On Friday night at JACK, in Brooklyn, the audience was at a loss. At the end of James Ijames’s whip-smart satire “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” (which you would be wise to race to see), we in the audience waited for what felt like minutes. But there was no bow from the actors, who had already left the stage.
That’s when it sank in. The beautiful dare the show had offered us in its final lines? We were expected to take it. Or not. Either way, we had a decision to make as we left the theater — voting, with our very bodies, for the kind of future we want to see.
That’s mysterious, I know, but I won’t ruin the surprise of Jordana De La Cruz’s electrifying production, which offers an extraordinary, deeply moving payoff. The pinch of courage it demands of us — audience participation, like change, is frequently unnerving — proves more than worth it.
Set on a college campus in the contemporary American South, where a whitewashed sense of tradition drips with nostalgia for the antebellum past, “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” is not a romance by any stretch. Despite the title, it isn’t TJ’s story either, though he does tend to think everything is about him.
This play belongs to Sally (Sierra D. Leverett), our sensible, straight-talking narrator, and her fellow black students. As she informs us, “TJ” stands for Thomas Jefferson.
“Not exactly the one that wrote the Declaration of Independence,” she notes.
Still, you can see the resemblance, which only grows as TJ (John Bambery), the school’s white, middle-aged dean, develops a predatory obsession with Sally, his young research assistant, self-assured and certain of her own boundaries. (“Ever heard of Sally Hemings?” she asks us. “Yeah? No? Google her.”)
Part of what Ijames (“Kill Move Paradise”) is interrogating is the inheritance that comes with a black body or a white body. And part of the power of his play, and of De La Cruz’s tone-perfect staging, is its very physicality.
There are moments that make your skin crawl as TJ encroaches on Sally, but also scenes where she and her ferociously loyal sorority sisters (Aja Downing and Starr Kirkland) exult in their bodies, dancing together or parading in a marching band. Their bodies are emphatically their own, no rightful concern of his, and their joy is vivifying.
Terrific moments of physical comedy include an absurdly long running-in-place chase between Sally’s activist friend, Harold (Drew Drake), who wants to rid the school of monuments to its racist history, and TJ, who doesn’t want to hear it. Later, their face-off in a tap-dance battle (the choreography is by Candace Taylor) is funny, furious and almost feral.
This finely cast production’s heightened, sometimes hallucinatory feel (aided by Megan Lang’s lighting and Kathy Ruvuna’s sound design) is of a piece with the logical insanity of the world these students inhabit, where blackness and femaleness are enduringly alien to white men like TJ, with his sorghum-sweet accent and entrenched entitlement.
But as much as this is a play about dismantling an ugly legacy, it is even more about constructing something better in its place.
“You would think all of this would have been fixed by now,” Harold says, quietly.
This confrontational, compassionate takedown of a host of social toxins is a step in that direction. Happy Presidents Day.
TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever
Through Feb. 29 at JACK, Brooklyn; jackny.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
