Review: 'TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever,' a play about inheritance, power inequalities

Philadelphia playwright James Ijames has plenty of ideas: about the weight of inheritance, the lure of a weightless future, unequal power relationships, the limits of educational diversity, and the value of protest and resistance. And that’s just for starters.

Unfortunately, in TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever, receiving a regional premiere at Norristown’s Theatre Horizon through March 20, these notions, expressed in fragmentary bursts, don’t cohere into much of a play.

Ijames (pronounced Imes) sets the action at the fictional Commonwealth of Virginia University, an institution whose compromised legacy includes dozens of buildings, statues, and plaques named for Confederate soldiers and Southern owners of enslaved people. Sally (the expressive Sydney Banks) — the play’s narrator and female lead, and a metaphoric descendant of the enslaved Sally Hemings — lives in Calhoun Hall.

It is homecoming weekend, a time of both celebration and taking stock. Two of Sally’s sorority sisters, Pam (Noelle Diane Johnson) and Annette (Adaeze Nwoko), are leading campus tours and performing step routines. Their classmate Harold (Devon Sinclair) is a committed activist, petitioning for the dismantling of the university’s legacy when he isn’t defacing campus property.

Set and props designer Marie Laster represents the university with a lawn and a wall emblazoned with monumental, ghostly-white silhouettes. Sally opens the play by showing the audience a whiteboard on which she writes the word “inheritance.” That inheritance, she explains, is “real, and ugly, and uncomfortable, insane, unsafe and unreasonable.” Every now and again, she calls on the audience for its participation and approbation.

At the core of the overlong, 100-minute, intermission-less show is a set of confrontations between Sally and a dean named Thomas Jefferson (the comically gifted Sean Close, in an unenviable role). He’s the titular TJ, namesake of the U.S. president who fathered multiple children with his late wife’s much younger half-sister Sally Hemings, an enslaved Black woman.

Challenging the dean on the political front is Harold, portrayed with grace and conviction by Sinclair. The two engage in a lively tap dance-off that is the show’s highlight.

Beyond his outdated political views, Ijames’ Thomas Jefferson turns out to be a caricature of a sexual harasser, obviously lonely but completely reckless. Lauren E. Turner’s high-pitched direction doesn’t help Close make much sense of the character. The dean, a supposed expert on diversity in education, is described by the script as “smart.” But almost the moment that Sally, who has won a fellowship to work for him, enters his office, he pounces.

The dean’s unwelcome advances quickly escalate to increasingly explicit sexts and then a full-fledged assault, which Sally repels. (As narrator, Sally admits she’s “theatricalizing” these encounters, but insists they’re “just one kick ball-change away from what really happens.”) One obvious analogue is David Mamet’s Oleanna, which also depicted a campus relationship of unequals gone awry, but with enough realism and ambiguity to be truly uncomfortable.

Of course, Ijames isn’t much interested in realism. He wants to lay out a series of provocations — provocations thoroughly in tune with the prevailing orthodoxies of our day.

“TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” presented by Theatre Horizon, 401 DeKalb St., Norristown, through March 20. Masks and vaccination proof required. Tickets: $25-$35; $15 for students and theater industry; limited number of $2 tickets for Norristown residents. Information: www.theatrehorizon.org

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