09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
This Bay Area theater sparked protests. Now it's revisiting the same topic
In 2017, the company now called Marin Theatre produced a show so controversial that Black women and their allies staged peaceful protests outside the venue, passing out flyers urging patrons not to support the show. Some of those protesters created a website demanding accountability from the theater.
That show, penned by Black playwright Thomas Bradshaw, was called 'Thomas and Sally,' about Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore Thomas Jefferson six children.
Now, less than a decade later, the company plans to mount 'Sally & Tom,' which seems to speak directly to those difficult events.
'I don't know what it was, a devil or an angel on my shoulder,' Artistic Director Lance Gardner told the Chronicle. 'It started out like a whisper: 'Hey, hear me out: What if we did 'Sally & Tom'? ''
Gardner, who took the helm of the theater in 2023, was rehearsing a separate Marin Theatre play at the time of the 'Thomas and Sally' debate and recalled, 'It was really an all-consuming conversation and one that it seemed the theater was not equipped to have.'
That conversation still feels 'unresolved,' he added, hoping that 'Sally & Tom' — written by Suzan-Lori Parks, a Black woman — might help it move forward.
Parks' piece, he explained, 'is not a play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. It is a play about an up-and-coming theater wrestling with trying to produce a play about it.' That fictional group's struggles remind him of Marin Theatre's experience.
'It centers a Black female playwright who is also the lead actor,' he added.
He confirmed with the Chronicle he has not yet spoken with any of the 'Thomas and Sally' protesters about his plans, preferring to wait till after revealing his season, which was announced Thursday, May 8.
Gardner is directing the West Coast premiere — the longtime actor and new producer's first time in that role at a major theater.
'Because of this material,' he said, 'I did not want to put this into anyone else's hands.'
The lineup's opener, 'Eureka Day' (Aug. 28-Sept. 21), is just as exciting. Oakland playwright Jonathan Spector just nabbed a Tony Award nomination for his script, about a mumps outbreak at an uber-liberal, ultra-affluent Berkeley private school. This production reunites almost all of the original cast from the show's world premiere at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre, along with director Josh Costello. (Aurora is a partner on the production.)
Gardner, who attended elementary school in Berkeley and Oakland, praised the way Spector combines audacity with economy.
'It's not this big, sweeping thing, but it contains big, sweeping ideas for our time,' he said. Spector, he went on, 'complicates people's arguments without waving a finger.'
After 'Sally & Tom,' the company presents Anton Chekhov's 'The Cherry Orchard' (Jan. 29-Feb. 22). Carey Perloff, who recently directed the hit 'Waste' for the company, returns to helm the 1904 classic about Russian aristocrats reluctant to part with their debt-ridden estate.
As a selector of plays, Gardner admitted a general preference for aesthetics and ideas over story. In 'The Cherry Orchard,' characters stagnate rather than move forward along an event-packed narrative. But he believes it provides 'a bridge to modern times,' with characters 'not so far away' that contemporary audiences can't relate to them.
'This idea of holding on to something in spite of the fact that letting it go might be the better idea — that's something that we all wrestle with,' he explained.
The season concludes with the West Coast premiere of 'Pictures From Home' (May 7-31), directed by Jonathan Moscone.
Sharr White's play, set partly in the Marin community of Greenbrae, is inspired by the eponymous photo memoir by the Bay Area's own Larry Sultan, a photographer who taught at San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts. In delving into Sultan's parents' lives, the show is grounded in what Gardner called sons' 'life-defining' quest for approval and respect from their fathers.
It also prominently features Sultan's stunning images of his parents at home in the San Fernando Valley, with carpets as lush and thick as lawns, with makeup as garish as the wallpaper, with golf balls and swimsuits always at arm's length and the sun an omnipresent oppressor.
