Sandra Seaton Biography

Sandra Seaton

Photo of Sandra Seaton

Sandra Seaton is a playwright and librettist. Her plays have been performed in cities throughout the country, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, AnnArbor and East Lansing. Seaton is currently working on a new play, A Bed Made in Heaven, about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. In July, 2005, Seaton taught a playwriting workshop at the Prague Summer Program in the Czech Republic, which brings students to Prague to study with a faculty of distinguished writers from America and Central Europe. Her evening reading with Prague literary giant Ivan Klima was delivered to a packed house. She has been chosen for inclusion in the upcoming Gale Thomson standard reference work Contemporary Authors. In January, 2005 her Reflections on the Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. premiered at the Michigan State University Children’s Choir Black History Month Concert in the Great Hall of the Wharton Center for the Performing Arts. In March 2005 her play The Bridge Party, winner of the Theodore Ward Prize for African American Playwrights, was performed at Cleveland’s Karamu Theatre, the oldest African American theater company in the United States

Seaton has explored the relationship between the president and Sally Hemings in a number of works. She first dramatized the relationship in her libretto for the song cycle From the Diary of Sally Hemings, a collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom, who set Seaton's text to music. The work, for voice and piano, recreates the thoughts and feelings of Sally Hemings throughout her long relationship with Thomas Jefferson by means of fictional diary entries. Seaton’s text presents Sally Hemings as a complex individual who refused to be defined only as Jefferson’s mistress. From The Diary of Sally Hemings, sung by mezzo-soprano Florence Quivar, premiered at the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress on March 16, 2001. From The Diary of Sally Hemings was commissioned by Music Accord, Inc., a national consortium of presenters including The Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood, The Library of Congress in Washington D.C., San Francisco Performances, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York, the Fortas Chamber Music Series at the Kennedy Center, The Ravinia Festival of Highland Park, Illinois, The Krannert Center at the University of Illinois in Urbana, and the University Musical Society, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The work was praised by the Washington Post for its “subtle, penetrating power.” Seaton is indebted to the gifted and internationally acclaimed mezzo soprano Florence Quivar whose vision was the genesis of this work.

In Seaton's one-woman drama, Sally, an aged Sally Hemings recalls her life with Jefferson, reliving and re-evaluating the dilemmas she faced and the choices she made. Sally premiered at the New York State Writers Institute at the State University of New York in Albany in February 2003 under the direction of Langdon Brown with Zabryna Guevara as Sally Hemings.

Adilah Barnes and Amentha Dymally headed the cast when Sandra Seaton's play The Bridge Party played to sold-out houses during a run at Michigan State University in 2000. In this production William Bolcom's piano rags provided musical background. Sandra Seaton's plays have been performed in Chicago, Los Angeles, and in New York at Woodie King's New Federal Theatre. The Bridge Party, for which Seaton won a Theodore Ward Prize for New African American Playwrights, has been anthologized in Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women (1998) edited by Judy Stephens and Kathy Perkins. The play portrays a group of Southern black women who gather for a weekly bridge game against a background of lynching and house-to-house searches. In a review of that production, The State News described The Bridge Party as a "careful look at women's wisdom and strength that dissects racial prejudice and its impact on everyday life." Ruby Dee appeared in a 1998 production of The Bridge Party directed by Glenda Dickerson at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor along with an Equity cast that included Adilah Barnes, Michele Shay, Kim Staunton and Lynda Gravatt.

Seaton's other works include the plays The Will, about the struggles of a black Tennessee family during Reconstruction, as well as a trilogy of plays about African-American students at a Midwestern university during the Civil Rights Movement: Room and Board, Do You Like Philip Roth? and Reservations. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Ragdale and Dorset artists’ colonies. As a Professor of English at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Sandra Seaton taught courses in playwriting, fiction writing, and African American Literature. Her scholarly work about African American communities in the South from colonial times through the era of segregation has been microfilmed by the Tennessee State Archives. Sandra Cecelia Seaton was born in Columbia, Tennessee. The stories of her grandmother, Emma Louish Evans, and her mother, Hattye Harris, remain an important influence on her writing. Grandma Emma also instilled in her granddaughter great pride in the work of their relative Flournoy Miller, who wrote the book and starred in Shuffle Along, a musical that many believe inaugurated the Harlem Renaissance. She received her BA from the University of Illinois, where she studied with John Frederick Nims, George Scouffas, and Webster Smalley. At Michigan State University, where she earned her MA in Creative Writing, she studied with Robert A. Martin.

For more information on scheduled performances click here to view the "Performances" page on this site.

Return to top of page.