Kalyn West plays Sally Hemings

THE THIRD CROSSING is my first production with Plan-B Theatre Company and I am so grateful to start off in a piece of such beauty and complexity. The life of Sally Hemings [a house slave in Thomas Jefferson's household that also bore him several children] is a true enigma and fascinating to explore. As a woman of the 21st century it is deeply humbling to look at the life of a woman who had no voice, much less choice. She endured far more than I can ever imagine and did it all with a silent dignity that simultaneously renders respect and pity. Then again, the whole point of THE THIRD CROSSING is that we don’t know how she personally viewed her situation so either response finds little validation. I consider this to be the most beautiful aspect of the play – the attempt to give voice to a figure who was buried in secrecy and injustice. As human beings, we seem deeply compelled to defend and define ourselves in the world; ensure that we are known for all that we think, feel and believe. This is the very thing Sally was unable to do.

I was cast last spring and have been excitedly awaiting the process, thinking about Sally and how her life translates to me. At the end of the first week of rehearsal, I am teeming with questions that remain unanswered:  How did Sally feel about her situation?  Was she angry?  Did it make her feel powerful?  Did she ever want to run away?  Did she really love Thomas Jefferson?  I wish so badly that there were some means of reaching into the past to tap her on the shoulder, embrace her and invite her to unload every suppressed thought and feeling. Some quality girl talk. A “venting-session.” Seems rather silly, but I entertain the fantasy just the same. I wonder what I would say to her.  Would we have anything in common?  Would we make each other laugh?  Would she appreciate or detest the attention she still gets today?  I wonder all these things in a surprisingly frightened state because I will never get the opportunity to hear her side of the story and here I am trying to portray her and do her justice on the stage. It is a delicate, honorable task.

THE THIRD CROSSING artwork by Greg & Hollie Ragland

It is difficult for me to react without anger to stories of racism in our present and not-so-far-removed past.  It’s a small, nearly-long-forgotten moment in my life, but I do remember being told by some girls in elementary school that they didn’t want to be my friend because I was “brown.”  I remember my little sister coming home in tears when a friend cut her out for not being Mormon.  I also feel my heart break every time I read or hear about another suicide because of the oppression surrounding homosexuality.  Society falls prey to all sorts of labels that separate and harm us, fueled by the potential for humans to inflict pain, which I’ve always considered frightening.  I am grateful though, for I have not experienced true social degradation that comes with far more contempt, arrogance and violence. Particularly that of racism.  How would I feel if I wasn’t permitted to marry the person I love because of my skin color, religion, sexual orientation, etc.?  How would I feel if I was denied basic human rights?  How would I feel if I was denied my freedom?  The fact tthat all of these hypothetical questions for me are realities for others leaves me breathless. I strongly believe that educating people is the best way to create understanding and acceptance.  So for me, the exposure of such injustices through theater like THE THIRD CROSSING is the most comforting remedy. It is stunning, the things one can achieve by stepping outside oneself, suspending one’s disbelief and, for a moment, considering the perspective of another human being.

Kalyn West plays Sally Hemings

While I can only experience the receding waves of the storm that Sally Hemings endured and can only imagine what life must have been like for her, considering her perspective and trying to understand the gravity of her situation is beginning to give me a glimpse of her world.  A glimpse of the anger, frustration, longing for change, understanding, hope and love that she must have felt – the same emotions that arise in my heart when I see or experience injustice today.  This sameness bridges the gap between us, bringing her to life again.

I am honored to share Sally’s story and give her a voice.

Plan-B Theatre Company’s world premiere of Debora Threedy’s THE THIRD CROSSING, featuring Kalyn West as Sally Hemings, runs March 8-18, 2012.  Click here for tickets and more information.

Playwright Debora Threedy

I wrote THE THIRD CROSSING to answer the question:  How could two people live together for thirty-eight years, have children together, run a household together, when the woman is a slave of the man?  More particularly, what was that life like for her?  Was it a life of unmitigated horror – a lifetime of rape?  Was it secret love hidden from a disapproving world?  Or was it something much more complex?  A lifetime of compromise, of making the best of things, of moments of pleasure and intimacy bracketed by moments of pain and degradation?

I’m not the first to be fascinated by this story; I stand on some pretty impressive shoulders, particularly Barbara Chase-Riboud’s historical novel, Sally Hemings, Fawn Brodie’s history, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Life, and Annette Gordon- Reed’s analytic history, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, all of which I recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about this story.

It became clear to me very early on that there had to be an ironic tone to my telling of this story, because the layers of irony are so thick.  First of all, the man in the story is Tom Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, the author of “all men are created equal.”  Tom Jefferson, who himself owned some six hundred slaves and who only freed seven of them in his life or by his will (all of whom, by the way, were related to Sally . . . but not including Sally).  Another layer of irony:  we know so much about Tom Jefferson because he left such a thick documentary record, both by and about him: official writings, books, letters, journals, newspaper articles, etc. etc.  In comparison, we know so little about Sally.  As far as we know, she herself never wrote a thing in her life and the only things Tom Jefferson ever wrote about her were some thirty notations in his Farm Book, his journal of the business of the running of his plantation.  Another irony:  Tom and Sally probably first became an “item” when they were both living in France, Tom as Ambassador and Sally as a maid for his daughters.  According to the law of France (which took to heart the message about liberty that it learned from America), Sally was a free woman while she was on French soil.  Another irony:  the scene about Jefferson’s “mathematical formula” is taken almost verbatim from a letter Jefferson wrote in answer to the question of what the legal definition of “negro” was – and by that letter, Tom Jefferson’s children by Sally were legally “white” – but not free.  So, according to Jefferson, there could be such a thing as a “white slave” – a category that included his own children, including his only surviving sons!  Another irony:  Sally was the half sister of Tom Jefferson’s wife, Martha.  Another:  in the 1830 census, just four years after Tom Jefferson’s death, Sally Hemings, no longer living at Monticello, is listed as “white.”   I could go on and on.  So from the beginning I wanted this irony to be reflected in the play.

THE THIRD CROSSING artwork by Greg & Hollie Ragland

I began writing THE THIRD CROSSING in the mid-90s; my earliest remaining draft is dated 1995.  Originally, the story focused exclusively on Tom and Sally.  It was a long one-act.  I circulated that draft among my friends and writing group, got good feedback, including the recommendation that I somehow “expand” the story as it seemed thin.  Lots of advice on how to do that:  develop the Martha/Sally relationship, move the beginning of the story back earlier to France, move it back even earlier to include Jefferson’s first wife and his deathbed promise to her to never marry again (true).  And I even wrote some of those scenes – and then promptly threw them all out.  Because the play was turning into this historical domestic drama.  And that wasn’t what I wanted at all.  I wanted to keep this ironic distance between the audience and the characters, not get swept up in a soap opera.  (And of course, Hollywood was already doing that: it was during this period that Jefferson in Paris, starring Nick Nolte and Thandie Newton, came out: when I read about the opening in the paper, I was thoroughly disgusted, because now everyone would think I was inspired by the movie – which by the way I have studiously avoided seeing, to this day.) But at the time I couldn’t figure out how to capture that ironic distance.  So I stuck the script in a drawer and there it sat for years, while I went on to other projects – including the story of Everett Ruess that eventually became THE END OF THE HORIZON (which received its world premiere at Plan-B Theatre Company in 2008).

I don’t remember when I finally took the script out of that drawer (actually, a box on the floor of my office) and started to work on it again, but it was sometime in the mid-00s.  When I picked it up again, I very quickly realized what the problem was.  I had said everything I wanted to say about Tom and Sally – but I wanted to show how their story reverberated over the centuries between them and us.  I didn’t want people to be able to say, “Well, that was a long time ago.”  I wanted to bring their story into the present.

I realized I wanted to do two things in the play: imaginatively re-create this very strange (to me) lifestyle of family intimacy where half the family is free and half is enslaved AND imbed it within the larger story of inter-racial relationships in America and the law’s role in policing those relationships – a topic I had studied in my academic life.  And I realized I could do both, by alternating scenes between Tom and Sally and their family, with scenes that moved forward in time.  So Professor Sloan comes into existence, as a feminist scholar commenting on the historic story – a character based on a real-life feminist scholar, Suzette Spencer (whom I’ve contacted by the way and who says she is flattered to be the inspiration for Professor Sloan).  And of course I have to include the story of Mildred and Richard Loving, because their story is the bookend to Tom and Sally’s story:  They are convicted of violating Virginia’s (Jefferson’s home state, remember) Racial Integrity Act, which made inter-racial marriage a crime, and they challenged their convictions all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in a 1967 decision struck down all such acts as unconstitutional.  The case is called Loving v. Virginia.  How’s that for irony?

Listen dramaturg Greg Hatch’s audio interview with playwright Debora Threedy here.

Debora Threedy’s THE THIRD CROSSING (winner of the 2010 Fratti-Newman Political Play Contest and funded by an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts) receives its world premiere March 8-18, 2012 at Plan-B Theatre Company.  Click here for more information and tickets.  Plan-B has previously premiered Ms. Threedy’s THE END OF THE HORIZON (2008) and WALLACE (2010).

Greg Hatch, dramaturg

The reason I have been involved in theatre, in one capacity or another, since I was cast in my first community theatre production at age 12, is I enjoy—no, love!—the communal nature of it. So, I was struck by an epiphany that occurred to me as I was working late on the dramaturgical research for THE THIRD CROSSING [Debora Threedy's play about interracial relationships]  this week. Theatre is an art form that thrives on collaboration, yet there are tasks within the process of creating a show that require practitioners to work in isolation. At times, dramaturgy is one of them.

Depending on the theatre company and the show, dramaturgs can participate in many steps along the production path. In the case of THE THIRD CROSSING, I was first introduced to the script when I taught the Dramaturgy course at the University of Utah in 2007. I wanted to offer a module on new play dramaturgy, so I invited my friend, playwright Debora Threedy, to submit a rough script for the students to read. She accepted and sent me THE THIRD CROSSING, which had been sitting in a drawer for years. The students, in return, read the play and presented Debora with three things: answers to questions she’d posed to them in advance, a brief summary describing what they though the play was “about,” and a list of thought-provoking, open-ended questions that stimulated our in-class discussion.

Taking all of this input with her, Debora then went off to rewrite the play. Graciously, she sent me a new draft of THE THIRD CROSSING and asked me to pass it along to my former students. And over the next few years, new iterations of the play had public readings and even won the 2010 Fratti-Newman New Political Play Contest. When Jerry Rapier announced THE THIRD CROSSING would be produced at Plan-B Theatre Company this season, I offered my dramaturgical services, eager to continue to be a part of the play’s development. After attending a table reading with the cast in August, Debora and I sat down together to discuss the text before her final rewrite. We talked about rearranging the order of scenes, and how each combination could change the arc of the play. We considered the implications of word choices in a show that’s consciously anachronistic. We deliberated on characters’ names and whether they would affect the audience’s ability to follow the historical details of the show.

So, you ask, what about working in isolation?

Since early December, I’ve combed through Debora’s final script to pull out words to be defined, and names and events to be explained in more detail. I then began to gather research materials that will provide the cast and crew with background information on their characters and the historical context of the play’s various locations and time periods. I’ve created a website where I’ve posted biographies of Thomas Jefferson and of Mildred and Richard Loving, images of slave housing at Monticello, newspaper accounts of anti-miscegenation violence, recordings of music popular in 19th century Virginia, and video documentaries about mixed race children. In truth, this is my least favorite part of the dramaturgical process. Not because the research is hard or boring, but because it’s the period in which I work on my own.

My preliminary research is complete and has been shared with the company. I look forward to rehearsals beginning in mid-February. That is when I finally get to see the fruits of my labor being consumed, digested, and absorbed by the actors, designers, and director. It’s when the challenging questions arise and my skills as a researcher are put to the test. That is when the collaboration reaches its peak, on opening night of a world premiere, when we add the final participants in the collaboration: the audience.

That is when I fall in love with theatre all over again.

Click here to read the dramaturgical materials Greg Hatch has compiled for the cast and creative team of THE THIRD CROSSING.  Click here for more information on the show itself and to purchase tickets.