On a recent afternoon in Minneapolis, Parks sat behind a folding table and watched a stumbling block of “Sally and Tom,” being developed in collaboration with Public. Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, this production is structured as a play within a play. A contemporary New York theater troupe is pictured on the final day of rehearsals for a new play about Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, an enslaved woman. Parks had a long-standing interest in Jefferson and Hemings, at one point working on a television project about a relationship that never came to fruition. According to her, the play is not a simple historical drama, but “about how the world is made and how we live in this country.”
The protagonist is a playwright, warm but austere like Parks, rewriting and rebuilding the show as opening night approaches. When I asked Guthrie’s artistic director, Joseph Haji, how much he thought the play was about Parks, he shrugged at first and said that the artist is always present in his work. After going through it, he grabbed me and corrected his remarks. “I retract everything I said,” he said. “I see her through this.”
Kristen Ariza, who plays playwright and Hemmings (the fictional playwright star in her own play), said, “The play is full of humor, but it’s not.
“It feels so meta, because we’re acting within a play, like we’re doing all these things,” she said. “She’s always asking, ‘Does this fit? is it working? Is it flowing correctly? She listens to us and adds things and makes things work better as we go. “
A few days later, Parks was in Times Square watching an invited “Top Dog/Under Dog” dress rehearsal. The set is covered from floor to ceiling with American flags tinted in gold. This is what director Kenny Leung told me to reflect the way commerce permeates culture.
Two successful film actors, Corey Hawkins (“In the Heights”) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (“Watchmen,” “Aquaman”), play the role of storied brothers with the mischievous names of Lincoln and Booth. play. They share a shabby apartment. Lincoln, fatefully, works as a Lincoln impersonator at an amusement park where patrons pretend to assassinate him, but Booth makes ends meet by shoplifting. Relationships to each other, truth-telling, and shared history are at the heart of the story.