Review: In ‘The Reclamation of Madison Hemings,’ debating questions of liberty and life

In Act 2 of “The Reclamation of Madison Hemings,” a Charles Smith play that is a good deal more visceral than its academic title suggests, a character named Madison Hemings, played at American Blues Theater by Jon Hudson Odom, screams the name “Sally Hemings” like he’s Marlon Brando screaming “St-ell-aaaa!”

The circumstances are, of course, very different in this drama set on the grounds of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home and slave-owning plantation in Virginia.

Madison is the son of the third president of the United States and Sally Hemings, a woman Jefferson enslaved and yet who birthed at least six of his children, all of whom eventually were freed by the Founding Father, a dispensation he did not grant to any other family unit at Monticello.

Madison, whom we meet in middle age, has taken the surname of his beloved mother, not his famous father, as a matter of principle. And yet the man with whom we find him in conversation, Israel Jefferson (Manny Buckley), a former enslaved footman now looking for his brother as a free man, has made a different choice. Both men have their reasons and their pain. Each approaches Jefferson’s legacy from different points of view and yet each has a shared Black experience.

Smith has written many dramas over the years dealing with Black history, many of which premiered at the Goodman and Victory Gardens Theaters. This particular one, though, premiered in 2022 at the Indiana Reportory Theatre, another of his favored homes. Regardless of theater, we have a distinguished oeuvre from this Chicago-born playwright. I’ve been a fan of his work across the Midwest for decades, and while this play is more modest in size and scope than some of Smith’s dramas (it was from a commission to write a two-character play during the pandemic), its concision is actually one of its strengths. That’s viably the case when directed by Chuck Smith (not to be confused with the author) and with actors of the experience and quality of Odom and Buckley, both of whom tear up American Blues’ brand-new 137-seat stage in a former drugstore on Lincoln Avenue.

Smith long has loved plays where two strong characters both debate justifiable positions and this particular play offers an exploration of how America should deal with so mixed a legacy of enlightened freedoms and forced subjegation.

Many questions are in the air. Should a Black man have been in any way proud to have been at Monticello, even proud enough to bear Jefferson’s name? Was Jefferson, who is said to have enslaved some 600 people, better or worse than other slave owners and is that even a valid question? Did his devotion to so-called liberty and equality, and his condemnation of the institution of slavey as a “moral depravity” mitigate any of the ways he lived his actual life? Was Monticello merely a locus of white supremacy?

And, perhaps most tellingly here, how should Madison Hemings deal with own complex treatment at Monticello?

It’s also worth noting that Israel Jefferson’s surname was, in fact, suggested by a clerk of the court as he acquired his freedom, given his history at Monticello. There again, Smith homes in on a complexity: What are the boundaries of choice? Wither expediency versus principle?

That debate is richly expressed here as two men who both eventually ended up in Ohio talk things through with nary a false note. In real life, the words of these two characters (as reported in interviews) turned out to be important records of the enslaved life at Monticello.

This play, and these two deeply experienced actors, do them proud.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “The Reclamation of Madison Hemings” (3.5 stars)

When: Through March 24

Where: American Blues Theater, 5627 N. Lincoln Ave.

Running time: 2 hours

Tickets: $29.50-$49.50 at 773-654-3103 and americanbluestheater.com