AMERICAN THEATRE: In a particularly disturbing moment in Thomas and Sally, a new play by Thomas Bradshaw, a 41-year-old Thomas Jefferson takes the 15-year-old Sally Hemings’s face in his hands and kisses her. “I love you, Sally,” he says. Then, without asking her permission, he starts to undress her. For actor Tara Pacheco, who played Hemings every night in the production at Marin Theatre Company (MTC), the moment was fraught. “She’s being kissed, and she’s not consenting to that initiated sexual relationship at all,” Pacheco explained recently. “She kissed him, but it’s the classic consenting to one thing doesn’t mean you’re consenting to something else.”
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I argue frequently with my parents, one of whom is black and the other is white, about the nature of interracial relationships in the United States throughout the course of the history of this country. And I think my parents are extremely blinded by the love that they have for each other. Ultimately, there is not a situation where a black or Native American person would have wanted to be with a white person at this time. Sally Hemings had not love in her heart for her rapist. Jefferson was a powerful man. I know that with the rise of Hamilton and other pieces of art that glorify him we forget that he was actually a rapist and a slave master.
This play sounds like just another example. I'm actually very disgusted with Bradshaw for writing such an untrue portrayal of this women. Black people are supposed to be the legacy and the dreams of our ancestors. Yet he betrayed Hemings which in my opinion probably has something to do with the fact that he's a man.
The most horrifying thing about this article to me was that they would silence women holding a vigil for Hemings. Again, I think that as a black person I owe it to Hemings to pray for rest for her soul because I doubt she is getting anything considering the trauma she endured. For the theatre company to a.) call the police on trafficked black women who are abused by the police and then b.) taunt these women's way of mourning is incredibly insensitive.
In summation, if you can't do a play about black people that doesn't including retraumatizing us and awakening souls that deserve to rest, then don't put on a play about black people. Let our trauma rest and let the effected group (aka black women in this case) dig that trauma up.
There’s a whole lot of yikes going on in this article. First of all, this company keeps insisting that they weren’t romanticizing rape, people just ‘didn’t get it’. Which isn’t an excuse. If that many people aren’t getting it, your work isn’t explicit enough. And I get it, you want to be subtle. The world is complicated. You want to make people question, blah blah blah. And that’s fine for normal stuff, but not rape. Everyone should always make it 100% clear they are against rape. If you aren’t doing that you’re doing something wrong. There are no complexities to it. Rape is wrong. Rapists are bad people. Thomas Jefferson was a bad person. Any attempt to cover that up or mystify it is problematic. Problem number two is that when black women say they are uncomfortable, YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE THEM. You, white theatre producers and male playwright, do not know better than them. If that many people say there’s a problem, you need to look critically at what you are doing. And there are many more problems here to unpack. Hopefully someone on this process learned their lesson and something like this won’t happen again.
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