NEW YORK, NY.- If I were reviewing “The Pursuit of Happiness,” produced by a “low-budget-no-budget” troupe called Good Company, I might note that the subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which it approaches the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson come as quite a surprise. After all, Good Company is best known for “politically charged,” “finger-waggy” provocations like “Patriarchy on Parade” and “Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault” — work that leaves audiences running for the exits while casts bid them farewell with the bird.

But “The Pursuit of Happiness” isn’t real: It’s the play within Suzan-Lori Parks’ backstager “Sally & Tom,” which opened Tuesday at the Public Theater.

Still, my review stands — except for one thing. The subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which “Sally & Tom” approaches the story of Hemings and Jefferson, dazzlingly doubled in the story of the troupe putting it on, come as no surprise at all. They are the hallmarks of an author incapable of writing a line unfilled with the bewildering burden — or is it the treasure? — of human contradiction.

Indeed, Parks begins with an unprovable yet also undisprovable thesis. She has Luce, the author and star of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” decree: “This is not a love story.”

Luce (Sheria Irving) feels compelled to say so because her boyfriend, Mike, the show’s director — and also its Jefferson — wants a happier ending than the one she has written. As a proper white ally, Mike (Gabriel Ebert) understands that love is, at best, a problematic notion when one of the lovers is owned by the other. Even after 30 years together, Jefferson did not free Hemings in his will.

But would it be so awful, he wonders, to make more money and draw a wider audience — which Luce mishears as a “whiter” one — by introducing just a bit of recognizable romance at the curtain? Can the not-yet-third president and the teenager who would soon bear six of his children at least hold hands?

Can their descendants?

Backstagers are usually farces, finding humor in the collision of the world on set and the one in the wings. “Sally & Tom” begins in that ingratiating mode, with each overwhelmed member of Good Company doing at least double duty.

Scout (Sun Mee Chomet) is thrilled that she has finally been given a role — Jefferson’s younger daughter, Polly — even if she is simultaneously the stage manager and dance captain. (She must call cues via weird hand signals while onstage.) Ginger (Kate Nowlin) plays Jefferson’s other daughter, Patsy, and is also the dramaturge and choreographer. Geoff (Daniel Petzold) outdoes them both, with three small roles along with responsibility for the sets and costumes. No wonder he keeps bobbling his lines.

The actual play’s director, Steve H. Broadnax III, finesses the busy traffic and comic tone admirably, though the pacing throughout could be brighter. The spare, swift-moving sets by Riccardo Hernández, alternating between cramped dressing rooms and gracious Monticello, make sure you’re never confused about where you are; the handsome costumes (by Rodrigo Muñoz) and elegant wigs (by J. Jared Janas and Cassie Williams) place you clearly in the 18th or 21st century. So does the nimble code switching of the Black characters, who also include Kwame (Alano Miller), Devon (Leland Fowler) and Maggie (Kristolyn Lloyd) as enslaved people at Monticello.

But slowly and deliberately, a different kind of confusion seeps in, as Parks ingeniously stretches the canvas to accommodate a bigger picture. In “Sally & Tom,” it turns out, she is dramatizing not just the collision of onstage and off — one actor quits, one gets promoted, two hook up — but also the interpenetration of past and present.

The way she shapes Kwame’s story to express that is almost diabolical. A rising star, but still confined to bit parts on television, he feels reinvigorated to be back “on the boards,” playing the meaty role of Sally’s brother James Hemings. Central to his enthusiasm is the speech in which James calls out, at great length, the hypocrisy of the author of “all men are created equal.”

“All them pretty words you write, Mr. Jefferson, they’re all lies!” he shouts, risking at least a night in the stocks.

So when the show’s producer suggests that the speech be cut, Kwame finds himself in danger of being silenced in the same breath with James. “I was pouring my heart out,” he protests, “and all the while I was on the auction block?”

More centrally, in the relationship of Luce and Mike, the power imbalances and betrayals of antebellum America (and, let’s face it, post-bellum too) get replayed like long-scripted roles. What Hemings secured for herself through Jefferson, with an unknowable titration of guile and disgust and affection, Luce secures similarly through Mike. And what Jefferson does to honor or abrogate his part of the bargain, Mike does too.

Parks is not saying that nothing has changed. But not everything has changed. As Luce, Irving is especially powerful feeling out the limits of the power she has that Hemings lacked. And Ebert embodies the contradictions of Jefferson — with his strange half-smile and half-consciousness of injustice — no less than he does those of half-woke men today. “You might hate me. Go ahead,” he says smugly in some liminal state that is both then and now.

Ebert and Irving and the rest of the cast are excellent. They need to be; what a course of hurdles Parks has set for them! Also for herself, not all of them cleared. The play is too short to do justice to the many stories it wants to tell, and the contemporary ones are short-shrifted. The occasional oddball idea, as yet unpruned, is distracting. (Geoff carries signs meant to clarify the timeline.) And the working out of the arguments is, in places, lumpy and baggy, but who isn’t?

In any case, lumpiness and bagginess are often part of Parks’ aesthetic. In her plays, life and especially history are never smooth. We cannot see everything underneath the present. In particular, as her Jefferson demonstrates, it is nearly impossible to recognize the evil we do in choosing to abide the evil we live in. Still, she argues, you cannot merely blame “the times.” (Washington and Franklin freed their enslaved people, and John Adams never had any.) Jefferson’s treatment of Hemings, however enlightened for Virginia in 1790, remains appalling.

And yet. Is “Sally & Tom” really “not a love story”? The brilliance of the play lies in Parks’ admitting that even she, its author, cannot know. When Luce, revising her ending, finally comes up with the perfect, dignified, ambivalent human gesture, it is necessarily inconclusive. With the factual record unclear and likely to remain so forever, we can only imagine what Hemings — or for that matter Jefferson — felt.

Which is why we must have “Sally & Tom.” Parks, our most Shakespearean playwright, does for presidents and enslaved people what “Henry IV” did for royals and riffraff. She reveals the theater as a place to make truth when history has nothing more it can tell us. That’s the real love story here.

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‘Sally & Tom’: Through May 12 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.