles,
and in New York at Woodie King's New Federal Theatre. The Bridge Party has been anthologized in Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by
American Women.
The play portrays a group of Southern black women who gather for a weekly
bridge game against a background of lynching and house-to-house searches. Ruby
Dee appeared in a 1998 production of The Bridge Party.
Seaton's other plays include The Will, about the struggles of a black
Tennessee family during Reconstruction, as well as a trilogy of plays about
African-American students at a Midwestern university during the Civil Rights
Movement: Room and Board, Do You Like Philip Roth? and Reservations. She has been awarded residencies
at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Ragdale and Dorset artists' colonies. As a Professor
of English at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Sandra
Seaton taught courses in playwriting, fiction writing, and African American
Literature. Sandra Cecelia Seaton was born in Columbia, Tennessee.
The stories of her grandmother, Emma Louish Evans, and her mother,
Hattye Harris, remain an important influence on her writing.
Grandma Emma also instilled in her granddaughter great pride in the
work of their relative Flournoy Miller, who wrote the book and starred in
Shuffle Along,
a musical that many believe inaugurated the Harlem Renaissance. Seaton is
currently working on a new play, A Bed Made in Heaven, about Sally Hemings and Thomas
Jefferson.
Mizan Nunes appears as the title character,
Sally Hemmings. Born and raised in Trinidad, she is a graduate of Franklin
and Marshall College and trained at the American Conservatory Theatre in San
Francisco. She has appeared
in many plays in New York and elsewhere including Ethnic Bacchanal, Rosa,
Who is Alice Daphné?, Sherlock Holmes and the Hands of Othello, King
Lear (Goneril), Antony and Cleopatra (Cleopatra), Hamlet
(Ophelia), Othello (Desdemona), The Trial of Adam Clayton Powell
Jr., I Marcus Garvey and the Captivity of Babylon, Once in a Wife Time, Mothers
and Daughters, Faith, Hope and Charity, Fortunes of the Moor, and Shakin'
The Mess Outta Misery. Her film work includes Alma's Rainbow, Off
the Hook, The Occulist, Crooklyn, and Married to the Mob. Her
praywriting credits include My Journey (presented at The Normandie
in Trinidad) and Incidents (part of the River Festival at New York's
Ensemble Studio Theatre). Ms. Nunes has been heard on the award winning
Midnight Ravers Fade to Black on New York's WBAI.
ROBERT
GRAHAM SMALL is Artistic
Director of Shenandoah International Playwrights, Ink. He is an accomplished
dramaturg, director, lighting designer, and teacher with extensive national
and international experience. He has worked in residence at such institutions
as the Yale Repertory Theatre and Drama School, Willamstown Theatre Festival,
Pan Asian Repertory Company, Chelsea Theatre Center, and The Ensemble for
Early Music. He has served as Artistic Director of ShenanArts (Staunton,
VA), Producing Director for Riverside Shakespeare Company in NYC, and twice
directed for the late Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival. Dramaturgy
and developmental work include The Eugene O' Neill National Playwrights Conference,
The New Harmony Project, and 31 years at Shenandoah International. He is the
author of plays such as American Christmas Carol 1852,
Garden Menagerie, and
American Yarn. He
has been a regional and national adjudicator for the J. F. Kennedy Center's
American College Theatre Festival, as well as for the University of Iowa's
Playwrights Festival. He served as a Jurist for the Cairo International
Festival of Experimental Theatre. He recently received an award as an Honored
Theatre Artist at the Jordanian Theatre Festival in Amman. Teaching residencies
have included Yale, SUNY Purchase, Notre Dame/St. Mary's, George Mason University,
and Catholic University of America, Chung Ying Theatre (Hong Kong), the Londrina
Festival in Brazil, and the Waterford Theatre Centre, Waterford, Ireland
He currently serves as an Adjunct Professor at Western Michigan University
and Kalamazoo College. He has served on peer review panels for the Maryland,
Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania Arts Commissions. He is
a member of Rotary International (Portage Club Board of Directors, and Group
Study Exchange team leader to the Philippines); and a member since 1977 of
the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.
The production will be
followed by a question and answer session with the playwright, director and
actor. This will be followed by a reception in our lobby.
This production is made
possible through the generosity of the Skidmore College Office of the President.
We would like to gratefully acknowledge the generous support of President
Phil Glotzbach.
Background
Notes from Playwright Sandra Seaton
My first
project about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson was a libretto for a song
cycle entitled FROM THE DIARY OF SALLY HEMINGS, which I wrote at the
request of composer William Bolcom. Prior to writing FROM THE DIARY,
I spent about a year immersing myself in the world of 18th century France
and Virginia. In these fictional diary entries (no writing by the historical
Sally Hemings has been discovered), my aim was to allow Sally Hemings to speak
for herself. I envisioned her as a proud woman, an individual with an identity
in her own right. From The Diary of Sally Hemings, premiered
in March 2001 at the Coolidge Auditorium of the Thomas Jefferson building
at the Library of Congress's Jefferson Building. At the premiere, 45 descendants
of Sally Hemings were present. Since then, I have been in touch with the descendants
of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson as well as a number of Jefferson scholars. In
July 2007, I was invited to the Monticello Community gathering. The emphasis
was on the whole community - not just the Hemings-Jefferson connection. The
event brought together the descendants of a number of groups connected with
Monticello: Jefferson and the other owners of Monticello (the Levys), all
the enslaved families, including Hemings descendants, plus artisans--bricklayers,
millwrights, carpenters. There was even an Italian family there whose ancestor
had brought over the grapes that Jefferson used in his vineyard. I met the
descendants of Jefferson's butler Burwell. The whole event was fascinating
The
enthusiastic response to FROM THE DIARY at its premiere and at subsequent performances throughout
the country at venues such as the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and the
Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, as well as my own interest in exploring the
relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, led me to write SALLY. The story of Sally Hemings and Thomas
Jefferson has captured the collective imagination, giving us new ways of
thinking about our third president and about race in American history, about
the ways in which the stories of blacks and whites in the United States are
both conflicted and interconnected. Sally Hemings, it is important to remember,
was legally Thomas Jefferson's slave, but she was also Thomas Jefferson's first
wife's half-sister. Students, in particular, are hungry for a an historically
accurate and dramatically powerful portrait of a world whose dilemmas about
race were so different from our own and yet strangely similar.
My
portrait of Sally Hemings is based not only on a study of the growing
historical literature on Jefferson and Sally Hemings but also on my own family
history. Growing up as an African American in the South before the civil rights
era, I heard many family stories about relationships between blacks and whites
outside the law. Some were love relationships; other were exploitative--some
were probably both.
The
Sally Hemings dramatized here is a woman who seized the opportunity to enjoy
French fashion and culture, a woman whose intellect and taste were limited
neither by her legal status nor racial categorization. The experience of Paris
is central to my Sally Hemings. She never forgot either the freedom it promised
or the wider world it offered. The Monticello overseer, a not particularly
sensitive observer, remembers her talking about Paris in his memoirs. The
Africa passed down in family stories and the Paris she lived in provide my
Sally Hemings with an awareness of societies and standards beyond her own
time and place. She will never accept slavery for herself or her children
as natural or inevitable. She is a proud woman who refuses to join the conspiracy
to ignore her "Bloodlines!"--just as her descendants continued to
refuse until finally the whole world acknowledged their claims.
Scholars
are unsure whether the historical Sally Hemings could read or write. My own
reading of the documents leads me to suspect that Sally was indeed literate;
since there is incontrovertible evidence that other members of the Hemings
family were, the possibility that Sally Hemings could read is historically
plausible. Historians have often described Sally as flighty or irresponsible
based on the contemporary testimony of white observers; perhaps, however,
the quality that bothered people like Abigail Adams was Sally's ability to
think and reason beyond her "station."
My
view of Sally Hemings is based on the facts of her situation as they are known
to us. It seems significant, for example, that no scholar has unearthed any
rumors linking Jefferson to any other woman during the years he apparently
lived with Sally Hemings. Jefferson's private life has been scrutinized by
political adversaries in his own time and by scholars in our own time so
closely that if there were any hint of an illicit relationship with any other
woman, it would have been known. If there were evidence that Sally Hemings had
been only one of Jefferson's sexual partners among many, then one would have to
look at the relationships in an entirely different light.
Jefferson's
apparent faithfulness to Sally over many years suggest that Sally Hemings
was more common-law wife than sexual plaything. I suspect that Sally Hemings
influenced Thomas Jefferson as much as he influenced her. . .