Seaton is the author of 14 plays, opera librettos, a spoken-word piece, and short fiction.
Ruby Dee, Adilah Barnes, Kim Staunton,
Michele Shay and Linda Gravatt appeared in a 1998 production of her first play,
The Bridge Party, at the
University of Michigan, a work inspired by local events. The play is anthologized in
Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women (1998). Seaton's literary works have been featured by the Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series. The fictional work is a depiction of the innermost thoughts of
Sarah "Sally" Hemings, an enslaved woman of mixed race who is believed to have had a sexual relationship with
Thomas Jefferson. Bolcom asked Seaton to create "diary" entries that would provide the text for his song cycle
From The Diary of Sally Hemings. Seaton spent more than a year doing research to create a "diary" that would be historically plausible. As David Lewman pointed out in an article on Seaton's libretto, "It was a challenge. Though there is voluminous material on Jefferson and his period, there are no surviving examples of writing by Sally Hemings." The work was commissioned by mezzo-soprano
Florence Quivar, who sang the piece at the
Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium, the University Musical Society in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the
Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, and other similar venues. In 2010, soprano
Alyson Cambridge performed
From the Diary of Sally Hemings at
Carnegie Hall. Seaton has continued to explore the relationship between
Sally Hemings and the third president in two plays,
Sally, a solo play, and
A Bed Made in Heaven, a multi-character play.
Sally premiered in 2003 at the New York State Writers Institute featuring Zabryna Guevara. Seaton's play
The Will, the story of an African-American family in
Tennessee during
Reconstruction, was performed in
Idlewild, Michigan, the historic black resort, in 2008 as part of an event that focused on the connections between African-American culture and classical music. The character of Patti was inspired by the life of
Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, the African-American opera singer of the
Civil War era. Seaton's comedy
Martha Stewart Slept Here, set in an
Indiana trailer park, premiered in 2008 and
Estate Sale, a comedy set in a
Cleveland suburb, in 2011.
Music History, a play about African-American college students at the university of
Illinois,
SNCC, and the struggle for civil rights, was the focus of a 2010 symposium at
Michigan State University on the ability of drama to illuminate issues of racial and social justice. Seaton is also the author of "Betty Price and George Nelson, Spreading the News about Modern Design", which appeared in
Modernism magazine. In 2020,
Night Trip, a collaboration between Seaton and composer Carlos Simon, was performed at the Kennedy Center as part of their annual American Opera Initiative. According to critic Alex Baker of the
Washington Classical Review, part of what "Sandra Seaton’s libretto...especially in the arias for Conchetta, attains a level of poetry that allows for authentic and thrilling fusion between text and score." Writing for
A Beast in the Jungle, Mark Rudio described Seaton's lyrics as "transcendent" and credited her and Simon for "not only rising to the challenge of creating a dramatic work that does everything it needs to in just twenty minutes, and for creating an opera that unequivocally succeeds within those extreme limitations." Matthew Guerrieri, in a review for the Washington Post, praised the "candid, vernacular text" for "gradually revealing dramatic and poetic substance." Seaton taught creative writing and African-American literature at
Central Michigan University for 15 years as a professor of English. == Works ==