I couldn’t help but think of the musical Kiss Me, Kate as I emerged from Suzan-Lori Parks’s new play, Sally and Tom at the Public Theater In both, we see actors dealing with each other as they work on a new play. In Kiss Me, Kate, the offstage relationship between the couple playing the leads echoes the relationship between Kate and Petruchio in the musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. As you might imagine, the stakes are weightier in Sally and Tom given the play being rehearsed in Parks’s play dramatizes the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the slave he first took up with when she was a teenager. Certainly from our contemporary perspective, the idea of a middle-aged man sleeping with an underage girl is disturbing. The fact that he sleeps with an underage girl he owns makes it even more appalling.

But, not having first-hand witnesses of their relationship and not having the words of the leading figures in correspondence to refer to, we have little idea what the Hemings-Jefferson relationship consisted of. It lasted a long time and was believed to have produced several children. There is no question of the power dynamic having favored Jefferson, but given the narrowness of Heming’s choices and her knowledge of the lives of other slaves, to what degree did she reconcile herself to the situation? Did a genuine bond exist between them? Did habit overcome what would be natural revulsion?

We don’t know. And Luce, the leading character in Parks’ play, doesn’t know either. She is, however, highly aware of the contemporary politics of her relationship with her boyfriend, Mike. Aside from being her romantic partner, he is the director of the play she has written about Sally and Tom and he is playing Tom opposite her Sally. The personal politics and the power structure of non-profit theater producing certainly influence both the writing and production of her play. Actors in plays, of course, are not slaves, but they can be compelled by writers and directors to say and do things against their consciences. And the people who fund these plays can also pressure the writers and directors to do things they don’t want to do in order to keep their shows alive.

Parks deftly shifts back and forth between the scenes Luce has imagined for the characters she’s researched and the issues that come up in the politics of contemporary theater, letting us discover the parallels without succumbing to the temptation to interpret them for us. Some of the contemporary scenes are sketchily written, but I just decided to accept developments that I might have challenged in a play with a heavier tone for the sake of the larger pleasures the play offers in abundance. It helps that the cast – led by Sheria Irving as Luce/Sally and Gabriel Ebert as Mike/Tom – are up to the challenge, transforming from one world to another, often in a second. Steve H. Broadnax III has directed a complicated script with grace. It is one of the plays for which I will remember this season.