North Carolina-born and-raised, James Ijames has been forever part of Philadelphia’s theater firmament as an actor, director, educator and most importantly, as a playwright. Along with his current role as Wilma Theater’s co-artistic director, Ijames’ always-provocative plays have been produced in the area at the Wilma (‘Fat Ham’, ‘Is God Is,’ ‘Kill Move Paradise’), through Orbiter 3 Playwrights Collective (‘Moon Man Walk’), with Flashpoint Theatre Company (‘The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington’), and Mauckingbird Theatre Company (‘The Threshing Floor’).
Norristown’s Theatre Horizon, however, has shared one of the most long lasting and fruitful relationships with Ijames, producing such works as the playwright’s ‘White’ in its world premiere, as well as hosting Ijames as a director for author Charlayne Woodard’s ‘Pretty Fire’ in the recent past. Currently the fruit of that relationship continues at Theatre Horizon with the regional premiere of Ijames’ ‘TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever’.
Running until March 20 at 401 DeKalb Street, Norristown, Ijames’ prickly, historically-twisting work re-imagines descendants of Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson, now, as a student and a dean at the Commonwealth of Virginia University, studying the complex history of the South’s antebellum legacy, and taking into consideration how degrading it is, in the present, to maintain the use pf slave-owners names on university buildings.
“I love this question because theater is really all about connections and relationships, and the way the team for this production came together is all about both,” says Theatre Horizon Artistic Director Nell Bang-Jensen about working on Ijames’ TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever. “James has a long history with Theatre Horizon. We’re thrilled to be his artistic home for this play’s regional premiere. And, I have the great gift of calling him a friend.”
Having successfully presented Ijames ‘White’ in 2017 through Theatre Horizon, Bang-Jensen wanted to continue that charged relationship between writer and presenter by exposing Norristown audiences to such smart, knowing new work.
Theatre Horizon also presently wanted to be in the business of director Lauren E. Turner, an activist, director, performer and community facilitator beloved for her work as the founding Producing Artistic Director of the communally driven mission of the No Dream Deferred NOLA theater company.
“I met James at an Arts Equity gathering several years ago, and it was if I was meeting a brother from another mother,” says Turner, smiling. “We realized that we were both from North Carolina, and that we had a shared understanding, culturally, of what theater should be. James also always reached out to me about how to best support No Dream Deferred.”
Also connected are Turner and Bang-Jensen through several national theater Mellon grant programs, so that when the director’s name up for the leadership role before ‘TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever’, Ijames was thrilled. “Everyone in theater is but three degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon,” jokes Turner.
Specificity in storytelling and specificity when it comes to casting the ensemble of ‘TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever’ meant actors being tight within their skins and their own vision of the characters. “We are stepping, we are tap-dancing and we are walking backwards in this show,” says Turner. “I wanted actors who were not only up for it, but truly comfortable in their bodies. Like when I cast any project, I wanted true collaborators, where their artistry is combined with their need to collaborate and that all of their diverse performance skills are heightened.”
Bang-Jensen, Theatre Horizon’s still-freshly-anointed Artistic Director made it clear that, along with actors from the across the United States coming to Norristown to perform in ‘TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever’, several of Philly’s top-tier thespians were in on Ijames’ challenging script. “Watching this story in rehearsal, night after night, I am seeing just how much of this play is about the stories that our bodies tell,” says Bang-Jensen.
“Without giving away too much, within the first ten minutes of the play the audience is asked to look at its hands and consider all that they have inherited, what they carry from their past in their bodies. That perpetual through-line that we are asked to come back to, that experience of embodiment – what we tell about ourselves through physicality – is hugely important to the point of this play, and Lauren did the best job of bringing that out of James’ words and actions in the script.”
