Suzan Lori-Parks: A Casebook (Casebooks on Modern Dramatists)

Suzan-Lori Parks

Suzan-Lori Parks confirmed herself as one of the most exciting and successful playwrights of her generation when her work Topdog/Underdog was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, making her the only African-American woman to win the award. Despite the cultural weight of this achievement, Parks remains difficult both to pigeonhole and to summarize. This volume seeks to provide a context for her work, with essays from major and emerging scholars addressing the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, language and history in plays from her first major work, Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom to the 365 Days/365 Plays project. Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook represents the first major study of this unique voice in contemporary drama. Contributors: Leonard Berkman, Jason Bush, Shawn Marie-Garrett, Andrea Goto, Heidi Holder, Barbara Ozieblo, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr and Harvey Young. Kevin J. Wetmore Jr is Professor of Theatre at Loyola Marymount University, as well as being a professional actor and director of the Comparative Drama Conference. He is the author of The Athenian Sun in an African Sky and Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre. Alycia Smith-Howard is an Assistant Professor at New York University in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she is the Artistic Director of the Gallatin Arts Festival and the Book Reviews Editor at the New England Theatre Journal. A Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library, her areas of specialization include Shakespeare, performance history, feminist theatre aesthetics, and literature and drama of the south.

Casebooks on Modern Dramatists Kimball King, General Editor Peter Shaffer A Casebook Edited by C.J. Gianakaras

Wendy Wasserstein A Casebook Edited by Claudia Barnett

Simon Gray A Casebook Edited by Katherin H. Burkman

Woody Allen A Casebook Edited by Kimball King

John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy A Casebook Edited by Janathan Wike

Modern Dramatists A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights Edited by Kimball King

August Wilson A Casebook Edited by Marilyn Elkins John Osbourne A Casebook Edited by Patricia D. Denison Arnold Wesker A Casebook Edited by Reade W. Dornan David Hare A Casebook Edited by Hersh Zeifman Marsha Norman A Casebook Edited by Linda Ginter Brown Brian Friel A Casebook Edited by William Kerwin Neil Simon A Casebook Edited by Gary Konas Terrance McNally A Casebook Edited by Toby Silverman Zinman Stephen Sondheim A Casebook Edited by Joanne Gordon Horton Foote A Casebook Edited by Gerald C. Wood Samuel Beckett A Casebook Edited by Jennifer M. Jeffers

Pinter at 70 A Casebook Edited by Lois Gordon Tennessee Williams A Casebook Edited by Robert F. Gross Beth Henley A Casebook Edited by Julia A. Fesmire Edward Albee A Casebook Edited by Bruce J. Mann Joe Orton A Casebook Edited by Francesca Coppa A.R. Gurney A Casebook Edited by Arvid Srponberg Neil LaBute A Casebook Edited by Gerald C. Wood Contemporary African American Women Playwrights A Casebook Edited by Philip C. Kolin Martin McDonagh A Casebook Edited by Richard Russell Suzan-Lori Parks A Casebook Edited by Kevin J. Wetmore Jr and Alycia Smith-Howard

Suzan-Lori Parks A Casebook

Edited by Kevin J. Wetmore Jr and Alycia Smith-Howard

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Suzan-Lori Parks: a casebook/edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr and Alycia Smith Howard p. cm. – (Casebooks on modern dramatists) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Parks, Suzan-Lori–Criticism and interpretation. I. Wetmore, Kevin J., 1969II. Smith Howard, Alycia. PS3566.A736Z87 2007 2007 812′.54--dc22 2007019712 ISBN 0-203-93728-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

10: 10: 13: 13:

0-415-97381-3 (hbk) 0-203-93728-7 (ebk) 978-0-415-97381-6 (hbk) 978-0-203-93728-0 (ebk)

This book is dedicated to the memory of Lloyd Richards (1919–2006) and August Wilson (1945–2005)

Contents

Acknowledgments List of contributors

ix xi

Chronology

xiii

Introduction: Perceptible Mutabilities – The Many Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks/ The Many Suzan-Lori Parks of Plays

xvii

Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.

1. Figures, Speech and Form in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom

1

Shawn-Marie Garrett 2. Strange Legacy: The history plays of Suzan-Lori Parks

18

Heidi J. Holder 3. Choral Compassion: In the Blood and Venus

29

Harvey Young 4. The ‘fun that I had’: The theatrical gendering of Suzan-Lori Parks’s ‘figures’

48

Barbara Ozieblo 5. Language as Protagonist in In the Blood Len Berkman

61

viii

Contents

6. Who’s Thuh Man?! Historical melodrama and the performance of masculinity in Topdog/Underdog

73

Jason Bush 7. Re-enacting: metatheatre in thuh plays of Suzan-Lori Parks

89

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. 8. Digging Out of the Pigeonhole: African-American representation in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks

106

Andrea J. Goto 9. It’s an Oberammergau Thing: An interview with Suzan-Lori Parks

124

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. 10. Selected Reading Index

141 147

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the team at Routledge, including Kimball King, the series editor, the contributors and those who have read the essays and given valuable feedback. Much like a theatrical production, a casebook is the product of many hands and could not be done as well or at all without all of them. Thanks are due to Kathryn Barcos and Harry Elam. Multiple thanks and much gratitude is due to Suzan-Lori Parks herself, who has given much of her time and insights into this volume. Thanks to the Gallatin School and New York University, as well as Loyola Marymount University for supporting us in this endeavour. Thanks as well to our families and friends, without whom none of this would be possible. Kevin J. Wetmore extends special thanks to his partner, Maura Chwastyk.

Contributors

Len Berkman, Smith College’s Anne Hesseltine Hoyt Professor of Theatre, is a playwright and dramaturge who has helped develop over 400 plays at such institutions as Sundance, NY Stage & Film, South Coast Rep, Mark Taper Forum, Voice & Vision and Epic Theatre Center, among others. His own plays include Oh the Undoing, The Play of Red, Quits, I’m not The Star of My Own Life, and These Are Not My Breasts. His essays have appeared in Theatre in Crisis, Upstaging Big Daddy; Modern Drama, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Parnassus. Jason Bush is completing his doctorate in theatre history at The Ohio State University. He has an MA from California State University, Northridge and a BA from UCLA. He is pursuing a specialty in ethnicity and popular entertainment in the Americas. Shawn-Marie Garrett is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has recently published on Peter Brook and on Kafka adaptations in the New York theatre, and is currently readying her manuscript, Suzan-Lori Parks’ History Plays, for publication. She also works as a production dramaturge. Andrea J. Goto completed her BA in English at Western Washington University and her MA in English from Georgia Southern University in Savannah. Upon graduating, Andrea taught Composition at Georgia Southern University until the recent birth of her daughter, Ava. Heidi J. Holder is Professor of English at Central Michigan University. Her articles on British, Irish and Canadian drama have appeared in such journals as Essays in Theatre and the Journal of Modern Literature. She is currently at work on a full-length study of the working-class theatre of Victorian London and on an anthology of plays from those theatres. Barbara Ozieblo teaches American Literature at the University of M·laga, Spain; her research focuses on women playwrights and on biography. She is the author of Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and co-founder and President of the Susan Glaspell Society. She has organized two international conferences on American Drama at the University of Málaga and co-edited Staging a Cultural Paradigm: the Political and Personal in American Drama and Codifying the National Self: Spectators, Actors and the American Dramatic Text.

xii

Contributors

Alycia Smith-Howard, PhD is an assistant professor at New York University in the Interdisciplinary Arts Programme and artistic director of the Gallatin Arts Festival in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is a Shakespeare scholar and theatre director, and received both her MA and PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, England. She was selected as a 2006–7 Folger Fellow at The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. She is the author of Studio Shakespeare: The Royal Shakespeare Company at the Other Place (Ashgate, 2006), this work was recently nominated for the ‘Theatre Book Award’ by the Society for Theatre Research (London, UK). She is also the coauthor of The Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams (with Greta Heintzelman), and is the book reviews editor for the New England Theatre Journal. She frequently serves as a Shakespeare specialist and modern drama consultant for major projects and arts organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her areas of teaching and research interests include Shakespeare studies, modern drama, performance history, directing, dramaturgy, nineteenth-century studies, book culture and bibliography. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is an actor, director and stage combat choreographer who teaches at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He has written books on African theatre, African-American theatre, Shakespeare and youth culture and a post-colonial analysis of the Star Wars films. He is also the co-editor of Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance. His writing has also appeared in such journals as Theatre Journal, Text and Presentation, Asian Theatre Journal, Studies in Popular Culture, Metamorphosis, InterCultural Studies and Theatre Symposium. Harvey Young is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University, with appointments in African-American Studies and Performance Studies. In addition to Suzan-Lori Parks, he has written articles on American lynching spectacles and the films of Marlon Riggs. His first book, Embodying Black Experience, is under contract with the University of Michigan Press.

Chronology

1963 Suzan-Lori Parks is born in Fort Knox, Kentucky on 10 May, to Francis and Donald Parks. She has an older sister, Stephanie Parks, and a younger brother, Donald ‘Buddy’ Parks, Jr. Her father is in the military and the family frequently moves around. 1970s Attends junior high school in West Germany. 1982 Takes a short story class with James Baldwin, who encourages her to write plays. Begins to write The Sinner’s Place in Baldwin’s class. 1984 Parks’s senior thesis play, The Sinner’s Place is written at Mount Holyoke. It is subsequently read at a new play festival at Hampshire College. 1985 Graduates Phi Beta Kappa from Mount Holyoke College with a double major in English and German. Studies in London at London Drama Studio for a year. 1986 Returns to the USA and moves to New York City. 1987 Betting on the Dust Commander premieres at The Gas Station, New York, directed by Laurie Carlos. Fishes read at the International Women Playwrights Festival. 1989 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom premieres at BACA Downtown, Brooklyn, directed by Liz Diamond, beginning a lengthy relationship between director and playwright. 1990 Wins Obie Award for Best New American Play for Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World premieres at BACA Downtown. Pickling, a radio play, is produced by New American Radio. Teaches playwriting at Yale University. Directs a short film with Bruce Hainley entitled Anemone Me for Apparatus Productions – the brainchild of producers Christine Vachon and Barry Ellsworth, and director Todd Haynes. 1991 Theatre for a New Audience commissions the work that will become The America Play. 1992 Wins Whiting Writers’ Award. Devotees in the Garden of Love is commissioned by Humana Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville to serve as half of a double bill with play by David Henry Hwang, and

xiv

1994 1995

1996

1997 1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Chronology is directed by Oscar Eustace. Two radio plays, Locomotive and The Third Kingdom, produced by New American Radio. The America Play produced at Yale Repertory Theatre and The Joseph Papp Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. Receives the Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Award. Establishes the Harlem Kids Internet Playwriting Workshop. The America Play and Other Works is published. Writes the screenplay for Spike Lee’s Girl 6. Venus premiers at Yale Repertory Theatre on 28 March, directed by Richard Foreman and is performed subsequently at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, winning the Obie Award. Receives a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts (Drama). Writes adapted screenplay for Gal (not yet produced) and the original screenplay God’s Country (not yet produced). 6 January, Parks begins writing Topdog/Underdog. She finishes the play in 3 days. 2 November–19 December, In the Blood premieres at New York Public Theatre, directed by David S. Bjornson. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Playwriting. Infernal Bridegroom Theatre Company premieres Fucking A on 24 February at DiverseWorks in Houston, Texas, directed by Parks. Red Letter Plays published. Directs Jeffrey Wright and Ruben Santiago-Hudson in the Public Theatre’s New Work Now! Reading of Topdog/Underdog. Becomes the first director of the dramatic writing programme at CalArts. Awarded MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Grant. Gives commencement speech to Mount Holyoke College on 27 May. Marries blues musician Paul Oscher on 24 July. Topdog/Underdog premieres 22 July at The Joseph Papp Public Theatre, directed by George C. Wolfe with Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle. Becomes first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Topdog/Underdog. April, Topdog/Underdog opens on Broadway at the Ambassador Theatre, with Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def. Begins writing 365 Days/365 Plays on 13 November. Getting Mother’s Body, her first novel, is published. At the suggestion of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Parks’s papers are purchased by Harvard University’s archives. 365 Days/365 Plays is completed on 12 November. Leaves CalArts to write full time. Writes the screenplay for Their Eyes Were Watching God, based on the novel by Zola Neale Hurston, for Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films. Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Halle Berry, premiers in March on ABC television. Writes the screenplay for Act V (not produced). Begins writing the book for the musical Ray, a musical version of the life of Ray Charles.

Chronology

xv

2006 Writes the screenplay for The Great Debaters. On 13 November, the individual plays of 365 Days/365 Plays have a ‘simultaneous and shared world premiere’ when they begin being performed at hundreds of theatres around the USA. 2007 365 Days/365 Plays completed during week of 12 November.

Introduction Perceptible Mutabilities – The Many Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks/The Many Suzan-Lori Parks of Plays Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.

Many challenges await those who attempt to compile a casebook on SuzanLori Parks. More than one scholar has abandoned a critical analysis of her work because her most recent play does not fit into a preconceived notion or theory of what a ‘Suzan-Lori Parks play’ is. She is a playwright comparatively early in her career, having written for almost two decades and having created a significant body of work already, but with the promise of many projects to come. Nine major works have been published thus far, but as the title 365 Days/365 Plays suggests, the number of plays by Parks has just increased exponentially. Previous articles on her and her work have been fraught with errors: the year of her birth has been listed variously as 1964, 1965 and 1960 (for the record, it is 1963); some report that she attended Yale for playwriting (she did not – she taught there). In short, it is difficult to categorize, summarize, and sometimes even theorize Parks and her plays. But, as Parks herself writes in ‘Start Here’, the first play in 365 Days/365 Plays, one has to begin somewhere. This volume represents a beginning to the ever-evolving study of Parks’s works, even as Parks’s works are ever evolving. Parks herself is known for her formula of ‘rep and rev’: repetition and revision. Do it again; do it differently. One might see ‘rev and rep’ as a form of signifyin(g), as defined by Henry Louis Gates. Gates himself coins the term ‘repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference’, which Parks then further paces down to ‘rep and rev’.1 The ‘trope of the talking book’ – the ‘double voiced texts that talk to other texts’ becomes apparent

xviii

Introduction

in Park’s plays.2 Even within her canon, the plays themselves form an intertext as Topdog/Underdog can be seen as a ‘rep and rev’ of The America Play, and yet, it is not. The heroines of In the Blood and Fucking A echo the Hottentot Venus from Venus. The plays ‘rep and rev’ on the micro and macro levels, within themselves and between themselves. In taking in the Parks canon as it exists in this moment (and only in this moment, as it will soon change again with each new ‘rep and rev’), certain themes recur. Her plays are concerned with ritual, memory, history, language, gender, ethnicity, the acts of viewing and performing and the interaction of all of the above elements. The essays in this volume provide contexts for Parks’s work to date, from Shawn Marie Garrett’s analysis of Parks’s first major play, Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom, through Jason Bush’s observations on masculinity in the Pulitzer Prizewinning Topdog/Underdog to Kevin Wetmore’s interview with Parks, concerned largely with 365 Days/365 Plays. Shawn Marie Garrett and Leonard Berkman both consider Parks’s use of language in her plays. Garrett links the language of the play to history, even as she demonstrates how language is the link between African and African American, between past and present, between ‘you’ and ‘I’. Berkman moves from the notion of language as the architecture of the play to the language as the protagonist itself. Comparing Parks to other ‘language dramatists,’ he then offers a close reading of In the Blood. Like Garrett, Heidi Holder is concerned with history, but Holder begins with endings, looking at the deaths (and ‘deaths’) of characters in Park’s history plays, demonstrating how Parks takes history ‘out of order’ in order to demonstrate the (w)hole, so to speak. Language is also a force in Harvey Young’s reading of In the Blood and Venus, although, in this case, it is the language of the communal voice. Young surveys the manner in which Parks strategically uses choruses in those two plays to serve in a similar manner to Greek tragic choruses (albeit in postmodern fashion) to narrate the tale, serve as bridge to the audience, and, ultimately, to support the black female protagonist of each play. Gender plays a role in the readings of Parks’s work by Barbara Ozieblo and Jason Bush. As in some of the other essays, Ozieblo points to Parks’s playfulness and sense of play within her plays, in this case, to ‘deconstruct, subvert or invert’ stereotypes about gender. Bush, on the other hand, focuses on how Topdog/Underdog deconstructs and reconstructs notions of masculinity, especially as they relate to the hierarchy of men that the title suggests, and the link between the historic violences of American history to the current violence found in urban African-America. Ozieblo’s essays notes that the characters ‘play’ their genders. Kevin Wetmore takes this observation a step further to study role-playing and metatheatre in Parks’s work. While other scholars have discussed at length voyeurism in Parks’s work (such as the Venus being the object of the male gaze), Wetmore focuses on the conscious performances of Parks’s characters, who are always aware of being watched, and use it to their advantage.

Introduction

xix

Lastly, Andrea Goto excavates Parks’s construction (and deconstruction) of race on stage. Goto argues that Parks’s characters go beyond the essentialism of ethnicity and challenge the notions of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’. As these essays suggest, Parks is neither easy to pigeonhole, nor easy to summarize. Parks has listed numerous influences on her work, from James Baldwin (her teacher at Mount Holyoke) to August Wilson (whom she interviewed right before his death for American Theatre,) to a variety of authors including, but not limited to the Greek tragedians, Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, Proust, Albee, Morrison, Kennedy, and Stein. As this variety of influences indicates, Parks sees the entire traditions of global literature as sources for her work, and as she states in the interview with her that closes this book, she refuses to allow herself or her work to be defined by anyone. Yet another challenge for a book that seeks to, at least in part, define her work. As an undergraduate, Suzan-Lori Parks was described by James Baldwin as ‘an utterly astounding and beautiful creature who may become one of the most valuable artists of our time’. Two decades later, she has indeed become one of the most significant and important playwrights working in America today. I began this introduction by noting the challenges in writing and organizing a book on Parks. The challenges continue to grow as Parks expands into new mediums, even as she continues to write for the theatre. Her novel, Getting Mother’s Body was released in 2003, and Parks has promised more fiction in the years to come. She has also written numerous screenplays, some of which have been made into films, others of which have not (yet) been produced. It seems safe to say that Parks will continue to write for many years to come; and scholars, challenged as always by her work, will continue to contextualize that work again and again with each new work.

Notes 1

Henry Louis Gates (1988) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. xxiv. 2 Gates, p. xxv.

1

Figures, Speech and Form in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom Shawn-Marie Garrett

Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom premiered in September 1989 under the direction of Liz Diamond at the Brooklyn Arts Council (BACA) Downtown Theatre in front of approximately 75 people. Diamond also later collaborated with Parks on The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1992) and The America Play (1994). She was introduced to Parks’s work by the New York experimental theatre’s designated mentor, the playwright Mac Wellman. Parks and Diamond met in 1988 at the Lincoln Centre café, hit it off, and agreed that they should work together on the premiere of Imperceptible Mutabilities. Audiences and critics would soon share Wellman and Diamond’s excitement about Parks. The New York Times’s Mel Gussow lauded the play, the premiere, and Parks’s ‘historical perspective and theatrical versatility’ as well as her ‘ingenuity and humanity’ (C24). The Village Voice awarded Imperceptible Mutabilities its 1990 Obie Award for ‘Best New American Play’. To many people, Imperceptible Mutabilities signalled the long awaited arrival in the American experimental theatre of a politically minded new playwright of originality and substance, physically possessed by words, mindful of their many shapes and powers, and heedful of their long halflives. The arrival was even more exciting because this new experimental dramatist was an African-American woman. Apart from work by Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange, American theatre in the 1980s was dominated by white playwrights. Time has not diminished Imperceptible Mutabilities’ power. In dense, allusive theatrical poetry, it exposes hidden connections among AfricanAmerican literary and historical figures who span several hundred years, two continents and the Middle Passage. Its obsessively precise language shows, paradoxically, the impossibility of pinning language down: Utterance, identity and space all imperceptibly mutate as they regenerate over the course of the performance. Like the plays it precedes, Imperceptible Mutabilities is fundamentally concerned with the problem of history, especially the problem of the self in relation to history, i.e. the problem of identity.

2

Suzan-Lori Parks : A Casebook

(Un)seeing place Slide show: Images of Molly and Charlene. Molly and Charlene speak as the stage remains semi-dark and the slides continue to flash overhead. CHARLENE: How dja get through MOLLY: Mm not through it.

it?

Yer leg. Thuh guard. Lose weight? Hhh. What should I do Chona should I jump should I jump or what? (25)

CHARLENE: MOLLY:

In its 1989 premiere, Imperceptible Mutabilities started in a near-blackout, which remained throughout the first scene. It started, therefore, with a fundamental formal reversal of the traditional Greek meaning and purpose of theatre as a seeing-place. From the beginning, the production unsettled the traditional grounds of theatrical truth (i.e. collective witness, recognition, identification, etc.). The actors play it lento, parlando, as if speaking privately. Though disembodied, Parks language was familiar, without a trace of the archness or self-consciousness so often heard in New York experimental theatre at the time (and since). The sounds were concentrated, clear, and unadorned by stylization. In this way, Diamond immediately established the kind of theatrical clarity that can sustain multiple paradoxes. Affectless, contextless, Parks words were freed to perform as poetry: ironic, vernacular free verse in the form of dialogue. Parks and Diamond had exiled ‘physiological man’ (Zola 54), usually at the centre of naturalistic drama, from their stage. In his place, two women appeared (though only in darkness), the subjects of a slide show that flashed overhead. The women were attractive, contemporary, 20-something and black. The slide show was a series of innocuous, flattering colour portraits: First, the portrait of a serene woman [flash]; then the portrait of a melancholy woman [flash]; then the first woman again, laughing [flash] and so on. As it unfolded, the slide show began to collaborate naturally with Parks’ language to form, in the audience’s mind, a dramatic situation. The dark stage gradually took shape in the audience’s imagination as a familiar form: a naked little apartment that poetry built. The audience saw the kitchen of a fly-infested urban apartment (‘Flies are casin yer food Mona’) and two African-American women, roommates or sisters maybe, who called each other Mona and Chona. Mona, perhaps the younger of the two, was in despair, having failed an English test (of basic skills), lost her job, and given up looking for another job (‘Only thing worse n working sslookin for work’) (26). Chona offered eggs and sympathy and used a parable about a robber without speech to obliquely encourage Mona to keep up the fight. Finally, Mona concurred, ‘Once there was uh me named Mona who wanted tuh jump ship but didn’t ... Ya got the help wanteds?’ (26). The comic,

Figures, Speech and Form in Imperceptible Mutabilities

3

sentimental scene (vaguely familiar somehow, as if from television) quickly drew to a close. In a production of Imperceptible Mutabilities staged several years later (directed by Kaia Calhoun at the Yale School of Drama), the lights came down at the end of the first scene with a burst from a laugh track that underscored the televisual feeling of the scene. With light, the audience might have seen a black girl considering suicide, perched at a window, her leg wedged through a window guard. On the page, Parks (cued by Shakespeare and the Greeks) does not spell out (‘in a pissy set of parentheses’ [Parks 15]) what Mona has or has not ‘got through’. In this early play, Parks makes most matters imperceptible, or rather, she retrains her audiences and readers’ habits of perception until they, too, can see the metonymic mutabilities she wants them to see, which are changes quieter and more radical than Aristotelian reversals. In Parks theatre, sight tends to be less instrumental than hearing for discovering these mutabilities, not only in the play’s first scene, but throughout the play. (In Diamond’s New York premiere production, Part 2 of the play, ‘Third Kingdom’, was also performed in darkness.) ‘Splat. Splat. Splatsplatsplat’ (27): Parks riffs on this syllable over and over in Parts 1 and 2, and depending on the imaginary context, a roach is squashed, an egg cracks, a suicide hits the pavement, or a captive African is jettisoned from a slave ship. Yet the stage picture remains little changed; the soundimages become ‘notes’, as Alisa Solomon writes, played ‘again and again in ever-changing chords’ (75). Writing, too, is unreliable in this play, and a name is a mere enigma: ‘All by dint’, as Poe writes in his Enigma, ‘Of the dear names ... concealed within’t’ (761). Never mind what the two women onstage call each other. On the page, the speakers’ names are written not as Mona and Chona, but as Molly and Charlene. Meanwhile, Molly/Mona frequently speaks of herself in the third person. She speaks of herself, as Shange’s lady in brown says, in ‘dark phrases of womanhood/of never havin been a girl’ (3). ‘Once there was uh me named Mona who wanted tuh jump ship but didn’t’, Molly/Mona says. This is third-person Mona, the same one who later appears in the bowels of a slave ship in ‘Third Kingdom’ (Part 2) as a figure called Kin-Seer who always-already wonders, ‘Shouldijumporwhut?’ (40). The vertiginous logic of Parksian stage-time and psychological exposition dictates that Molly/Mona’s 300-year-old back story comes later in the play, and this is another way in which Parks opens up history’s Cartesian timespace and its protagonist, physiological man. In whatever guise she haunts the stage, in whatever era, Molly/Mona is a survivor. She resigns herself again and again to life, even though, again like lady in brown, ‘she’s been dead so long closed in silence so long

4

Suzan-Lori Parks : A Casebook

she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice’. (Shange 3) ‘Once there was uh me’: Mona, Molly, Kin-Seer and the lady in brown. Who, where, when is that me now? Imperceptible Mutabilities offers a possible answer: As a consequence of history, the African-American me is three-personed: ‘uh third Self made by thuh space in between’, Africa and America, that is, a ‘third Self’ created by and still stuck in the Middle Passage (39). In the ‘Third Kingdom’ section of the play, Kin-Seer sings of this sorrow: ‘Last night I dreamed of where I comed from. But where I comed from diduhnt look like nowhere I been ....I was standin with my toes stuckted in thuh dirt. Nothin in front of me but water. And I was wavin. Wavin. Wavin at my uther me who I could barely see. Over thuh water on thuh uther cliff I could see my uther me but my uther me could not see me’. (38) Dreamlike, yet inescapably political, Imperceptible Mutabilities works through 300 years of history in 3 hours or so. Its aim is not to present a totalizing vision of African-American history, but rather to dramatize the impossibility of such a vision. The play is dizzying and hallucinogenic, frequently threatening to careen out of control, touching on horrors beyond words, horrors signified on the page by blank spaces, dashes and guttural spellings (i.e. ‘gaw’, ‘eeeee-uh’ and ‘thup’). It enacts the hunger and obligation as well as the heartrending difficulty of seeing (the central action in this play) the truth, whether past or present, to say nothing of capturing it in literary or expressive form. The play’s events only affirm that one must keep peering into the darkness. In the Middle Passage, Kin-Seer reminds OverSeer, another figure on stage, about the importance of continuing to look for her lost selves: ‘You said I could wave as long as I see um. I still see um’. ‘Wave then’, Over-Seer commands (40).

Uh speech in uh language of codes Like all of Parks’s plays, Imperceptible Mutabilities on the page is merely, as Parks writes, a ‘blueprint of an event’ (4) with an audience. If the play is a blueprint, then it is not a mirror. It does not seek to reflect or even distort the surface of everyday reality; rather, in the manner of experimental drama by Stein, Beckett, Shange and Kennedy, it creates its own hermetic, repetitive world, consciously unmaking dramatic conventions to remake the theatre. In this kind of drama, words and letters work like chromosomes. Any missing or extra words or letters may signal a profound transformation, and they may leap generations. Language and timespace are porous, relative and perspectival. Forbidding on the page at first glance, Imperceptible Mutabilities insists

Figures, Speech and Form in Imperceptible Mutabilities

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on being heard aloud. At the same time, Parks writing holds secrets that can only be deciphered by studying the coded page. For example, the laughs in Molly’s basic skills recitations (i.e. “S-K’ is /sk/ as in ‘ask’’, and ‘The-littlelamb-follows-closely-behind-at-Mary’s-heels-as-Mary-boards-the-train’ [25]) are a matter of punctuation. Then there are the still deeper mysteries the writing holds: for example, the secrets of the characters’ double names and the slide show that Parks specifies should ‘flash overhead’ throughout the first scene. ‘How dja get through it?’ is the first line of the play. This is a question one might ask a survivor. ‘Mm not through it’, which is a likely response. Like Endgame’s first lines, Imperceptible Mutabilities’ first lines quickly shrug off teleology; as they continue, they look like non-sequiturs. Like Hamlet’s first lines, they questioningly begin a problem to which the play will return again and again. In Imperceptible Mutabilities, it is getting through. Imperceptible Mutabilities is Parks’s first history play and her most radical experiment with indeterminacy. These lines about getting through it, which rise from a crisis of language and a failed performance (i.e. the botched English test), have an additional resonance: They echo with the struggle to begin a life as a writer. As Molly/Mona says, the ‘whole idea uh talkin right now aint right no way. Aint natural’ (25). What about writing? Toni Morrison (x) describes it as a process of ‘struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people and language’. Hortense J. Spillers argues that the ‘Great Long National Shame’ of slavery and its aftermath have ‘marked’ black women as stereotypes, even as they have erased their true names: ‘Sticks and bricks might break our bones’, Spillers writes, ‘but words will most certainly kill us’ (60). At the start of Parks’s first major drama, Molly/Mona is in danger of words and hesitates even to claim her name. Mona never gets through the window. Parks’s drama denies audiences ‘the fatted calf, the gift of closure, the performance of waste’, as Joseph Roach (46) calls catharsis. Suicide (in Part 1), being ‘jettisoned’ from a slave ship (in Part 2), ‘expiring’ like a warranty that has run out (in Part 3) and being blown to bits by a landmine (in Part 4), are all catastrophes threatened in Imperceptible Mutabilities, but none delivers the sense of an ending. This is the single difference between Imperceptible Mutabilities and the two other plays it occasionally resembles, both of which climax in violence: Shange’s For Coloured Girls and Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. No-one in Imperceptible Mutabilities comes out dead. Parks is more interested in how her figures get through. In Imperceptible Mutabilities, Parks aims to erase the mark, survive the words, and make her name by inventing ‘uh speech in uh language of codes. Secret signs and secret symbols’ (56). Parks’s language in this play is comprised not of expressions, but of codes and secret signs that are somehow first sounded and gestured (first ‘uh speech’) and only written later.

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‘Once there was uh me named Mona who wondered what she’d be like if no one was watchin’, what she would ‘talk like if no one was listenin’ (27, 28). With this line, Parks joins a chorus of modern writers (e.g. DuBois, Fanon, Ellison and Shange) who have sung of the souls of black folk in a white world. The line is a concise rewording of DuBois’ double-consciousness and its consequences, with a crucial temporal dimension added. Mona’s thoroughly colonized me comes equipped (à la Fanon) with an equally colonized past. Both past-me and past-Mona are entirely conscious of being watched and invisible, of being ‘a phantom in other people’s minds’ (Ellison 3), while the present speaker Mona has, ominously, stopped wondering. As it happens, the present speaker Mona is indeed being spied on, even in the dark. In the second scene of the play, Mona and Chona are upstaged by a figure called ‘the Naturalist’, a white man. Naturally speaking in the first person plural, he appears to resume an ongoing discussion with the audience (now unwittingly cast as his students) about how he has bugged Mona and Chona’s apartment – literally. He has planted a tiny camera inside a mechanical roach, which the women spend most of the rest of Part 1 trying to squash (‘splat’). The overhead slides, then – which have so far provided the only images of Mona and Chona – must come from the camera hidden inside the roach. No wonder Molly/Mona describes herself in the third person and past tense. Experience, never unmediated, has taught her to historicize herself. ‘Thus behave our subjects when they believe we cannot see them’, the Naturalist concludes from his first (Part1/ SceneB) ‘nature study’. Contrary to the Naturalist’s (and his audience’s) impressions, however, ‘our subjects’ – Molly/Mona and Charlene/Chona – do not behave naturally in the first scene. For them, distorted by so many lenses of observation, there is no such thing as naturally. Blind to this, the Naturalist posits the central question of “Snails” (Part 1) as ‘How should we best accommodate the presence of such subjects in our modern world’ (53). From the opposite perspective, DuBois asks, ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’. According to DuBois, [T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world, – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (615) In Imperceptible Mutabilities, Parks’s figures are conscious that they always have an audience and always play multiple, self-alienating roles. Hopeless to evade it, Parks turns double-consciousness back on the audience by theatricalizing it. In the process, she mocks the Naturalist’s temporizing

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distinction between mundus primitivus and mundus modernus by showing how these first and third worlds are one and the same. This aspect of Parks’s dramaturgical strategy has significant political implications: Foucault reminds us of those living with us on the planet; that they are “distant” from us does not make them “fixed, dead, immobile”, as the lingering discourses of primitivism, racism, and Orientalism would have us believe. Benjamin reminds us of the demands of our ancestors who died unjustly ... their death is, in a powerful sense, not ‘past’, but subject to the meaning it is given through action in the present. (Boyarin 11) The audience knows that the Naturalist’s ‘journey to the jungle’ (i.e. his visit to Mona and Chona’s apartment) is just a drive across (up?) town. As a result, the distance he emphasizes between himself and mundus primitivus becomes a joke. Imperceptible Mutabilities moves through performance in sync with the dream rhythms and sudden blows of its figures’ collective memory, circling back as way of moving forward. As Parks continues foregrounding and advancing memory in Parts 2, 3 and 4 of the play, the past continues to encroach, with increasingly tragic results.

The figure and dramatic form As it unfolds in performance, Imperceptible Mutabilities sounds at first like the work of a poetic realist with a comic flair, but it soon careens wildly into Ionesco-flavored farce before devolving into what Parks (Solomon 77) calls ‘death throes’ – and this is only in Part 1: “Snails”. In Part 2: “Third Kingdom”, the play drops low into a call-and-response threnody of the Middle Passage. In Part 3: Open House, it reaches the intensity of an exorcism performed on the central figure, Aretha, a dying slave nanny who hallucinates her way to the present day, where she continues to haunt her former charges. “Third Kingdom” is reprised and revised before the play’s fourth and final part: Greeks (or the Slugs). In Greeks, a black soldier overseas and his family back home awaiting his return occupy two alternating tableaux that eventually merge in a final scene which deliberately echoes the scene of suffering of classical tragedy. The play presents four separate parts, and each part has a distinct group of five characters rather than recurring characters. Once a part is finished, the characters in it do not reappear, although their lines often do, spoken by a subsequent character played by the same actor. The play plants refrains and motifs early on and then revisits them, gathering momentum through accumulation rather than racing towards a climax. A cyclical history is built up over the course of the play through the bodies of the five actors, who circulate through all four sections and all twenty roles in the play.

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Suzan-Lori Parks : A Casebook

This would at first seem to reify the actors’ presence as the only solid reality in this kind of theatre because it is clear that the figures are intended to be repetitions and revisions of each other. Yet Parks’s use of overhead slides and darkness, among other techniques, complicates the human subject in her theatre, making it inextricable from her formal principles, particularly her insistence that the people in her plays ‘are not characters. To call them so could be an injustice’ (13). At the same time, as the resemblances among the speakers multiply, they form a kind of imaginary family. In Imperceptible Mutabilities, the actors become shadows of all the figures they stand in for just as the figures shadow each other through the bodies of the actors. The technique connects the actor to her characters in a manner different from traditional mimesis: The actor does not represent a fictional individual but rather manifests many voices through her own. ‘If I answered that ‘I write for the audience’, I would be lying’, Parks writes. ‘I write for the figures in the plays’ (3). In Possession, she writes that these ‘figures’ come ‘from, say, time immemorial, from, say, PastLand, from somewhere back there’ (12). Parks’s figures gesture toward history, symbol and silhouette, and finally poetry, and they suggest that Parks writes as much for her love of language as for the people who have led to her plays. Ultimately, as with Adrienne Kennedy, the two categories, speakers and words, merge in Parks’ work. Both are vessels through which the past speaks. Parks’s use of the term figures emphasizes that her dramatis personae are only words, words, words. Yet, as Parks writes, ‘words are so old, they hold, they have a big connection with the what-was’ (3). Like actors, they perform but with a different kind of electric life all of their own. In performance, therefore, Parks’ figures call for an acting style devoted at least as much to poetic as to psychological analysis. In her essay, Possession, Parks gives a further hint about the nature of her figures using an excerpt from John S. Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy: ‘A person dies and yet continues to live: he is a living-dead, and no other term can describe him better than that’ (5). Through the ghostly vessel of the actor – already a liminal figure – Parks’s voices emerge, dissolving (rather than affirming) the authenticity of the self, including the author’s. ‘Who am I?’ Parks asks, and the question is not rhetorical: ‘I’m not just Suzan-Lori Parks, 30 years old, whatever. It’s all those who came before me, because my family comes from all over. I don’t take any of those things for granted, none of them. I think that’s why I tend to write the way I do’ (Ong 49). Parks’ development of the figure in Imperceptible Mutabilities owes much to Adrienne Kennedy, who, like Parks, is ‘always writing about [her] family’ (E. Diamond 117) in plays that forgo the comforts of naturalistic family drama. In particular, Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro first inspired Parks ‘to take weird riffs and shifts of character’ (Solomon 75). Like Kennedy, Parks’ formal use of repetition complicates mimesis in her drama, ruining, as Elin Diamond writes, ‘the discourse of individual identity’ as

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well as ‘the fantasy of linear progress’ (119). If not in identity, Kennedy’s figures often find temporary refuge in identification with movie stars, historical figures or animals. In this play, however, Parks’ figures find no refuge. In all Parks history plays, repetition frees language from bondage to plot. Often, it extends a kind of freedom to Parks figures. Yet Imperceptible Mutabilities’ repetition dooms its characters in a way that distinguishes this play from those that follow. For the characters in Imperceptible Mutabilities, repetition leads to confusion, entropy and disability. The characters frequently speak at cross-purposes. Their misunderstandings begin innocently but often degenerate into violence. Their attempts to get to the bottom of things only sink them deeper in confusion. Imperceptible Mutabilities presents four brutal scenarios as well as a record of Parks’ struggle, as a young playwright, somehow to get through the discontinuous yet interdependent identities suggested by the pairing of African and American. In the end, both identity and erasure of self, however longed-for, prove elusive, but the need to search for them (Beckett’s obligation to express) does not. The seminal, semi dark tableau of Imperceptible Mutabilities shows how Parks works language into a new type of dramatic character in the context of a new type of dramatic action. Imperceptible Mutabilities’ asks for contemplation and a deepening understanding from the audience, but not Brechtian judgement. Imperceptible Mutabilities in performance is a deliberately disorienting experience from which the spectator leaves with a multiplicity of stories with multifarious meanings. Like a Brechtian episodic drama, Imperceptible Mutabilities deliberately opens gaps between and within its four parts and asks the audience to fill in the missing variables; however, the familiar dialectical equation does not compute here. In a more radical manner than Brecht, Parks leaves the decoding to the audience. Perhaps if they can decode the play beyond dialectics, they can start to decode history beyond dialectics as well. In Parks’s sketch-representation of the play in ‘from Elements of Style’, the gap between Africa and America equals x. The spectator or reader must not only solve for x, but formulate a new equation for doing so. Imperceptible Mutabilities play with light and dark (and their metonymic connotations) as well as with simultaneous time and space suggests a post-Newtonian equation: an algorithm for AfricanAmerican memory. Parks’s figures are simultaneously tropic, visual and historical; they are real, simulated and imaginary. Above all, they are contingent on the historical forces that have made them what they are. Different from Aristotelian characters, Parks’s figures seek to re-configure rather than identify (and thereby confirm) the universal (rational Eurocentric) structures of knowledge that underwrote the slave trade. Like Oedipus, they are detectives, amnesiac and (in the case of Mrs Smith) going blind. What Parks’s figures possess – or perhaps, what they are possessed by – is a compulsively

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Suzan-Lori Parks : A Casebook

repeated phrase, which is a shattered flashback instead of a name. Ritually repeating them as invocations, Parks’s figures re-figure the fragments of language they possess, hoping that the word can be made flesh. In Imperceptible Mutabilities, Parks’ character-figures are continually, habitually misnamed. So tenuous is their existence that they expose themselves in the theatre in search of a more substantial existence. ‘Tell him ... [He hesitates] ... tell him you saw me and that ... [He hesitates] ... that you saw me’, Vladimir begs the second Boy at the end of Waiting for Godot (Beckett 86). Parks’s figures make the same humble request of their audiences, who, however (like Beckett’s Boys) may be unreliable messengers. What Parks’s figures achieve, when they achieve it, is a momentary understanding that usually takes place in silence during what Parks calls ‘spells’. Parks’s spells, which first appear as part of the dramatic text in The America Play, are part-Africanist possession (a key word in Parks’ dramatic theory and the title of the first essay in her anthology, The America Play and Other Works, 1995), part epiphany (which, quite possibly, ‘hasn’t epiphanized yet’, as Joyce writes; 187–8). A quintessential modernist experience, the epiphany is generally known by Joyce’s term; yet Virginia Woolf’s ‘moment of being’ (72), a private experience that opens onto the historical, comes closer to Parks than Joyce does. Finally, because Parks’ spell is theatrical, it also recalls Brecht and Benjamin’s charged historical present, in which a figure (and in the theatre, one also hopes the audience) acts, as Benjamin writes famously, ‘to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’ (255). Spells are also ‘place[s] where the figures experience their pure true simple state’, Parks (16) writes. This is a quieter version of experience than the traditional dramatic climax, but the best spells also involve simultaneous reversals and recognitions. Parks’ spells move toward illuminations, not through a Dionysian or ecstatic shedding of the self, but through incantatory repetition that connects the individual to the great beyond: the past. Through Imperceptible Mutabilities, audiences come to understand how the self is less an invention of one’s own making than a result of historical forces. In Imperceptible Mutabilities, the black characters in “Snails”, Aretha in “Open House”, and the Smith family in “Greeks (or Slugs)” all mistakenly look towards, respectively, science, the Bible, and the government to replace identities stolen by slavery and discrimination, but their truer, spectral identities lie just beyond what they can see: a timeplace outside history that they can only remember. (But they cannot constructively ‘re-member’, i.e. create anew. In Imperceptible Mutabilities, this is a privilege Parks reserves for herself but does not extend to her figures, with the exception of Aretha.) In Imperceptible Mutabilities, this timespace is the Third Kingdom, a watery space connoting tears as well as the perverse baptism of the Middle Passage. Imperceptible Mutabilities’ white characters are also delimited by the history they have written in order to take power by force because it is a history without memory. In Part 1, the Naturalist obsessively seeks mundus

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primitivus in Mona and Chona’s apartment. In Part 3, the slaveowner Charles worries that he will ‘not remember himself to be master’ (48) when his slave Aretha is freed. In Diamond’s staging of “Greeks (or Slugs)”, Sergeant Smith’s youngest son Duffy, was played by a white actor, signifying the Smith family’s gradual assimilation with white America. ‘Who’re you uhgain’ (69), Sergeant Smith asks the boy upon returning home. Imperceptible Mutabilities’ black figures start each of the play’s three main parts as hackneyed stereotypes drawn from the history of drama: the ghetto-dwellers Mona, Chona and Verona; the slave nanny, Aretha; and the middle-class, assimilated military family, Sergeant and Mrs. Smith, Buffy, Muffy and Duffy. As their parts come apart, however, these figures develop a dawning awareness of the historical forces that still hold them in check. Parks severs the link between cause and effect, expectation and fulfillment for both audience and figures. Those figures that cling resolutely to illusion suffer: At the end of Part 1, Mona lies down to die; Mrs. Smith of Part 4 has ‘lost her eyes’ by the play’s end (69). Part 2, “Third Kingdom”, by contrast, is populated by seers.

Words workin’: language as action Jumping down from the window into the play’s first scene, Mona mocks the notion of harnessing language to any agenda other than its own pleasure. Complaining about the uselessness of the basic skills her boss is forcing her to learn, she says, ‘Couldnt see thuh sense uh words workin like he said couldnt see the sense uh workin where words workin like that was working’ (26). Suddenly, the idea of ‘words workin’ only to serve plot or grammar or business protocol becomes ridiculous compared with the sheer delight Parks takes in the texture of the line. Such language asks the audience to listen closely, and the effort is repaid with a burst of sound and a multiplicity of meanings. Parks’s words play games behind her characters’ backs, but the alternative is worse. The alternative is the language of basic skills and rote repetition: ‘The-little-lamb-follows-closely-behind-at-Marys-heels-as-Mary-boards thetrain’ (25). Mona balks at reiterating this parable of the lamb brought to heel: ‘Aint never seen no woman on no train with no lamb’ (26). Here and elsewhere in the play, neutral clichés, formulas, and statistics are revealed as insidious or at least inadequate with respect to African-American experience. In Part 3: “Open House”, the dialogue is punctuated with numbers expressing the capacity of slave ships, the ratio of male slaves to female slaves, and the dates on which slaves were freed in various places, but none of this information, all drawn from a mysterious, omniscient text known only as ‘THE Book’, succeeds in evoking or assuaging the brutality of slavery and its consequences. The Book, with its peremptory facts and emphasis on the official history of laws and amendments, casts a vivid light on certain selected effects while leaving the complex of causes in shadow. Yet the only alternative to The Book, according to the white character in the scene (i.e. Charles), is

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chaos: ‘There would be chaos, chaos it would be without a knowledge from whence we came ... chaos without correct records’ (48). Parks sees figurative language in this play – specifically metonymy, or mutability – as a better way of exposing the often cruel actions of history. The statistical facts about overcrowding and expulsion, for example, find form in an image both comic and horrific: the excruciating, unnecessary tooth extractions performed on the slave nanny Aretha throughout the scene. Extraction is also happening to Aretha herself in the scene. She is expiring, dying on Juneteenth, no longer a slave, not yet free. Even though they have been excluded from history books, Parks’s figures in Imperceptible Mutabilities have been central to the shaping and interpretation of past events. Their experiences reveal the many ways in which history, like memory, is susceptible to flights of fancy and how historymaking itself is an act of the imagination, albeit one with profound consequences. As Mona’s crisis of language illustrates, history can quite concretely be used against you. Parks’s figures in Imperceptible Mutabilities are only half-aware of this, and as a result, they are inexorably caught up in it. Their understanding of the workings of power may be partial, but Parks’s figures are historically minded themselves. They are possessed by personal and collective memories, and they are obsessed with ritually repeating stories and acting them out. Yet the figures’ bruised awareness of history as ‘time that won’t quit’ (Parks 15) also has its advantages. In the context of a national socioeconomic and cultural system powered by strategic amnesia, historical awareness can be a means of resistance and a tool for survival, a way of getting through. It can open up vistas of connection between the living and the dead, providing a source of energy for struggles in the present. Mona, for example, does not return to the stage as a character after the first part of Imperceptible Mutabilities, but echoes of her persist throughout the rest of the play. The actor who plays her is still visible in other guises and even occasionally speaks Mona’s words as she travels back and forth in the play and in time. And later, when we see the same actor on a slave ship in the Middle Passage, once again weighing the possibility of jumping, it becomes clear that history repeats itself, and not necessarily for the better. From the vantage of her precarious position at the window at the start of Imperceptible Mutabilities, Mona ultimately discovers her own way of getting through. Gazing, Humpty-Dumpty-like, down toward the cement below and out toward the action to come, Mona asks her roommate, ‘What should I do Chona should I jump should I jump or what?’ ‘You want some eggs?’ Chona, unperturbed, asks in response. ‘Would I splat?’ (25) Mona counters. Parks puns, wrenches apart sentences, upsets order, pulls words apart by the phonemes, experimenting with juxtapositions of sound and sense in search of double, triple, quadruple meanings, all in search of the tell-tale slip. Her language performs, distinctively and hauntingly working like action to ameliorate the sorrows of half-living in the Third Kingdom.

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“Snails”: naturalism’s death throes All four parts of Imperceptible Mutabilities are supersaturated with poetic sound and sense, and all of them deserve close line-by-line readings; however, Part 1: “Snails” provides the broadest hint as to Parks’s formal aims in this play. “Snails” opens in the roach-infested tenement apartment of black situation comedy and drama. The title ironically reinforces the characters’ ineluctable, specimen-like relationship to their shelter. Both Chona and Mona are reassuringly comic. The audience is invited to sympathize with Mona’s problems and admire Chona’s nurturing kindness. Chona’s parable about the robber with no language and no name at the end of the first scene seems a pat metaphor for Mona’s dilemma, and the scene ends with a joke. Bittersweet closure has been achieved. Or has it? Four scenes later, this situation comedy has worked itself into an absurdist farce. The local robber, who remains nameless, attempts to steal the Naturalist’s giant spy-roach. Another character, Verona, screams at the television, horrified that naturalist Marlon Perkins of Wild Kingdom has pulled out a gun and is ‘SHOOTIN THUH WILD BEASTS!’ (35). The Naturalist, now disguised as an exterminator, squirts Mona and Chona with insecticide in order to rid them (or more accurately, himself) of their ‘infestation problem’ (28). Language and activity whirl about the stage, and gestures and speech have a manic rhythm. Sometimes the characters address the audience, sometimes themselves, sometimes each other, but they neither expect nor receive answers. Their sentences are fragmented and repetitive. Dialogue has become a thing of the past; cause and effect are no longer speaking to each other. Suddenly, the man without language or a name who has stopped by to rob the place changes from pitiable outcast – an object-lesson in the value of education – to the only stable participant in the scene; at least his motivation (to steal) is clear. Mona, torn between two languages, begs to be delivered from this nightmare through sleep, but she cannot remember if she should say ‘I need to lie down’ or ‘I need to lay down’ (34). Parks has likened Snails to ‘death throes’ (Solomon 77). This enigmatic simile (the scene feels farcical) captures both the scene’s spasmodic rhythm and its determination to show a mode of dramatic representation (naturalism) and, indeed, a whole epistemological mode (scientific positivism) at their last gasps. The living rooms and linearity of naturalistic space-time quickly cramp Parks’ figural style: Many playwrights who consider themselves avant-garde spend a lot of time badmouthing the more traditional forms. The naturalism of, say, Lorraine Hansberry is beautiful and should not be dismissed simply because it’s naturalism ... I don’t explode the form because I find traditional plays ‘boring’ – I don’t really. It’s just that those structures never could accommodate the figures that take up residence inside me. (Parks 6)

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Suzan-Lori Parks : A Casebook

Parks characterizes Imperceptible Mutabilities as ‘African-American history in the shadow of the photographic image’ (Solomon 76) – a shadow that obscures its subject. It is commonplace to say that photography is a form of representation that distorts as much as it depicts, and it is all the more distorting for its implicit claim to truth. Parks realizes this idea’s theatrical possibilities by dramatizing it as a conflict between, as she says, ‘fixed pictures projected up there’ and ‘down below ... a little person mutating like hell on the stage’ (Solomon 75). The schism between the two has obvious political implications: All of the tableaux frozen into photographs during the course of Imperceptible Mutabilities –‘welfare queens’ framed by a dingy apartment, a slave nanny clutching her charges and ‘grinnin’, a dutiful black soldier standing behind his superior’s desk – are already imbedded somewhere in the depths of our national consciousness as icons of AfricanAmerican history. Parks strips away the aura of authenticity surrounding these images, insists that photographic evidence is always constructed through interpretation, and dramatizes how distorting and distorted the conclusions drawn from such evidence can be. It makes no difference if the characters attempt to exert control over the way they are represented by the camera. Mona and Chona are caught unawares (‘observed unobserved’, as the Naturalist puts it), while Sergeant Smith carefully poses, but none of the resulting images capture the complexity of the characters’ lives. The respective truths presented by the dramatic text and the performance are also unreliable. During the opening scene, the audience hears the characters call each other Mona and Chona. When the Naturalist subsequently refers to them as ‘subjects’ which for our purposes we have named ‘MOLLY’ and ‘CHARLENE’’ (27), a rift forms between the audience’s grasp of the facts it has witnessed in the previous scene and the Naturalist’s willful misinterpretation of the same facts (Ben-Zvi 1995). (The audience may also have observed the Naturalist’s use of the first person plural and recognized it as another form of coercion.) The reader, however, is faced with a considerably more complex interpretive task because the speakers’ names in the first and third scenes are written not as Mona and Chona, but as Molly and Charlene. Who, then, is writing the play? The Naturalist’s use of the first person plural (‘our purposes’) now takes on a more ominous hue, and the questions about Imperceptible Mutabilities’ white audience at BACA Downtown pass from the realm of the real world into the stage world and even the confines of the dramatic text. Ultimately, it may be that in Imperceptible Mutabilities Parks sees herself, as well as her figures, caught in the Naturalist’s ‘fixed pictures up there’, powerless even to write (as her characters are to speak) her way out of this double-bind. The drama of letters is, in fact, written through all of Parks’s history plays. As Liz Diamond writes: [Parks’s] words are actors, performing virtuoso feats of transformation, reconfiguring new meanings right before our very eyes: “fo” father’

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becomes “foe father” becomes “faux father” in The America Play; “history” becomes “his tree” becomes “his story” in The Death of the Last Black Man. (86) Words weave their way through Parks’s scenes and acquire new textures as they go along, but frequently, only the reader can feel these textures. Parks also privileges the reader in another way: Both Imperceptible Mutabilities and The America Play come saddled with footnotes that provide information integral to interpreting the action. Yet readers are often quickly put off by the look of Parks’s plays on the page. Erika Munk writes, ‘When she started out, Parks says, she’d get ‘weird letters’ from theatre directors saying things like, ‘you are obviously not writing plays! It really doesn’t make any difference, all your little spellings, it just makes it so hard to read’ – and this from someone who’d read Joyce’ (G3). (For the published anthology of her plays, The America Play and Other Works, Parks wrote a lexicon of ‘foreign words & phrases’ to ameliorate such difficulties.) When Parks writes words like ‘Thuuuuuup?’ or ‘UUH!’ or a line like ‘Ee-uh. Gaw gaw gaw gaw eeee––––’ she would appear to be transcribing performance. Imperceptible Mutabilities and The Death of the Last Black Man in particular resemble dramatic sheet music. The rests, crescendos, decrescendos, improvisations and refrains are all written down, but only performance can bring them to life. When reading Parks’ plays, one is frequently reminded that it is much more fulfilling to see them performed, and Parks admits that she is ‘most interested’ in how words ‘impact on actors and directors and how those folks physicalize those verbal aberrations ... [in] the creation of a theatrical experience’ (10). “Snails” sets up this anxiety surrounding the limitations of forms in general, naturalistic and otherwise, which is never dispelled nor resolved. Neither the reader nor the spectator (nor the author, it seems) is allowed to feel as if he or she has mastered the experience of the play. The struggle between authority and freedom drives Imperceptible Mutabilities at every level of discourse. As a first major play, then, Imperceptible Mutabilities is both astonishingly ambitious and relentlessly self-questioning – the latter of course expands the scope of the former. Parks strives to encompass the sweep of African-American history from its origins to the present, debunking as she goes along. This hope clashes with a scepticism throughout Imperceptible Mutabilities concerning all forms of interpretation, including that offered by the play itself. In its fraught attitude toward epistemological truth, Imperceptible Mutabilities, of all Parks’s plays, comes closest to occupying the postcognitive universe of some of the post modern playwrights Elinor Fuchs discusses in The Death of Character. Composed over 4 years (from 1986 to 1989), Parks’s first play reflects the influence of the intellectual climate in which it was written. The gnawing doubts of poststructuralism

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are everywhere present. It is as if Parks started with the desire to subvert an audience’s preconceptions (about the kind of drama she would write, how she would represent African-Americans on stage, what her language would sound like) and quickly started to question her own assumptions (about the nature of textuality, performance and representation). This refusal to take anything for granted is the driving force behind Imperceptible Mutabilities. Parks juggles four separate stories, twenty characters and a myriad of linguistic styles, seemingly sceptical that any of her creations, separately or together, are adequate to the task her imagination would set for them. Yet, by incorporating these problems of process into her work, Parks allows the play to grow, rather than diminish, in meaning and scope. The play itself becomes a Third Kingdom, where meanings converge and mutate in a language of codes, signs, and symbols that always remain half-secret.

Bibliography Beckett, Samuel (1986) The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber. Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations (Harry Zohn, trans. and Hannah Arendt, ed.) New York: Schocken. Boyarin, J., ed. (1994) Remapping Memory: The Politics of Timespace, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Diamond, E. (1997) Unmaking Mimesis, London: Routledge. Diamond, L. (1993) ‘Perceptible mutability in the Word Kingdom’, Theatre 24(3): 86–7. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1997) ‘The souls of black folk’, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nelly Y. McKay (eds) The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 613–740. Ellison, R. (1952) Invisible Man, New York: Signet-New American Library. Fuchs, E. (1996) The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gussow, M. (1989) ‘Identity loss in Imperceptible Mutabilities’, New York Times, 20 September, C24. Joyce, James (1944) Stephen Hero. (Theodore Spencer, ed.) New York: New Directions. Morrison, T. (1993) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage. Munk, E. (1993) ‘Is Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks the Voice of the Future? Washington Post, 28 February, G3. Ong, H. (1994) Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks, BOMB 47: 47–50. Parks, Suzan-Lori (1995) The America Play and Other Works, New York: TCG. Poe, Edgar Allen (1984) Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. New York: Doubleday. Roach, J.R. (1996) Cities of the Dead, New York: Columbia University Press. Shange, N. (1977) For Coloured girls who have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf: a Choreopoem, New York: Scribner. Solomon, A. (1990) ‘Signifying on the signifyin’: The plays of Suzan-Lori Parks.’ Theatre 21(3): 73–80.

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Spillers, H.J. (1994) ‘Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book’, in Camille Roman and Suzanne Juhasz (eds) The Women and Language Debate: A Sourcebook, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 56–77. Woolf, Virginia (1985) Moments of Being (Jeanne Schulkind, ed.), 2nd edn. New York: Harcourt. Zola, E. (1976) ‘Naturalism in the theatre’, in Eric Bentley (ed.) The Theory of the Modern Stage, New York: Penguin, pp. 351–72.

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Strange Legacy: The history plays of Suzan-Lori Parks Heidi J. Holder

Even a quick examination of twentieth-century history plays in the USA reveals that race and ethnicity are vitally important to such theatrical interpretations of history. One obvious function of the historical drama for these groups is corrective: the plays tell stories left out of popular, mainstream depictions of history, or tell known stories from a different viewpoint. Early in the century, African-American playwrights, includes May Miller, Willis Richardson and Randolph Edmonds, attempted to fill a perceived void in their history by creating dramas of heroes and revolutionaries, such as Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner. Parody of popular versions of US history has likewise been an enduring tactic, from Langston Hughes’ lampooning of white views of slavery in Little Eva to Luis Valdez’s self-critiquing melodrama of the fate of the Californios in Bandido! Slowly, the use of traditional models of historical drama has given way to more self-conscious works that draw attention to the very problems inherent in staging history, and no playwright exemplifies this trend like Suzan-Lori Parks. Certain themes and structural innovations are notable in many recent history plays (one can look to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America or Robert O’Hara’s Insurrection: Holding History, for examples). The connections and parallels between the events of the past and the conditions of the present are often made explicit rather than implicit. There is a fascination in much of the twentieth-century historical drama of the USA with repetition in history: certain kinds of actions – rebellion, oppression, flight, execution, miracles – are shown to be part of an endlessly recurring pattern that may or may not be broken or changed in the present or future. This is not, I think, a novel development in history plays: Shakespeare’s cycles, for instance, display a seemingly endless series of betrayals, executions and rebellions in order to point the way to the happy ending of this history, in which England is finally perceived to be peaceful and justly ruled. On the twentieth-century American stage, however, the shifts between tradition and discontinuity are more strongly marked. A preoccupation with synthesis, or lack thereof, is evident in plays in the USA. The bicentennial celebrations in the USA, while the occasion for innumerable traditional history plays and pageants, also gave rise to

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revisionist views, such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s False Promises/Nos Engañaron and Megan Terry’s 100,001 Horror Stories of the Plains, which give a central place to people and issues usually left out of historical drama. Many US history plays of this century were written by members of racial and ethnic groups that were earlier denied access to the mainstream stage. Thus African-American dramas such as Randolph Edmonds’s Nat Turner (1927), Langston Hughes’s Don’t you want to be Free? (1938), Amiri Baraka’s The Motion of History (1978) and Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990) all ‘rewrite’ US history, with the object of telling what has been left out. The works that result are not simply, however, exercises in filling in the blank spots. In the plays of Parks, in particular, this business of staring into an absence and attempting to see it clearly has involved not a simple filling of a blank spot, but an intensification of and obsession with absence. All history plays, by placing before an audience past events and dead persons, display what Freddie Rokem has called the ‘inevitable ghostly dimension of history’ (6). One tactic for the playwright is to try and overcome this ghostly dimension, to revivify and embody the past; another approach is to raise into relief the contradictions inherent in the staging of history: to embrace the ghostly, to turn the focus to the dead and what they have left us. It is in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks that we can best observe this preoccupation with death, endings and aftermaths at work. Parks, whose works have appeared on Broadway and at the Yale Repertory Theatre, the Joseph Papp Public Theatre and the Humana Festival, is usually read as an AfricanAmerican playwright. I suggest that it might also be worthwhile to read her works in the context of historical spectacle. Her pieces often begin with the ‘deaths’ of the main characters. The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1989–1992) begins, after the characters introduce themselves, with the lines: ‘This is the death of the last black man in the whole entire world’; ‘Yesterday today next summer tomorrow just uh moment uhgoh in 1317 dieded thuh last black man in thuh whole entire world’ (101–2). The death is announced repeatedly throughout the play. The America Play (1993) features a character, ‘The Lesser Known’, who believes that he is the image of Abraham Lincoln, ‘The Great Man’ and makes his living dressing up as the President and allowing people, for a small fee, to play the part of John Wilkes Booth and assassinate him. We see these ‘death’ scenes over and over, until the ‘Lesser Known’ finally dies himself at the end, in the same posture and attitude as in the earlier ‘mock’ death scenes. Venus (1996) begins with the announcement of the death of the Venus Hottentot, the African woman who was displayed in nineteenthcentury Europe as an anatomical curiosity; this Venus does not, of course, stay dead any more than Parks’s earlier characters. The plays begin, rather than end, with death. Parks uses a technique she calls ‘Rep & Rev’ – repetition and revision – to unmoor images and sounds from their expected context. The repetitions and

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revisions are frequently nonsensical or impossible. The forever-dying ‘last black man in the whole entire world’ was, we are told in one case, ‘born a slave, taught himself the rudiments of education to become a spearhead in the civil rights movement. He was 38 years old. News of [his] death sparked controlled displays of jubilation in all corners of the world’ (110). Another character, Ham, offers a lengthy parody of the Biblical begats using parodic black idioms (122). Ham: Ham’s begotten Tree: . . . . MeMines gived out 2 offspring, one she called Mines after herself thuh othuh she called Themuhns named after all them who comed before. Themuhns married outside thuh tribe joinin herself with uh man they called WhoDat. Themuhns in WhoDat brought forth only one child called WhoDatDere. Mines joined up with Whasshisname and from that union come AllYall. Before Columbus: All us? Ham: No. AllYall. The historical model here is undone when numbers are shouted out as the list goes on, numbers that can be inflected so as to suggest bible verses or auction bids. ‘Sold’ is called out at points, as the suggestion of an historical record devolves into a slave auction. The ‘Lesser-known’ in the America Play claims to be a dead-ringer for Abraham Lincoln and insists that he should have been present at the President’s funeral, all this despite the fact that he was born after Lincoln’s death and looks nothing like him (all of the actors are black, but race is never directly alluded to or acknowledged). The governing image is one of systematic inversion. The implied but never acknowledged racial inversion in the role of Lincoln is accompanied by other reversals. The play opens with examples of chiasmus –syntactical inversion (‘to stop too fearful and too faint to go’); and continues to emphasize this kind of turnabout. The play is set in what is supposed to be a replica of something called ‘the Great Hole of History’. In the second half of the play, when his wife and son are searching for the ‘Lesser Known’ by digging in the dirt (they want to find him so that they can bury him), they describe the genuine ‘Hole of History’, a theme park back east: Brazil: Its uh popular spot. He and Her would sit on thuh lip and watch everybody who was ever anybody parade on by. Daily parades! Just like thuh TeeVee. Mr George Washington, for example, thuh Fathuh of our Country hisself, would rise up from thuh dead and walk uhround and cross thuh Delaware and say stuff!! Right before their very eyes!!!! Lucy: Son?

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Brazil: Huh? Lucy: That iduhut how it went. Brazil: Oh. Lucy: Thuh Mr Washington me and your Daddy seen was uh lookuhlike of the Mr. Washington of history-fame, son. Brazil: Oh. Lucy: The original Mr. Washingtonssbeen long dead. Brazil: Oh. Lucy: That Hole back East was uh theme park son. Keep your story to scale. (179–180) The real is confused with the impersonation, and the theme park of history, instead of being something built up, is a hole in the ground. The use of inversion links Parks with other contemporary American dramatists interested in the shape of historical time. In Kushner’s Angels in America and José Rivera’s Marisol, for instance, the use of heaven as a significant space from which characters descend (and, in Kushner’s play, to which they ascend) alters our sense of space and time. An opposition is set up for us, and meaning in these plays is generated by a struggle between our world and another, largely unseen space. In Marisol one of the effects of heavenly warfare is the disarrangement of geography; attempting to travel, Rivera’s Marisol Perez is thwarted by moving landmarks (the Empire State Building is not where it is supposed to be). This disruption leads to chaos in general: ‘water no longer seeks it own level, there are fourteen inches to the foot, and the French are polite’ (54). In Parks’s The America Play the gaze is directed not heavenward but resolutely earthward, into the ground. The characters are all professionally in the ‘death business’: the ‘Lesser Known’, before impersonating Lincoln, was a grave digger in a long line of grave diggers; his wife keeps the secrets of the dead; and his son is a professional mourner, or ‘gnasher’. What matters is what is hidden, what needs to be unearthed; despite their apparent professional interest in putting things into the ground, these characters seem compelled to dig things up. In The Death of the Last Black Man, a persistent refrain is ‘you should write it down and you should hide it under a rock’. Parks is concerned here with the contradictions of AfricanAmerican history, with the hidden or invisible thing that must be revealed. But her work also intersects in useful ways with other dramatic writing of the day, particularly in its alternating compression and stretching of time and space. Marisol Perez, the ‘Lesser Known’, and Kushner’s Prior Walter are all ‘chosen’, singled out by God, history, or fate to play a part that finally is undefined and unfinished. In these stories of end-times the central characters are the representative undead. The insistence on the presence of the dead, on endings that do not end, is contextualized in Parks’s plays by an intense, at times disorienting, manipulation

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of the elements of order and structure. This kind of serious ‘playing’ with structure has received wide comment from critics of Parks’s work. Alisa Solomon suggests one way to view the structure of the works when she comments on the layering of images and historical resonances in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: ‘Slavery, genocide, gentrification – Parks does not equate them, but evokes them as spokes all spinning around the same historical hub’ (75). Alice Rayner and Harry Elam, Jr likewise strive for the correct image of Parks’s imaginative structures, suggesting, in the case of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, that the playwright ‘refigures narrative history in a vertical spiral rather than a horizontal line’ (451). Elinor Fuchs observes a conflation of time and space: the historical and historiographical interests of the plays offer ‘not a chronology of events over time, but . . . a great space of simultaneous experience (48)’. Parks herself, in a piece entitled ‘From Elements of Style’, points to the issue of form: A playwright, as any other artist, should accept the bald fact that content determines form and form determines content; that form and content are interdependent. Form should not be looked at askance and held suspect – form is not something that ‘gets in the way of the story’ but is an integral part of the story. This understanding is important to me and my writing. This is to say that as I write along the container dictates what sort of substance will fill it and, at the same time, the substance is dictating the size and shape of the container . . . . form is not merely a docile passive vessel, but an active participant in the sort of play which ultimately inhabits it. (7–8) Later in this essay, Parks provides diagrams suggesting the shape and ‘problems’ (sometimes mathematical) of her works, including a sketch of a coffin for Death of the Last Black Man with instructions to ‘find the volume of this solid’ (13). In both her works and her commentaries, she insistently draws attention to notions of mapping, charting, and diagramming, to ideas of chronology and sequence. Such elements of pattern and structure tend to be taken for granted in drama, particularly those focused on history. Even when great liberties are taken with timelines, as in Shakespeare’s cycle of the English kings, certain proprieties are observed. Moments of death, for instance, provide touchstones and pivots: Richard III dies in 1485 at Bosworth Field and the house of Tudor ascends the English throne. Even in more contemporary and experimental history plays, a ‘moment’ matters. The subject of Brian Friel’s Translations, for instance, set during the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in the 1830s, is designed to resonate with contemporary Irish cultural politics (of the 1980s): Friel evokes the slow defeat of Celtic Ireland by both Anglicization (as local names are literally ‘translated’) and (as the audience knows well) the impending famine of the 1840s. The key historical moment must remain past, distant, in order for the play’s point about loss of community to be made.

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Some contemporary playwrights come closer to Parks’s level of derangement of historical ‘order’. Tony Kushner, in Angels in America, stages the intrusion of historical background and myth into the tale of his central figure, Prior Walter. In Kushner’s play, a diorama of Mormon history is vivified and walks the streets of Manhattan; Prior Walter is visited not only by an angel but also by ghosts of ancestors. This kind of insistence on the powerful, even literal, presence of the past brings us closer to Parks’s technique. A similar approach can be found in some of the Irish historical dramas given shape by memories and nightmares that are both individual and historical: in works such as Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom, the lingering memory of national traumas (the Battle of the Somme, Ireland’s violent transition to independence) appears in the visions of haunted, dying old men. Chronology is unstable is these works, calling into question the ‘pastness’ of the past. Other works could be examined for similar thematic and technical links to Parks, including plays by Caryl Churchill, Robert O’Hara, Sabina Berman and Sharon Pollock. Plays that make reference to history often, these days, show considerable experimentation in form. But Parks’s works, I would argue, show some quite distinct features. In particular, her notion of an ‘ending’ requires further examination, and not merely because, as already noted, her history-centered dramas often begin with an end, a death. Here it might be helpful to engage in some further analysis of Parks’s idiosyncratic use of numbers, of counting, particularly in Death of the Last Black Man and Venus, as they relate to her practice of ‘Rep & Rev’. Counting and numbering indicate the ordering of things; such actions give a reassuring shape to the amorphous and set precise limits and meaning. In The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, the repetition of lines, actions and scenes is tracked by a parallel fascination with numbers. Often these numbers are puzzling, and easy to dismiss as irrelevant. Welcoming back her dead husband, ‘Black Women with Fried Drumstick’ describes the stupendous meal she has made for him (‘Knew you would come back. Knew you would want uh big good hen dinner in waitin. Every hen on the block’. [106]). The hens number, we are told repeatedly, 93: ‘93 dyin hen din hand . . . 93 dyin hen din hand with no heads let em loose tuh run down tuh towards home infront of me’. (106). In the oft-given lines describing the Black Man’s death, we are told that he ‘falls 23 floors to his death’: ‘23 floors from uh passin ship from space tuh splat on thuh pavement’ (111). The figure “Prunes and Prisms” carefully numbers the utterances of her ritual phrase: ‘Say ‘prunes and prisms’ 40 times each day and youll cure your big lips. Prunes and prisms prunes and prisms prunes and prisms: 19’ (113). The third ‘Panel’ of the play, ‘Thuh Lonesome 3some’, offers a phantasmagoric dialogue between the ‘Black Man With Watermelon’ and ‘Black Woman With Fried Drumstick’, a dialogue that offers both images of plenty and a counting of losses. The Black Man is insisting that he ‘cant

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breathe’ (‘let me loosen your collar for you’, the woman responds) (117–18), a complaint that slowly develops into an image of lynching. At the same time the scene offers a counting of melons, hams and eggs: ‘our one melon has given intuh 3. Callin what it gived birth callin it gaw. 3 August hams out uh my hands now surroundin me an is all of um mines?’ (117). Black Woman, meanwhile, counts broken eggs: ‘5. 6. Mm makin uh history. 7-hhh 8-hhh mm makin uh mess. Huh. Whiffit’ (118). There is a real muddle here of images of foods and fruits, death and resurrection. The lynched man in the tree, the ‘strange fruit’ of anti-lynching song, is surrounded by dropped eggs (themselves symbols of life and rebirth) and ironic heaps of self-multiplying watermelons and hams. The counting goes on throughout, an imposition of a kind of order on something that is uncontrollable. The scene without the numbers would have precisely the same images; with the counting it has a tension between pattern and chaos. The use of numbering is most marked and dense in ‘Panel Four’, following ‘Ham’s Begotten Tree’. Here Ham continues his parody of the Biblical ‘begats’: Ham: Ham. Is. Not. Tuh. BLAME! WhoDatDere joinded with one called Sir 9th generation of thuh first Sir son of You (polite) thuh first daughter of You WhoDatDere with thuh 9th Sir begettin forth Him – Black Man with Watermelon: Ham?! All: (Except Ham): HIM! Black Woman with Fried Drumstick: Sold. Ham: SOLD! allyall9 not tuh be confused w/allus12 joined w/allthem3 in from that union comed forth whasshisname21 SOLD wassername19 still by thuh reputation uh thistree one uh thuh 2 twins loses her sight though fiddlin n falls w/ugly old yuh-fathuh4 given she8 SOLD whodat33 pairs w/you23 (still polite) of which nothinmuch comes nothinmuch now nothinmuch6 pairs with yessuhmistuhsuh17 tuh drop one called yo now yo9-0 still who gone be wentin now w/elle gived us el SOLD let us not forget ye1-2–5 w/thee3 given us thou9-2 who w/thuh they who switches their designation in certain conversation yes they10 broughted forth onemore2 at thuh same time in thuh same row right next door we have datone12 w/disone14 droppin off duhutherone2-2 SOLD let us not forgetyessuhmassuhsuh38 w/thou8 who gived up memines3-0 SOLD we are now rollin though thuh long division gimmie uh gimmie uh gimme uh squared-off route round it off round it off n round it out w/sistuh4-3 who lives with one called saintmines9 given forth one uh year how it got there callin it jessgrew callin it saintmines callin it whatdat whatdat whatdat SOLD. Black Man with Watermelon: Thuh list goes on and on. Dont it. (124) The Biblical model here provides one of history’s great (if somewhat mindnumbing) representations of the distant past: a coherent sequence, a neat

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line of descent. Parks’s first revision is to substitute for the names words of stereotypical African-American dialect (with a distinct minstrel-show flavor). The inserted words call to mind the breaking of neat lines of descent, of family coherence, by the institution of slavery; the form and the content here begin to go to war. Parks’s insertion of numbers in the speech pulls the audience member farther in each direction. They can be read, in stately tones, as references to Biblical verses; they can be shouted out as bids. The calls of ‘SOLD’, inserted more frequently towards the end, seem to draw us towards the disintegration of the original image of order provided by the list. But the counting and the calls for mathematical calculation nonetheless keep teasing us with the possibility of sorting it all out, imposing a structure: ‘ . . . we are now rollin though the long division gimmie uh gimmie uh gimme uh squared-off route round it off round it off’. In Venus, the counting intensifies. And much of it involves the act of counting down. The very structure of the play is a counting down, with the 31 scenes announced to us by ‘The Negro Resurrectionist’ in reverse order; Scene 1, the last of the play, is in fact the ‘Final Chorus’. As with the much more low-key counting of ‘Prisms and Prunes’, there is the momentum of the movement towards an event, in this case one that has apparently already happened: the death of the Venus Hottentot, Saartjie Baartman. If the death has in fact just occurred as the play begins, towards what are we moving? The name of the Resurrectionist deserves comment, since it calls to mind the criminals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who illegally disinterred corpses (and occasionally murdered people) in order to sell the bodies to medical schools (the best-known figures of this sort being the infamous Burke and Hare). The name links the Resurrectionist with the Baron Docteur and the Anatomists, suggesting that his character is not merely ‘our host’, as Parks calls him,1 but someone who has a more participatory role. With his backward counting, he disinters the Venus for our edification. This function, of course, links him with the Foundling Father, another Digger. He is also someone who adds to the implication of the audience in the action of the work; we here move, as WB Worthen has suggested, from ‘amused observer of historical reconstruction to a culpable participant, a voyeur’ (3). In the course of the play more facts and figures are hurled at the audience, as in the ‘Whirlwind Tour’ Scene 21, where we are told that the Venus visits ‘Town 25! Town 36! Town 42! Town 69!’ (58). A ‘legend’ is told by ‘the Chorus of the 8 Human Wonders’ of ‘the girl’ who was ‘Sent away from home’: Those who sent her said she couldnt return for a thousand yrs. Even though she was strong of heart even she doubted she would live that long. After 500 years they allowed her to ask a question. She wanted to know what her crime had been.

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Suzan-Lori Parks : A Casebook Simple: You wanted to go way once. 9 hundred 99 of the years were finally up just one more year to go. She had in all that time circled the globe twice on foot saw 12 hundred thousand cities and had a lover or 2 in every port. She spent her last year of banishment living in a cave carved out outside the city wall. She spent that whole year longing not looking but longing not looking. They let her go home right on time all of her friends had died and well she didnt recognize the place. (58)

As with the Black Man with Watermelon, signifiers such as dates and times are here used to pull a figure out of time, towards a kind of universality. One might think that the fantastic use of numbers and figures would move us towards some kind of resurrection, revivification. If the plays begin with death, resurrection would provide a dramatic trajectory – and an expected one, in works obsessed with digging and featuring characters called ‘resurrectionists’. However, numbers in Venus seem only to confirm death, which becomes an inescapable fact. In Scene 28; Footnote 2, the Negro Resurrectionist reads from the Baron’s autopsy report, providing another method of calculation: ‘Small intestines measured 15 feet. Spleen was pale in color and weighed 2 and 1/4 ounces. Her pancreas weighed one and 3/4 ounces. Her kidneys were large’ (28). The link between measurement and death is even more ominous in ‘The Chorus of the Eight Anatomists’ who measure the living Baartman. A character comments, ‘The measurements of her limb-bones / will of course / be corrected / after maceration, Sir?’ The Venus echoes, ‘Maceration?’ (120). The living Baartman must enact a ritual of calculation and knowledge that will be repeated upon her death. The numbers will live on. The moments of actual ‘counting down’, aside from the slow countdown provided by the Negro Resurrectionist’s numbering of the backwards scenes, appear three times, in Scenes 25, 15 and 14 (in this last, the counting is in French). Scene 25 (‘Counting Down/ Counting the Take’) offers a puzzling moment of drama: The The The The The The The

Negro Resurrectionist: Scene 25: Mother Showman: 10-20-30-40-50-60-70-80-90: Venus: 1. Mother-Showman: 10-20-30-40-50-60-70-80-90: Venus: 2. Mother Showman: 10-20-30-40-50-60-70-80-90: Venus: 3.

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The Mother-Showman: 10-20-30-40-50-60-70-80-90: The Venus: 4. The Mother Showman: 10-20-30-40-50-60-70-80-90: The Venus: 5. The Mother-Showman: 10-20-30-40-50-60-70-80-90: The Venus: 6. The Mother-Showman: 9 ugly mouths to feed. Plus my own. We didn’t do too bad today. Hottentot, yr a godsend! The Negro Resurrectionist: 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24: (40-41) The counting of the night’s take, from which Baartman will never get her agreed-upon cut, tots up her value to the Mother-Showman. The moment thus recalls the echoes of slave auction bidding in Death of the Last Black Man. The accruing of money is balanced here by the reminder from the Negro Resurrectionist of exactly where we are in the play: heading into Scene 24, with a ways to go down (or up) to the end. Parks’s use of ‘accounting’, as it were, signifies a kind of inversion, similar in effect to the earlier images of digging and filling the holes of history. But the numbers also call into question any easy identification of order, or regulation of structure. Parks in her plays often ‘tinkers’, as Kurt Bullock has noted, ‘with the stability of . . . markers’, with those things that provide a ‘framework, a skeleton upon which future generations can build an historical body’ (87). Things merge into their opposites, characters are undone and created, and the Black Man with Watermelon meticulously orders his own grave: ‘6 by 6 by 6’, he insists, only partly conforming to expected dimensions. His intended grave is too large – ‘uh mass grave-site’ he calls it (109). The Venus’s own words in the final scene do vary slightly, suggesting both her absence and possible enduring nearness: her ‘Miss me Miss me Miss me’ at the beginning of the scene slips into something different at the end: ‘Kiss me Kiss me Kiss me Kiss [italics in text]’ (162). A plea slides into an imperative. Her death, like those in the earlier works, is not final. The endings of the plays, all featuring acts repeated throughout – the shootings of ‘Lincoln’ (played by the Lesser Known), the death of the Last Black Man, the disappointment of Venus’ audience due to her death – leave

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calculation for a different kind of memory. Parks has taken a subgenre, the history play, strongly associated with the writing, revision, and correction of the historical record (certainly the function of much previous work in this area by African-American playwrights), and used its elements to create what Harry Elam and Alice Rayner have identified as ‘ritualistic, if fragmentary performance’ (189). Resisting the temptation to be drawn towards synthesis and closure, the dramatist startlingly foregrounds basic elements of structure such as the act of numbering, and then displays the process of building and taking apart narrative. In Parks’s history plays, the process is the story.

Notes 1

Cited in Shelby Jiggetts, ‘Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks’, in Callaloo 19:2 (1996): 314.

Bibliography Bullock, K. (2001) ‘Famous/last words: The disruptive rhetoric of historico-narrative “finality” in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play’, American Drama 10(2): 69–87. Elam, H. and Rayner, A. (1999) ‘Echoes from the black (w)hole: An examination of The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks’, in J. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (eds) Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in the American Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 178–92. Fuchs, E. (1994) ‘Play as landscape: Another version of pastoral’, Theater 25(1): 44–51. Jiggetts, S. (1996) ‘Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks’, Callaloo 19(2): 309–17. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) The America Play, The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) ‘From elements of style’, The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1997) Venus. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Rayner, A. and Elam, H.J. Jr (1994) ‘Unfinished business: Reconfiguring history in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World’, Theater Journal 46: 447–61. Rivera, J. (1997) Marisol and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Rokem, F. (2000) Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in the Contemporary Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Solomon, A. (1990) ‘Signifying on the signifyin’: The Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks’, Theater 21(3): 73–80. Worthen, W.B. (1999) ‘Citing history: textuality and performativity in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks’, Essays in Theatre/Études théâtrales 18(1): 3–22.

3

Choral Compassion: In the Blood and Venus Harvey Young

More than a decade before she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her 2002 play Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks stood at (or near) the centre of the American theatre. The playwright had attracted the attention of the most prominent theatre critics who, by turns, identified the young, up-and-coming writer as the next, great, American playwright. If the 1970s was the decade of Mamet, the 1980s that of Wilson, the 1990s of Hwang and Kushner, then the fin de siecle/new millennium belonged to Parks. Mel Gussow, the celebrated New York Times theatre critic, led the charge among the mainstream press in 1989, when he applauded the playwright for her unique and ‘playful’ use of language in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (C24). Similarly, engaged, scholarly readings of Parks’s dramaturgy began a year later with Alisa Solomon’s study of Parks’s early plays in Theatre and slowly developed throughout the 1990s in the critical essays of Kimberly Dixon, W.B. Worthen, Jean Young, Harry Elam and Alice Rayner. In the 15 years since her critical debut, Parks has written seven plays, a novel (Getting Mother’s Body), won multiple Obie Awards, received a MacArthur ‘genius’ award, written a screenplay (Girl 6), collaborated on two other screenplays or teleplays (Their Eyes were Watching God and The Great Debators), been nominated for a Tony Award (Topdog/Underdog), been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist (In the Blood and Topdog/Underdog) and won the Pulitzer. Despite the range of Parks’s work, embracing literature, television, film and theatre, the extant writings (whether journalistic or academic) on the playwright narrowly focus on two themes: Parks’s unique use of language and her desire to stage history, specifically African-American history within her plays. On the one hand, the bulk of the popular and academic studies of the playwright emphasize Parks’s use of ‘spells’, non-verbal meaningful moments; her use of repetition; her tendency to spell phonetically and the deliberateness of the typographical layout of her pages. On the other hand, numerous texts, admittedly, more in academic than in popular articles, read Parks’s plays as efforts by the playwright to (re)stage African-American history. Citing published interviews where Parks identifies herself as a digger of (and, perhaps, into) history, these studies seek to untangle both

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the playwright’s seemingly deliberate conflation/confusion of the (w)hole of black history and her actual staging of history or historical moments onstage. While I agree with both branches of criticism and have contributed, in part, to their formation, I do not believe that ‘language’ and ‘history’ should be the privileged lens through which Parks’s writings should be evaluated or comprehended. In the pages that follow, I examine an area that has yet to be explored in Parks’s scholarship, namely the playwright’s strategic use of the chorus in her plays Venus and In the Blood. I contend that Parks, through her embrace and (post)modernization of the Greek chorus, stitches her contemporary audience into her narratives through an identification with her onstage characters, makes a veiled critique of present-day, societal complicity in the objectification of others, and, in so doing, encourages her audiences to feel compassion for the black, female protagonist within each play.

The chorus as citizen The chorus has changed over the centuries from its earlier incarnation in the fourth century BC, within the plays of Aeschylus and his contemporaries. Whereas the chorus originally reflected the citizenry and occupied a central role within the narrative, it, with the passing of years, has become a stylized, often unrealistic device, with marginal importance to the story. If a person imagines, from a contemporary perspective, the chorus, then she likely will conjure the image of the corps of singers and dancers within the American musical theatre. In this form, the chorus assumes a secondary role to the featured actors, and their presence onstage, when most active, occurs during transitions between scenes or acts. The differences between the current and the ancient chorus are so pronounced that the two forms do not resemble one another. In this chapter, my reference to the ‘chorus’ invokes the chorus in its earliest form. The Greek chorus represented the citizenry. Although historical studies on the form of Greek dramatic production, disagree on the exact composition of the chorus – whether local residents or members of the military played the roles of the chorus – they generally agree that they were not comprised of professional actors, dancers and/or singers. To attend a play and to witness the actions of the chorus was to watch your neighbours play the role of members of a community but ‘onstage’ and before an audience. Understood from this perspective, the chorus members were similar to contemporary participants in parades or cheerleaders at sports events or even protestors outside of World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings. They performed the role of the citizenry, even as they themselves were the citizenry. As both the embodied and performative citizenry, the chorus existed as the conduits through which the assembled spectators at the performance event could access the event. More than merely assuming the vantage point of the always seen/scened chorus, audience members could

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enter the narrative vicariously through the chorus. The citizen in the stands could become the citizen on the stage. While it is commonly understood that the chorus’s ability to occupy the space between the real citizenry and the staged characters occurred only in the moments of the chorus’s direct address to the audience, contemporary studies of the Greek chorus suggest that their engagement with the audience exceeded those spoken moments. Whereas an emphasis on their spoken words would suggest that the chorus held momentary meaning to the narrative as figures that facilitated the transition among the various scenes, a more realistic account of their activities, acknowledging their perpetual presence on stage along with their nonverbal contributions to the narrative (i.e. singing and dancing) shatters this illusion. The chorus members were active agents in the development of the narrative. They spoke. They sang. They danced. Peter Arnott, in his 1989 study of the Greek chorus, noted that the ‘chorus [gave] the play its musical component’ (26). In 1980, J. Michael Walton wrote, in Greek Theatre Practice, that ‘the chorus supplied an extra visual dimension to the story’ (53). He later noted that ‘the choros was a chorus of dancers who performed in an orchestra, not a place for musicians as in English usage, but a dancing-place’ (Greek Sense 3). Unfortunately, only the dialogue assigned to the chorus remains. Their songs, composed by the playwright, were lost. Their choreographic movements disappeared from history only to briefly re-emerge in a fragmented form in the recollections of philosophers and within the work of Greek artists (craftsmen, painters, etc.).1 As a result of their limited and faded presence within history, the chorus is mistakenly thought to be marginal to the narrative development of the plays in which they appear. This is not the case. Despite not knowing the specifics of choral behaviour, classical scholars agree that the chorus maintained a highly visible presence throughout the narrative. Walton writes: ... it is still the common belief that what was said was more important than what was seen. It was not so, I would maintain for the Athenian fifth century BC. ... The action of the play was a ‘drama’, ‘something done’, not ‘something spoken’, and the spectators, theatai, sat, not in an auditorium, a ‘hearing place’, but in a theatron, a ‘seeing-place’. The Greeks went to the theatre to witness a performance. (Greek Sense 2–3) Always within sight, always playing the citizenry, sometimes speaking, sometimes dancing, and sometimes singing, the chorus, we can imagine, continually attracted the attention of the audience. Their actions and activities were central to the dramatic narrative and demanded the type of engaged attention that individuated actors receive in the contemporary theatre. To attend the theatre was, by turns, to be a citizen watching a citizen play a citizen who indeed is watched by a citizen who both watches and watches you watch. The theatre was a place where society watched itself – and the presence

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of the chorus, as a metaphorical, partially unsilvered mirror, allowed this to occur. Furthermore, Arnott, in Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre, makes the observation that the choral members played two important roles within the dramatic narratives: as narrators and as characters. He offers: The chorus can be in the play, or out of it. It can work within the limits of the action as the character, knowing no more than such characters would know, responding to what the principals say and do; or it can stand outside the action as an impartial commentator, objective and omniscient, and illuminate factors in the action of which the principals themselves are not aware. (30) The choral members were the first ‘actors’ onstage. They framed the upcoming narrative for the assembled audience and introduced the individuated characters. Once they successfully set the scene, they then folded into the narrative as characters within the drama. As ‘the source from which the drama sprang’, the chorus were as, if not more, important to dramatic narrative as the play’s protagonist (24). Reaching a similar conclusion, David Wiles, in Tragedy in Athens, observed, ‘the conventions of the genre demanded that the chorus and actors should be in equilibrium’.

The citizen as witness Loosely based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, In the Blood centres Hester LaNegrita, a homeless, illiterate, black woman who independently raises her five children. Throughout the dramatic narrative, Hester encounters a series of individuals: Chilli and Reverend D., the fathers of two of her children (Jabber and Baby, respectively); The Welfare Lady, the federal programme personified; Doctor, the embodiment of the federal Medicare system; and Amiga Gringa, her homeless ‘white’ friend. Although each individual can provide some form of assistance to Hester, they do not. Instead, they use her – often sexually – before discarding her. Simultaneously abused and neglected by these five characters, Hester struggles to survive each day and to provide for her children. Eventually, poor nutrition, poverty and the weight of societal ridicule prompts Hester to kill her eldest child, Jabber. The play ends with Hester, standing at centre, covered in blood as bars lower themselves around her body. The play begins with a chorus, comprised of all five individuals, talking to one another about Hester. Their voices overlap and they speak together as one, not necessarily in unison, but from a single mindset. It is clear that they view Hester as being socially beneath them. More to the point, they blame her for her various predicaments – single motherhood,

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poverty and homelessness. At various intervals, they announce, ‘SHE’S A NO COUNT/SHIFTLESS/HOPELESS/BAD NEWS/ BURDEN TO SOCIETY/SLUT!’ (6–7). These words declared before Hester’s entrance frame the expectations of the audience. The play will be about a woman who is at fault for her social status and standing. With the entrance of Hester, who appears in tatters compared with the more refined clothing of the chorus, the chorus parts, and the play begins. It takes several minutes into the play, with the entrance of Hester’s five children, for the audience to realize that the choral members will play dual roles. It takes several more, with the entrance of the character Doctor, for spectators to understand that the chorus has been triple cast. The actor who plays Doctor, also plays Trouble, Hester’s son, and the role of chorus member. Reverend D. is Baby and also a part of the chorus. The Welfare Lady (hereafter Welfare) is Bully and chorus. Doctor is Trouble and chorus. Amiga Gringa is Beauty and chorus. Chilli is Jabber and chorus. Despite the multiple casting, it is immediately clear that the adult roles can be equated with the chorus and should be read as distinct from the children. In short, the chorus consists of Chilli, Reverend D., Amiga Gringa, Welfare and Doctor. Throughout the dramatic narrative, the individuated choral members interact with Hester. The nature of their respective encounters reflects an extended familiarity with the protagonist, despite her lower social standing, and reveals their responsibility for her homelessness, poverty and single parent status. Chilli and Reverend D. are absent fathers who refuse to pay child support. Welfare underemploys Hester by paying her to make dresses for her. Doctor loans her a dollar and threatens to perform a hysterectomy on Hester but does little to elevate her social position. Amiga Gringa steals money from Hester. Each encounter ends with the choral member leaving Hester and, before exiting the stage, speaking in direct address to the audience. Parks labels these moments as ‘confessions’. They are the moments when the individuated choral characters who have already demonstrated their role in Hester’s ‘low’ status, reveal to the audience that their involvement is more complex than initially presented. What makes these confessions dramatically interesting, beyond offering more examples of how Hester was used, is that they end without the characters acknowledging their roles in her mistreatment. An example of the type of ‘confession’ that appears in the play is that of Doctor. Toward the end of his visit with Hester, Doctor announces that Hester will have to have a hysterectomy, referenced as a ‘removal of your womanly parts’, because of the number of children she has had – each by a different father. His state sponsored intervention suggests that Hester actively disregards safe-sex practices and that her actions and the consequences of her actions, her children, have created problems for the locality. As a result, she, like an animal, must be corrected – ‘fixed’. Following his announcement, the Doctor proceeds to exit the stage but not before declaring the following to the audience:

34

Suzan-Lori Parks : A Casebook Times are tough: / What can we do? / When I see a woman begging on the streets I guess I could bring her in my house / sit her at my table / make her a member of my family, sure. / But there are hundreds and thousands of them / and my house can’t hold them all. / Maybe we should all take in just one. / Except they wouldn’t really fit. / They wouldn’t really fit in with us. / There’s such a gulf between us. What can we do? / I am a man of the people, from way back my streetside practice / is a testament to that / so don’t get me wrong / do not for a moment think that I am one of those people haters who does not understand who does not experience – compassion / (Rest) / She’s been one of my neediest cases for several years now. / What can I do? Each time she comes to me / looking more and more forlorn / and more and more in need of affection. / At first I wouldn’t touch her without gloves on, but then – / (Rest) / we did it once in that alley there, / she was / phenomenal. / (Rest) / I was / lonesome and / she gave herself to me in a way that I never experienced / even with women I’ve paid / she was, like she was giving me something that was not hers to give me but something that was mine / that I’d lent her and she was returning it to me. / Sucked me off for what seemed like hours / But I was very insistent. And held back / and she understood that I wanted her in the traditional way. / And she was very giving very motherly very obliging very understanding / very phenomenal. Let me cumm inside her. Like I needed to. / What could I do? / I couldn’t help it. (44–45)

What amazes me about the preceding is not only the unknowingly hypocritical posturing of the Doctor, the man, who will punish Hester for not employing safe sex practices, convinces her to let him ‘cumm inside her’, but also his ability to distance himself from his actions through his suggestion that he lacked agency in the encounter. Referencing his ‘powerless’ position in the preceding statement with the questions: What can I do? or What could I do? (these questions are asked four times), he ends his confession with the following statement: ‘I couldn’t help it’. The Doctor, a well-meaning, well-educated, and presumably well-rounded individual, a family man (no less) manages to talk about himself not as the victim but as the unknowing aggressor whose own powerlessness creates a different type of victimization. Like a sailor lured to the rocks by the song of a siren, he knows that he should not have done what he did, regrets having done what he did, and in the end, blames not himself but the outside other for allowing the action to occur. It is the siren who destroyed the ship – not him. In this case, it is Hester who seduced the Doctor and not the other way around. Equally interesting is the manner through which the Doctor appeals to the audience. His words, his confessions, cast the theatrical spectators not only as confessors, who are capable of absolving his sins, but also as a jury, who as his peers are capable of understanding and, perhaps, identifying

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with his actions. It is this latter status that confirms Doctor’s positioning as a choral figure within the narrative. He invokes a comparison between himself and the assembled spectators by using the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ multiple times in his opening sentences. He asks, ‘What could we do?’ He suggests, ‘Maybe we should all take in just one’ before responding, ‘They wouldn’t really fit in with us’. Confirming this split between Doctor/Audience and Hester is the Doctor’s equally divisive use of other pronouns such as ‘they’ and ‘them’ to assert an experiential difference between the two groups. We are not like them. They are not like us. Such pronouns attempt to ally the self-perceptions of the assembled audience with the character onstage. We are one. The choral member onstage is the spectator in the audience and vice versa. At the same time, they attempt to justify how one of ‘us’ could make a mistake and (intimately) be with one of ‘them’. In this case, it was momentary loneliness. We can absolve him. We can forgive him. We can find him innocent of improper conduct because we can understand him. In fact, we are him. The other four narratives are similar in theme. Welfare, despite maintaining that she ‘walk[s] the line between us and them/ between our kind and their kind’ reveals that she participated in a ménage à trois involving herself, her husband and Hester (60). Ending her confession, Welfare declares, ‘It was my first threesome and it won’t happen again. And I should emphasize that she is a low-class person. What I mean is that we have absolutely nothing in common’ (64). Reverend D., after having Hester perform oral sex on him and then compensating her with a ‘crumpled bill’, states, within his confession, that ‘Suffering is an enormous turn-on’ (78). Despite his involvement with her, the Reverend, who has fathered her youngest child, refuses to allow her ‘to drag me down / and sit me at the table / at the head of the table of her fatherless house’ (79). Chilli, Hester’s first love, father of Hester’s first child, and, possibly Hester’s first sexual/romantic partner, revokes his marriage proposal to Hester after encountering her children. His rejection, simply stated within his confession, appears as follows: ‘She was my first. / We was young. / Times change’ (98). The only confession that appears sympathetic to Hester belongs to Amiga Gringa, who, like Hester, is also a member of the underclass. However, Amiga Gringa acknowledges her difference from Hester. Her ‘white womb’ makes her valuable. People desire her children. She can sell them. On the contrary, Hester’s black womb lacks value and proves itself threatening to society. Although she exists at the centre of each confession, Hester does not speak. Parks, as playwright, does not give her protagonist an opportunity to directly address the audience. She is prevented from being able to tell her story – to relay the facts from her perspective. She cannot confess. She cannot testify. This is not to say that the character is mute within the narrative. She does engage with her children and she does converse with each of the five individuated, choral members. What she does not do is

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refute their confessions. Parks denies her this possibility. Admittedly, the playwright does script a sixth and final ‘confession’, which she awards to Hester. However, this ‘confession,’ in style and content, differs from the ones that precede it. Whereas the other monologues are relatively long and develop both logically and realistically, Hester’s final words are comparatively shorter and more expressionistic. Furthermore, she does not speak directly to the audience. She does not confess. Her repetitive, wandering statements appear to be more a vocalization of her fragile mental condition than a persuasive, direct appeal for absolution or forgiveness. From this perspective, I am intrigued by Hester’s silence. Why does she not talk? Why does she not confess? Why does she not testify? To begin, I am making the following assumption: that confession and testimony are related terms. Despite the fact the former tends to carry an association of guilt over actions performed whereas the latter centres itself on witnessed events and, often (within the US legal arena), allows the speaker to choose silence rather than to incriminate herself, they both share the facts that they gain their legitimacy through an association with governmental and/or religious institutions and that they are spoken narratives performed by participant-observers before a disinterested third party. While Parks, a talented and dutiful linguist, may have elected to use the word ‘confession’ to associate a sense of guilt or, at least, immorality with each of her characters, the content of their monologues appears equally to confess and to testify to their actions. This is a both and scenario and not an either or. Within their confessions, the characters testify. ‘To testify’, writes Shoshana Felman, ‘is more than simply to report a fact or an event or to relate what has been lived, recorded and remembered. Memory is conjured here essentially in order to address another, to impress upon a listener, to appeal to a community’ (204). Felman’s definition reminds us that testimony, like confession, begins at the point of reception and not at the moment of enunciation. It, with its increasing specificity of the role of the audience in testimony – from merely ‘another’ to ‘listener’ to ‘community’ – suggests that the receptor of the delivered testimony represents the locality, the society in which the testifier lives. To testify is to speak to your neighbor in the form of a direct appeal. Within our present day, mediatized society, testimony is everywhere. It is both unavoidable and inescapable. It is impossible to turn on the television and not be confronted with a spoken personal narrative in the form of televised court proceedings, televised therapy sessions, television talk shows, and the ubiquitous ‘infomercial’. While one might have contended in the past that testimony differed from confession in that the former was a public act and that the latter was private, our contemporary media environment erases this difference. At any time and, virtually, in any place, we can encounter the personal narratives (whether testimonies or confessions) of others. An extreme example appears on the internet at the Daily Confessional.com website. The website advertises itself as ‘the only place in the world where you can

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go to truly confess your sin (or sins), your transgressions, your humanity, in complete anonymity’. Subscribers are encouraged not only to confess but also to read, for free, the confessions of others. Seemingly everywhere, there is someone who wants to talk to us about themselves. Noting the overabundance of people willing to talk about themselves before an audience and recalling that each chorus member in the play In the Blood delivers a confession, it is even more surprising that Hester, the protagonist and the centre of both Parks’s narrative and the narratives of the chorus (which are also Parks’s narratives), does not confess. At no point in the play does she do what Doctor, Amiga Gringa, Welfare, Reverend D., and Chilli do. She does not stand at the centre of the stage, look directly at us, the audience, and tell us about her past and past encounters. Instead, she remains silent. When she does elect to speak, she rambles incoherently. Unlike the others who confess, Hester jabbers. In light of Parks’s careful use of language in her dramaturgy it seems intentional that Hester, after killing her eldest son, Jabber, would lose the capacity to speak on her behalf and before an audience. While this certainly offers one possible explanation of why Hester remains silent or, more accurately, lacks the ability to confess, there are other, equally plausible options. First, the chorus members represent the spectators in the audience. With the exception of Amiga Gringa, each chorus member is a respected figure within the imagined community of the play. Even Gringa, thanks to her seeming whiteness, resembles the assembled theatrical audience.2 These connections allow the chorus members to appeal to the various privileges which they share with the play’s spectators. In their confessions, they are speaking with peers and, perhaps, colleagues, people who understand their point of view and likely share their biases and prejudices. Hester, a member or the underclass, cannot interact with her audience on the same level as these others. Her only recourse is either not talk or to talk to herself. Second, we can borrow Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the limits to the authority of the witness and apply it to In the Blood. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben suggests that there is a fundamental deception in the testimony of witnesses. According to him, the ideal witnesses are those who did not survive to testify. He writes, ‘The “true” witnesses, the “complete witnesses”, are those who did not bear witness and could not bear witness. They are those who “touched bottom” (34). The inability of these idealized, non-witnesses to testify necessitates the emergence of others who must attempt to speak from the unknowable position of the absent witness. In the case of the Holocaust, the present witness must pretend to speak from the position of the dead. Although Hester lives and, therefore, seems capable of speaking on her own behalf, she too needs a surrogate because she has ‘touched bottom’. In Agamben’s reading of the true or complete witness, he suggests that successful witnessing and testimony require distance from the actions, events, or persons that they detail. Hester is too close to the experience to be able to witness it, and therefore, to be able to speak about it.

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Indeed, she is the experience, or at least the sexualized body that creates the experiences for the chorus members, and she continues to live that embodied experience in the present whereas the chorus recount their interactions with her from a past perspective. Third and, perhaps, most interestingly, Hester’s silence compels the spectator to imagine what Hester thinks about herself and these other figures. Not only must we, as audience members, place ourselves in her stead in order to approximate her thoughts but we also imaginatively must situate ourselves in her place in order to understand her behaviour as announced in the confessions of the chorus members or witnessed onstage. Why would Hester have sex with Doctor? Why did she agree to put on a sex show with Amiga Gringa? Why did she perform oral sex on Reverend D? Why would she consent to the threesome with Welfare and Welfare’s husband? What were her thoughts in the backseat of Chilli’s car? In the presence of her silence and the absence of her voice, we create a voice for her. Her silence elicits our empathy. This may have been Parks’s intention. In a January 2004 interview with a student journalist at the Eastern Michigan University, Suzan-Lori Parks was asked, ‘What is the one quality that you think that every person should work on improving?’ The playwright replied, ‘compassion’. When pressed to explain why she chose that word, Parks responded: Because if you can see someone’s side of it regardless of who they are, what they’re going through, if you can see, you know, Saddam Hussein getting his mouth opened and feel something other than, like, the thing you’re programmed to feel ... that’s a great, powerful thing, and it’s a force for positive change. You know, if you can see the Unabomber and feel compassion for him, if you can see the sniper and feel compassion for him. You know? If you can see the serial killer and feel compassion for him, that’s a great thing. That’s what Jesus and Gandhi and Buddha and Martin Luther King did. (Hubbard 2004) Parks’s invocation of the word ‘compassion’ reminds me of the Doctor’s confession when, early into his monologue, he announces, ‘do not for a moment think that I am one of those people haters who does not experience – compassion’. In retrospect, it is clear that the Doctor does experience compassion. But, he does not give it. He receives it – from Hester. She answers his questions and fulfils his bodily desires. She is compassionate. At the same time, she is silent. What does it mean for Parks to equate silence with compassion? This is what she does in her interview. Saddam Hussein, the former President of Iraq who was deposed and imprisoned by the USA in April 2003, appeared silent in the publicly circulated images of his health inspection (by US doctors) following his arrest and yet it is his silence which Parks suggests that should encourage compassion for him. Silence elicits empathy. Why? In a world in which people rush to tell others about themselves, it is

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the disempowered who often lack a voice. Silenced and marginalized by the dominating society within which they live, these individuals enter into the national dialogue when they are the subject matter of the conversations of more (comparatively speaking) empowered others. They rarely are the ones speaking. What Parks succeeds in doing is showcasing the vocal marginalization of the disempowered within her play. In so doing, she gives their silence a presence and a voice. Their silence encourages us, audience members and readers of her play text, to listen more attentively for the voice that never will arise and then to give voice, through our collective imagination, to the body whose activities we witness. In the case of In the Blood, the silence of the protagonist encourages and promotes our testimony. Like Doctor, Amiga Gringa, Welfare, Chilli and Reverend D., we find ourselves speaking on her behalf. We are her chorus. We are her confessors.

The witness as chorus First performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1995, under the direction of Richard Foreman, Venus centres the story Saartjie Baartman, the South African woman who was displayed as a freak or oddity in the early nineteenth century throughout England and France. What made her worthy of sustained attention was her ample buttocks and extended genitalia, which differed from the contemporary (black or white) French body. Following her death, Baartman’s body was dissected by Dr George Cuvier, who becomes Baron Docteur in Parks’s play, bottled, and put on exhibit at the Musee d’Homme. At the time of the play’s production, Baartman’s body remained at the Musee d’Homme but no longer on display. The plaster cast of her pronounced bottom and her jarred genitalia sat in the storage rooms of the museum. These remains were repatriated to South Africa in 2003 and subsequently buried. Similar to the real Baartman, in both life and death, Parks’s representation of Baartman as a character in Venus exists to be looked-at. The play opens with the character Baartman standing upon a rotating platform before the internal, choral audience of the production and the assembled theatrical spectators of the performance. As she slowly revolves, a full 360 degrees, several characters introduce/name her as ‘The Venus Hottentot!’ Indeed, from the very beginning, the character Baartman appears as a commodity on display – like a car at an auto show. People, we pay to look at her. She is the seen and the scened. Voyeurism, the self-gratifying act of looking at another – often, at another’s sexual organs, stands at the heart of Parks’s play.3 Every character looks, gawks, studies and/or inspects the character Baartman. They derive pleasure from their status as witnesses of her bodily display. In fact, the pleasure of the theatrical presentation, with its self-same emphasis on the act of seeing, anchors itself in Baartman’s body. The character Baartman herself, as written by Parks, understands her function within the dramatic

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narrative and allows it to occur. Twice she consents to being made an exhibit for hire. Despite the fact that she never formally announces her interest in going to England in order to appear as a freak or oddity on display, Baartman does express her desire for the profits that will result from such performances. She gleefully exclaims that she will receive ‘Big bags of money!’ (27). After having travelled to England and after having been exhibited throughout the countryside, the character Baartman agrees to an offer made by Baron Docteur to move to France and to become an oddity on display there. Although this exhibition is referred euphemistically as being an opportunity to ‘Move in a better circle’, the character Baartman knows better and announces her fee: ‘100 a week’ (92). Parks’s replaying of the play’s earlier solicitation scene empowers the title character. She is given a second opportunity to change her mind. She can say, ‘No’ – if she wants.4 By consenting to this second offer even after having had experienced the process of exhibition, the character expresses a full knowledge of what is expected of her and arguably can even see herself performing her future role. While she may have been naïve the first time, the replay relies upon her experience. Before saying ‘Yes’ this time, she can now see herself being seen as an object on display. Her ‘better circle’, despite its seeming allusion to increased social status, also could refer to a better circus in which she would appear and/or an improved rotating platform, a better circle, on which she would stand. Baartman’s scened status continues throughout the dramatic narrative, even in those rare moments when characters are not explicitly looking at her. Chief among these are the For the Love of the Venus excerpts, which occur at regular intervals throughout the 31-scene play. Based upon a series of French melodramas contemporary to the exhibition of the real Baartman in which Baartman, as the Hottentot Venus, gets referenced, For the Love of the Venus chronicles the story of a man whose infatuation with and desire to experience ‘Africa’, his imagined construct of Africa, motivates his fiancée to masquerade as the Hottentot Venus in order to reignite his passion for her. The chorus plays all of the characters within Parks’s melodrama and the characters of the play Venus assume the role of the audience. By framing the melodrama and, more apparently, the chorus as characters within Venus, Parks spotlights the strange spectatorial relationships that occur within her larger narrative. Although the character Baartman is given the opportunity to look back, to return the gaze of the other characters, her position as spectator gets challenged through the inner narrative in which she appears as a caricature. In these moments, Baartman witnesses Baron Docteur’s desire for her, which he expresses through his identification with the male protagonist of For the Love of the Venus. She spies on him as he, in rapt attention, watches the performance and demonstrates his delight with the performance with applause. Her privileged perspective gets compromised in the conclusion of the melodrama and toward the end of the play (Scene 4) when the ‘Bride-to-Be’ having masqueraded as the ‘Venus Hottentot’, removes

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her costume. In this unveiling, the masquerading body becomes normative and the spying body of Baartman regains its status as the oddity that is worthy of sustained attention. Beyond the internal melodrama that precedes her monologue, the character Baartman’s attempts to look back are admonished by Baron Docteur. Following the intermission (Scene 14), her ability to see what the doctor presumes to be his hidden lust appears when he, with back turned to Baartman (but continually sneaking glimpses of her), masturbates. Noting his change in position and the nature of his movements, she knowingly asks, ‘What ya doing’, to which he responds, ‘Nothing’. When she implores, ‘Lemmie see’, he commands ‘Don’t look! Don’t look at me’ (110). After he ‘cums’, the character Baartman underscores her awareness of the act which had just occurred by asking ‘Whyd you do that?’, to which Baron Docteur replies, ‘I’m polite’. I am intrigued by this ‘Don’t Look!’ moment because it addresses an issue central to the play, namely whether or not the black female body can look back. More precisely, it seems to ask (without answering) what would happen if the black female body did look back? Certainly, Baron Docteur’s expressed anxiety anchors itself in the interrelationship between him being caught masturbating and him being seen and, perhaps, objectified, by a figure who personifies the object on display. To some degree, we can attribute this initial concern to a temporal reading of the Baron Docteur’s concern that a private, solitary and, perhaps, sinful act would be exposed to the public but I do not believe that this is the strongest reading of this dramatic moment. Rather, I contend that his expression (Don’t look) anchors itself in an awareness of the artificiality of Baartman’s status as object and the ease with which she could become a subject. The doctor’s act of sexual self-gratification involving Baartman, whether as a seemingly, televisual masqueraded presence in the French melodrama or as a body on display in Venus, anchors itself in his anonymous and voyeuristic address of her body.5 She is object. He is subject. He looks. She is the lookedat. He is the self and she is always the other. The possibility of her look threatens the stability of this binary. More than equating the character Baartman with Baron Docteur, it opens up the possibility of a role reversal. The doctor could become the Venus Hottentot. Don’t look! Don’t look at me, indeed. These rare moments of near rupture ultimately do not shift focus away from the character Baartman as a body on display. She remains there, onstage, to be seen/scened. More than any other dramatic device, the chorus continually reminds the audience that the play is about looking-at her. The chorus plays five roles within Venus: The Chorus of 8 Human Wonders, The Chorus of the Spectators, The Chorus of the Court, The Chorus of the 8 Anatomists, and the Players of ‘For the Love of the Venus’. The Chorus of 8 Human Wonders are an assembly of human freaks and oddities: a bearded woman, a fire-eating man, a spotted (black and white) boy, a fat man, siamese twins, ‘Mr privates,’ a person whose genitals are where his face should be,

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and a ‘Whatsit’ who appear as the main attractions in a travelling circus. The presentation of the character Baartman alongside these ‘wonders’ proffers the thought that she is unnatural, non-normative, different, a freak, and therefore deserving of being looked-at. Indeed, she becomes a side-show attraction, the ninth human wonder. Following her addition to the travelling troupe, the chorus of wonders promptly changes into The Chorus of the Spectators who do not say anything to Baartman but only look at her. Within her play text, Parks scripts this within the following ‘spell’: The The The The The The The

Chorus Venus Chorus Venus Chorus Venus Chorus

of the Spectators of the Spectators of the Spectators of the Spectators

The spell ends with the character Baartman (or The Venus) declaring, ‘Oh God: Unloved’ (46). Without recourse to language in this moment, the playwright succeeds in establishing her title character’s seemingly ‘pure true simple state’ of otherness as seen through the eyes of the chorus. The Chorus of the Court serve as the judges, jury, and even the witnesses in a case determining whether Baartman was ever ‘indecent’ and ‘at any time held against her will’. Ironically, the character Baartman ‘sits in a jail cell’ throughout the proceedings. Over a series of scenes (Scenes 20B–20J), the Chorus ‘ejects’ its own members, one at a time, to serve as witnesses who testify, by turns, of Baartman’s mistreatment. After four choral witnesses have testified and, subsequently, returned to the body of chorus judges/jury, The Chorus of the Court ‘rules not to rule’, offers an extended laugh, and then ‘vanishes’ (85). Finally, The Chorus of the 8 Anatomists analyse the living body of the character Baartman. Their measurements presage Baartman’s later autopsy, dismemberment and scientific display. She becomes a living corpse on exhibit, which is a theme that repeats within the play. As the character Baartman herself asserts at the end of the play, ‘Loves corpse stands on show’ (162). In each of their various manifestations, the chorus reminds the audience, both within and outside the play, that the ‘Venus Hottentot’ is there to be looked-at. As wonders, they label her, by association, as a freak or oddity. As ‘spectators’, their wonderment at her body emerges through non verbal interactions: stares and looks. As the ‘court’, they testify on the behalf of the title character but ultimately leave her to remain on display – even as a series of remains on display. As ‘anatomists’, they transform her into a living corpse, a scientific object of examination. As ‘players’, they enable her to become aware of herself as seen (and, by extension, scened) by allowing her to witness others watching ‘her’, as an imagined construct (the Hottentot Venus masquerade).

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The chorus, consisting of eight individuals who are highly vocal (except when they become speechless ‘spectators’), differs from the individual, solitary and more quiet Baartman. Similar to Hester in In the Blood, the character Baartman becomes the object of the narratives of others but rarely speaks on her own behalf. She is silent and exhibited. Beyond the near-nakedness of her onstage body, silence serves as the most palpable feature of the protagonist. Despite being the title character in a play written by a playwright who has developed a reputation for her use of language and linguistic repetition, the character Baartman rarely speaks. When she does, she says only a few words and, then, becomes silent again. Evidence of her silent presence appears in the scenes following her transformation from ‘Saartjie Baartman’ or ‘The Girl’ into ‘The Venus Hottentot’. In the first of these scenes (Scene 27), the title character meets the Mother-Showman, the freak show owner/ringmaster, who will display her throughout England. The Mother-Showman orders the Venus to strip and to bathe (onstage). The Venus Hottentot, without saying a word, consents. She disrobes, enters the bath, and washes herself. After the bath, the Mother-Showman introduces the ‘The Girl’ as ‘The Venus Hottentot’. The Girl has become the Venus Hottentot. This was not an ordinary bath. It was a naming ceremony. It was a baptism. The stage directions confirm this. They read, ‘The Girl stands in the semidarkness. Lights blaze on her. She is now The Venus Hottentot’ (45). Whereas ‘The Girl’ was comparatively more vocal and inquisitive – she expresses her interest and desire in travelling to England (Big bags of money!), The Hottentot Venus remains quiet and appears genuinely accepting of the environment in which she must perform the role of exhibit. In the remainder, post transformation, of Scene 27, The Hottentot Venus, despite still appearing onstage, says only three words: ‘Oh, God: Unloved’. In the following scene, the second instalment of the ‘For the Love of the Venus’ play, the title character observes the Baron Docteur watch the playwithin but never speaks. The next scene, ‘Counting Down/Counting the Take’, finds a similarly quiet protagonist. She sits next to the MotherShowman and counts the proceeds earned through the exhibition of her body at the freak show. The Venus Hottentot, again, says only three words: ‘I can count’ (49). The following scene features the unveiling of a giant banner on which the name and likeness of the protagonist appears. Even with this heightened, visible presence, the double appearance of the Hottentot body, the character continues to barely speak. She says one word (‘Dance’) and laughs once (53). The next scene (Scene 23) returns to ‘For the Love of the Venus’ where the silent Venus Hottentot continues to watch the Baron Docteur watch a play about a man who desires her. In the remaining scenes, the Venus Hottentot remains similarly quiet. Although there are two moments within Venus in which she becomes vocal and delivers two, short soliloquies, the protagonist spends the vast majority of the play standing onstage and not saying anything.6

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The silence of the staged body objectifies it. It invites audiences to look even longer – and, perhaps, more critically – at the body in order to determine whether it will express itself in a nonverbal manner. Will the body speak even though it has not been given any words by the playwright? In the case of Venus, it does. Parks complicates her characterization of Baartman through her use of ‘spells’. Of the approximately 60 spells within her play, Parks assigns 46 of them, more than three out of every four, to the character Baartman. The sheer number of spells attributed to the protagonist supports the reading that Baartman gains meaning to the audience within, and without, the dramatic narrative through her silence. These spells encourage us, as spectators and readers of Venus, to think that the more that we look at the character Baartman then the better we will know and, perhaps, understand her. Our compassion and empathy for her anchors itself in our own complicity in her spectacularization.7 This is the double bind of the play. We, as the audience, must assume the stead of the Baron Docteur or the various choral characters, all of whom alternately look and stare at the Baartman, before we can begin to feel sorry for her.

The final chorus It is important to observe that one of the many strengths of Parks’s dramaturgy is her unwillingness to incorporate corrective monologues into her dramatic narratives. She resists the urge to have Hester and Baartman talk about how systemic racism; ongoing racial stereotypes, mapped across the black female body; and societal complicity created the unfortunate lives of her protagonists. Instead, she renders them mute thus denying them the opportunity to talk-back. We, as audiences, must imagine their voices. Admittedly, the voices that we create may vary. From one perspective, it is possible to contend that each protagonist created her own problems and predicaments. Baartman agreed to be exhibited – not once but twice. Hester could have said ‘No’ to each of the numerous requests for sexual gratification. From another perspective, it is possible to say that the two women were victimized by a society that seeks to exploit the black body. Welfare underemploys Hester. Repeatedly othered and objectified, Baartman never gets treated as an equal by any of the characters within Venus. Parks refuses to weigh in on this discussion. In fact, she revels in these multiple interpretations that her plays elicit. In a 1996 interview with Shelby Jiggetts, Parks mentioned that she deliberately seeks to create plays that allow a range of possible interpretation pathways or ‘roads’. [W]hat I try to do is say there are 10 roads, 20, 50 roads – take one. I get a kick out of seeing what people do. I think that the playwright provides the map. But I think a bad play only has a one-way road.

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Yes, I think the bad play has one road; one idea, one message, one way of doing it. It’s so much about one thing. And everybody walks of the theater going, ‘Yeah, homelessness is bad,’ for example. That’s not a map; I don’t know what it is. It’s bad art. (312) Although Parks does not create a voice for her protagonists, she does spotlight them as being significant and important figures within society. This act, which is political, proves important because it takes a marginalized position (the sideshow freak and the homeless single mother) and places it at the centre of the society depicted within her plays. The chorus, as societal representatives, the everyday folk of the street, must engage with Hester and Baartman. More importantly, the chorus must discern how these characters affect their lives and how their own lives affect the two women. Both In the Blood and Venus make it clear that society needs and depends upon each play’s protagonist. Doctor relies upon Hester for sexual gratification in much the same way that Baron Docteur needs Hester. Both desire ‘compassion’. It is less clear what Hester and Baartman get out of their association with society, as represented by the chorus. The mistreatment of the two protagonists is itself another example of how Parks has (post)modernized the Greek Chorus within her plays. Although the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often feature Greek protagonist as ‘heroes’, they vilify the ‘other’, the non-Greek. Peter Arnott, offering examples of xenophobia within early Greek plays, writes: Phaedra, who lusts after her stepson and contrives his death, is Cretan, sprung from an alien race, exotic and decadent. Hecuba, who blinds her enemy and murders his defenceless children, is a Trojan – nonGreek, in Greek eyes, though ethnologists believe both races to have descended from the same stock. Medea, who murders her own children, is from a land on the fringes of civilization, Colchis, in what is now Georgia in the USSR. At the close of the tragedy, when Jason mourns the death of his loved ones, he points a moral that would have been dear to the prejudices of Euripides’ audience: ‘There is no woman throughout Greece would dare / Do such a thing. And these I overlooked / To marry you, my ruin and my curse’. (10) The Greek amphitheatre was the place where the community gathered not only to watch itself but also to reaffirm its superiority over others. Audiences participated as spectators at and, vicariously (thanks to the chorus), as performers within performance events that intended to create a sense of civic pride by staging the community’s own prejudices as entertainment. Suzan-Lori Parks, in both In the Blood and Venus, does something similar but with an important twist. Her plays present the black body, specifically the black female body, as other and nonnormative. Caricatured and stereotyped, this staged body resembles historically racist images of the

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black female as Mammy, Jezebel and Breeder Woman. However, she also positions this body as the protagonist of each play and, in so doing, urge audiences to question the validity of these stereotypes. Although Parks explicitly does not tell her audience to challenges these caricatures of the black body, she, through her incorporation of the chorus, does create a series of ‘roads’ into the narrative for them. As participant-observers, the theatrical audience can engage with both Hester and Baartman. Will they repeat the sexual objectification of the characters? Will they feel compassion for them? The answer depends upon the road taken.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

7

J. Michael Walton develops his critical reading of the choreographic movements of the chorus in the fifth and fourth century BC through a close analysis of the decorative, artistic images painted on pottery and other crafts projects. In a 2000 study of the theatre-going audience’s in Washington, DC, funded by Shugoll Research and The Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, the report revealed that 83 per cent of the theatre-going audience was white. Recalling that 60 per cent of the city’s population is black, this statistic spotlights the racially homogenous nature of theatre-going audiences. I imagine that audiences in less diverse cities and towns would have a greater disparity in their racial make-up. According to the OED, the word voyeurism first appeared in print in 1924 in J. S. Vav Teslaar’s translation of Stekel’s Disorders of Instincts & Emotions. In the text, voyeurism is defined as ‘erotic gratification experienced at looking at another’s sexual organs’. In the same scene, The Venus asks The Baron Docteur, ‘Do I have a choice?’ He responds, ‘Yes. God. Of course’. Indeed, she can say, ‘No’ – if she wants. ’For the Love of Venus’ is a melodrama. Its presentation within the play Venus is, in my opinion, like watching the reenactment of a soap-opera, another melodramatic form, onstage. Watching the Baron Docteur watch the play within is a lot like watching a person watch television. Even though the action is live, it still feels televisual. The character Baartman has two short monologues in Venus. The first occurs in Scene 7. In this scene, Baartman, who is alone on stage, reveals that she is using The Baron Docteur in order to get money, greater social standing, and an audience with Napoleon. In Scene 3, the protagonist delivers ‘A Brief History of Chocolate’, a fascinating account of how chocolate was considered to be a devilish aphrodisiac because of its non-Western roots and how it slowly became accepted within Western culture. She also notes that it is fattening. Neither of these scenes truly give the protagonist a voice within the narrative. The gains that she makes in her former monologue are erased when, within the same scene, The Baron Docteur enters the scene and announces his plan to dissect and study Baartman’s body. The latter scene is about chocolate and not about Baartman. Finally, Parks presents her scenes in reverse chronological order and, as a result, Baartman does not speak until late in the play. W.B. Worthen, analysing the scene in which Baartman offers the history of chocolate, writes that it ‘is the moment when the actress [who plays Baartman] fully spectacularizes The Venus, rendering her – and herself – most vividly as performance commodities, for sale, to us, in the present tense’ (15). Although Worthen asserts that Baartman’s language reveals her status as a ‘commodity for sale’, I believe that her silence, which essentially defines the character, does the same thing but with a greater effect.

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Bibliography Agamben, G. (2002) Remnants of Auschwitz, New York: Zone Books. Arnott, P. (1991) Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre, New York: Routledge. Dixon, K. (1999) ‘An I Am Sheba Me Am (She Be Doo Be Wah Waaah Doo wah) O(au)rality, Textuality and Performativity: African American Literature’s Vernacular Theory and the Work of Suzan-Lori Parks, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 11(1): 49–66. Elam, H. and Rayner, A. (1998) ‘Body parts: between story and spectacle in Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks’, in Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (eds) Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 265–82. Felman, S. (1991) ‘The return of the voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (eds) Testimony, New York: Routledge. Hubbard, L. (2004) ‘Parks speaks’, Eastern Echo, 16 January. Online. Available: http://www.easternecho.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?4182 Gussow, M. (1996) ‘Identity loss in Imperceptible Mutabilities’, New York Times 12 May, C24. Jiggets, S. (1996) ‘Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks’, Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 19(2): 309–17. League of Washington Theatres. (2000) ‘The League of Washington Theatres announces results of landmark study of Greater Metropolitan Washington, DC Theatre Audience’, 12 June. Online. Available: http://www.lowt.org/survey/ surveyrelease.html Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2000) The Red Letter Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1998) Venus. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Solomon, A. (1990) ‘Signifying on signifyin’: The plays of Suzan-Lori Parks’. Theater 21(3): 73–80. Walton, J.M. (1984) The Greek Sense of Theatre: Tragedy Reviewed. London: Methuen. Walton, J.M. (1980) Greek Theatre Practice. Westport: Greenwood Press. Wiles, D. (1999) Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthen, W.B. (1999) ‘Citing history: Textuality and performativity in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks’, Essays in Theatre/Etudes Theatrales 16(1): 3–22. Young, H. (2003) ‘Touching history: Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, and the Black Body’, Text and Performance Quarterly April: 133–52. Young, J. (1997) ‘The re-objectification and re-commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus’, African American Review Winter.

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The ‘fun that I had’: The theatrical gendering of Suzan-Lori Parks’s ‘figures’ Barbara Ozieblo

Postmodernism, as modernism did before it, stresses the theatricality of the theatre; it has, in Janelle Reinelt’s (1998) words, ‘decentered the subject, fragmented narrative, refused closure, and foregrounded the instability of its own signifying process’ (285). But, for Erika Fischer-Lichte, it has gone even further: it has arrived at an acceptance of innovative work that takes for granted modernism’s goal to ‘make it new’ and so no longer aspires to shock an audience into a realization of the ‘incoherence and randomness’ (273) of our world, or, we may add, into a Brechtian active response. Fischer-Lichte, exploring the post modern theatre from a European perspective, concludes that ‘the interaction between text and spectator is realized quite differently’ (272) from that found in the work of the modernist playwright. She believes that the spectator will either impose meanings of his/her own on what is presented on the stage, or will simply accept what is seen for what it is, with no need to impose meaning. Suzan-Lori Parks would perhaps approve: she has said repeatedly that she is not interested in meanings. In ‘From Elements of Style’, one of the essays published in her collection The America Play and Other Works (1995), she mocks the very significance of ‘meaning’, taunting her reader with the equation: bad math x + y = meaning. The ability to make simple substitutions is equated with clarity. We are taught that plays are merely staged essays and we begin to believe that characters in plays are symbols for some obscured ‘meaning’ rather than simply the thing itself. As Beckett sez: ‘No symbols where none intended’. Don’t ask playwrights what their plays mean; rather, tell them what you think and have an exchange of ideas. (14–15) And, more recently, Don Shewey, in his review of Topdog/Underdog (1999), quotes Parks as saying, ‘I’m less interested in meaning – whatever that word means, I’m not quite sure, I keep meaning to look up meaning – than in doing’.

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This disparagement of ‘meaning’ is, of course, in keeping with the tenets of post modernisms, as is Parks’s recognition of self-alienation, of the need to question identity construction, even to doubt the very existence of the self and, it goes without saying, to ponder the ‘meanings’ of the gendered stereotype. For Judith Butler (1990), identity is ‘instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ (270, Butler’s italics) – that is, ‘one does one’s body’ (272) – and so a ‘gendered self’ can be no more than an ‘illusion’ (270). Thus Parks, in her earlier plays, does not create characters possessed of a given gendered identity; she repeats and revises, or ‘Rep & Rev[s]’ (America Play 9) as she puts it, acts or locutions that give a stage presence or form to what she has called ‘figures’. In ‘From Elements of Style’, she wrote: ‘They are not characters. To call them so would be an injustice. They are figures, figments, ghosts, roles, lovers, maybe, speakers maybe, shadows, slips, players maybe, maybe someone else’s pulse’ (America Play 12, Parks’s italics). The ‘figures’ she casts in her later plays have become more characterlike; they have recognizable names and their ‘doing’ is closer to activities that we carry out in our daily lives. As we have to, they too create/do/act out their identities within a society in which gender, class and race constructs contribute to impose specific demands on how we see ourselves and how we act. Ever since Freud, we have tended to take comfort (as daughters and sons) in the idea that our identity is formed during childhood, and that parents, mothers in particular, are responsible for our neuroses. Feminism has, since then, questioned the givens of identity formation, and men’s studies, building on feminist theory, now too questions traits that previously were considered inherently male. As Simone de Beauvoir taught us: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (1949: 295). Or, of course, a man. SuzanLori Parks, even in her more realistic or naturalistic later plays, continues to present us with stereotypes of male and female behaviour that she deconstructs, inverts, subverts – or obliges us, readers and spectators, to reconstruct, recreate, reject, or recognize as our own. Rather than adopt the depressing aspects of postmodernism––the negative, valueless model of human relationships that we see in Sam Shepard’s plays, for example – Parks has preferred to adopt postmodernism’s playful intent. She wants action or ‘doing’, and she also wants fun: postmodern play with and on language, concepts, ideas, theories and bodies has gone into her pieces, even those that, like Fucking A or Topdog/Underdog, end with murder and leave an audience staggering, our ‘whole bodies ... involved in the whole experience’ (Jiggets, 1996: 312), rather than just our minds searching for meanings. In a 1996 interview, discussing her spelling in an attempt to ‘get things on the page how I think they sound to me’, Parks admits ‘the fun that I had with that’ (Jiggets 311, author’s italics) – knowing that our postmodern sensibility does not require her to couch her ‘fun’ in a Twain-like arrogant insistence on the seven dialects of Middle America. Parks has also had ‘fun’ with accepted notions of history, as in The Death

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of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play or Topdog/Underdog and of literature, as in the Red Letter Plays, and with the stereotypes of gendered identity of [black] women and men in all these plays. Parks delights in intertextual exchanges that question the very core of our historical, gendered conceptions of all that surrounds us. In her earlier plays, as in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, she rejects the traditional notion of plot, and goes along with Gertrude Stein’s almost offhand comment: ‘everyone tells stories – why tell another one’ (‘Plays’ 118). Punning both on words and on accepted stories, she turns our1 notion of the world inside out. The man nursing his watermelon and the woman waving a greasy drumstick will never again conjure up those old images of submissive dejection and desire on the southern plantation: they have acquired new identities; they have become part of a new mythology, ‘lyrical badges of a defiant identity recreated through theatrical performance’ (Malkin, 1999: 167). The Black Man With Watermelon exemplifies all the black men that white society has tormented and put to death, but he is very far from being the Mr who molests Celie in The Color Purple, or the Walter of Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun. Black Man With Watermelon has a home to return to and a woman, someone who supports him and believes in him, waiting for him. Where Walter complained that all Ruth could do was feed him when what he needed was understanding and trust, Black Woman With A Fried Drumstick offers precisely the nurturing and nourishing that Black Man With Watermelon seeks. Thus he does return to his porch, repeatedly; this is the home from which he is ran off not by a supposed racial inability to sustain a family, but by a white society that fears him. As Yvette Louis (2001: 141) points out: ‘Although the black male body is apparently foregrounded in this play, the black female body is constructed as the discursive site of restoration for black subjectivity’. Louis goes on to explore the stereotypes of black manhood and womanhood: ‘In the aftermath of Moynihan’s report [1965], public discourses have often pathologized the African American community as an underclass and the black woman as responsible for its alleged failings’ (144). Parks, by probing the gaps of history and elevating them into ritual, deconstructs these stereotypes and is able to resurrect the Black Man With Watermelon as often as needs be in order to show that he is a worthy human being loved and mourned by his supportive wife. In The Death of the Last Black Man we are looking at a male figure rejected by the social system and for whom a sense of identity is not contingent on appearance (Faludi) or on sexual prowess (Saint-Aubin), but on a ‘sedimented act’ (Butler 274) or repetition of escape from death, which amounts to a resurrection. Both Black Man With Watermelon and Black Woman With A Fried Drumstick are representatives, or figures, for ‘the mythical, timeless black couple’ (Malkin 167), and thus the play can also be interpreted as ‘the story of a husband and wife in crisis’ as Rayner and Elam (1994: 449), in a valid oversimplification of the play, argue.

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Parks’s playful postmodernist spirit moves her to riff on the great moments of American literature and drama and, in the Death of the Last Black Man we perceive echoes of Eugene O’Neill’s experiments with expressionism in The Emperor Jones. The specters of diverse deaths that haunt the fleeing emperor are modulated and transformed in Parks’s play. In her reconstituted hole/whole of history, the black man has died many deaths, but he has always come back to the woman who is waiting for him. O’Neill’s Jones has no one to return to, no one who will nurture him with nourishing hens, stuff him with the feathers of love, or believe in him. Jones created an identity for himself based on worthless dreams of capitalism and colonialism (which Hansberry’s Walter desired to emulate); for a brief spell he wields inordinate power, deludes himself that he is immortal, only to fall into the awesome hell-hole/whole of terrifying visions that only a silver bullet can ultimately destroy. The Black Man With Watermelon does not have to mystify his fears; in the collective memory of his people he has lived through the traumas of multiple death; the Middle Passage, the lynching, the executions are all an inherent part of his identity as a black man. He does not need a silver bullet; the melon, which for some critics symbolizes plenty and abundance, and for others, death itself, grounds him; he is forever returning to the hen feast that the Black Woman With A Fried Drumstick always has ready for him. Overturning the stereotype of the black man who abandons his family and mistreats his women, this black man’s identity is inseparable from the black woman who cares for him, nurturing and nourishing not only his body but also his soul, his confidence, his ego. As bell hooks reminds us, ‘The image of black masculinity that emerges from slave narratives is one of hardworking men who longed to assume full patriarchal responsibility for families and kin’ (2004: 3). Thus Parks, overturning the stereotypes that traditional lore would impose on our consciousness, creates a new gendered identity for both her main figures in this play. In later works, Parks returns to gender and racial stereotypes, but the ‘fun’ that she has with them takes on more sober hues. With Topdog/Underdog Parks turns our gaze on to the black man who is fully caught up in the masculine rivalries that capitalist society displays for our consumption. Susan Faludi, in Stiffed, clarifies the ways in which male traditions and changing male roles in the work place and home have undermined men’s faith in themselves; she focuses on the social world in which men live, and concludes that our society is ‘a culture of ornament’ in which ‘manhood is defined by appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by money and aggression’ (38). The two brothers of Topdog/Underdog have bought into this image of modern manhood, but while Lincoln still puts some value on ‘social contribution’ (Faludi, 1999: 35) Booth rejects all that society can offer him and exemplifies Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin’s complex formulation of ‘how racist ideology and masculinity intersect’. Saint-Aubin holds that, ‘for men in this culture the relationship between gender (masculinity) and sexuality is a strict one: Masculinity ‘leans’ on sexuality. In other words,

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in men sexual expression is developmentally critical to achieving self-worth and autonomy through gender identity’ (1,057). Booth builds his self-image on his sexual prowess and when this image fails him, he reacts violently against his brother, who he identifies as his rival in an unstated competition for the sexual and financial privileges dispensed by the patriarchy. Parks, in creating two brothers who are so different, reflects Nancy Chodorow’s (1994) statement that self-identity is created in multiple ways, varying from person to person; thus the play demonstrates what Chodorow has described as ‘the extraordinary uniqueness, complexity and particularity of any individual psyche’ (ix). By staging Lincoln and Booth’s struggle for self-affirmation in an oppressive ‘seedily furnished rooming house room’ (7) Parks focuses our attention on the two men while she signals their inability to function in society; a recent production of the play in Atlanta’s Hertz Theatre2 underscored their isolation and entrapment by surrounding the small stage, which jutted out into the audience, by wire netting. However, society, or the outside world, has not relinquished its hold on the two brothers and both seek ways of participating of its privileges; Judith Butler recognizes this social dimension to identity creation when she states that: ‘the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives’ issued by social imperatives (277). Topdog/Underdog is ‘about two men locked up with an inheritance’ as Linda Winer suggestively phrased it (Winer, 2003 interview). But the inheritance is more than money: it is memories of what might have been a happy childhood, memories destroyed by Booth’s witnessing his mother with a man: ‘his pants had fallen down and her dress had flown up and they’d ended up doing something else’ (100), memories destroyed, ultimately, by mother making off with that man and abandoning her little boy. So father, taking off 2 years later, could only shatter what little confidence Booth had left, and Lincoln, the older brother by 4 years, takes over the role of nurturer and carer. Even as adults, living together in their cage of a room, it is Link who brings and serves the food, Link who continues to teach and advise his little brother. When creating their self-images of manhood, the two brothers did not have the ideal role models set up by patriarchal society before them: their father was a drunkard, their mother a slut. A desire for sex seems to be the only thing these parents taught their offspring: Booth had seen his mother with her lover; Lincoln had heard his parents at night, had heard and observed his father with other women, had even enjoyed certain initiating favours right beside his snoring, satiated father – ‘One of his ladies liked me, so I would do her after he’d done her. On thuh sly though’, he explains to Booth (90). How do you create a sustaining self-image on such an example? Booth, the younger brother, seems to have suffered most: he needs to boast of his sexual prowess with Grace, who he claims loves him, and with Cookie, Lincoln’s ex-wife. By raping Cookie, he not only stepped into the

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shoes of his brother, but also, because Lincoln had taken over the parental role, those of his father and mother. Cookie’s rape amounts to the symbolical rape of his mother, who he then kills in the figure of Grace, who, like his mother, rejects and abandons him. The frustrations of desire and love create a complex oedipal situation in which, according to Western society’s myths, murder is the only possible outcome, serving as both punishment and revenge. Parks replays the oedipal myth here, but places it in an entirely different context of male identity construction. Throughout the play, Booth taunts Lincoln for playing a part and submitting, for a lower wage than a white man would have taken home, to being shot from behind again and again, day after day, in a continuous replay of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. However, Lincoln is proud of his job, and of being the one to supply the ‘bacon’ on a daily basis; this gives him a sense of identity and of value that he struggles to maintain after he is fired. He insists that: ‘They didn’t fire me cause I wasn’t no good. They fired me cause they was cutting back. Me getting dismissed didn’t have no reflection on my performance. And I was a damn good Honest Abe considering’ (91). Booth, when Lincoln offers to get the arcade to hire him, if and when ‘business picks up again’ refuses categorically: ‘That shit ain’t for me. I ain’t into pretending I’m someone else all day’ (92). He prefers to know that ‘Least I’m still me!’ (94) rather than join the workforce and submit to a deadening routine, a way of life that he believes destroyed his father and the family. For Lincoln, however, there was no pretending involved – he just sat there in Abe Lincoln-like clothes, his sense of identity assuaged by the knowledge that: ‘Least I work. You never did like to work’ (94). Whatever Booth may have done – or spent his days not doing – he is more aware of his sense of self and its isolation in time and space; all the same, he chides Lincoln for having given up his old life and the wealth, wife, self-esteem and friends that went with it: ‘No matter what you do you cant get back to being who you was. Best you can do is just pretend to be yr old self’ (94). He is, of course, proved right; Lincoln does return successfully to card-playing and his old haunts, only then to be shot dead by his brother, who is unable to deal any longer with his sense of sibling inferiority and who is playing true to his name when he fulfills the death that Lincoln has been listlessly mocking at the arcade. What Parks subtly reveals to her audience, while forcing us to focus on and question a fragment of American history, is why the two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, act as they do, deconstructing and constructing through their frenzied ‘doing’ a series of gendered identities. Parks does not present her audience with a ready-made family as Shepard does in Curse of the Starving Class; instead, she pushes us to build the two men’s family and social history for them out of their fragmented and not always articulate dialogues. No other figures/characters intervene. We never see Lincoln at the arcade, nor Booth ‘boosting’ the suit he will wear to impress Grace. Nor do we meet ‘Amazing Grace’, or Lincoln’s pals, or the credulous boy on the

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bus who gives Lincoln $20 for his signature. As spectators, we are forced to imagine, or see for ourselves, the context of the play; we must deconstruct our prior assumptions of Lincoln and Booth, and reconstruct the ‘reality’ Parks presents us with – a ‘reality’, as it turns out, that cannot evade so-called ‘facts’. For although Parks is, with the audience’s tacit participation, recreating history, filling in the holes, the gaps, of the white man’s chronicle of his conquests, she cannot escape ‘facts’. Booth shot Lincoln dead, in the theatre. And that is precisely what this Booth does: in the theatre, with us for audience, he shoots Lincoln – thus, however perversely, fulfilling our historical expectations and converting ‘theatrical reality ... [into] the result or product of the spectator’s subjectively executed construction’ (Fischer-Lichte 70). In all her plays, Parks forces the audience to recreate the ‘reality’ that she has theatrically deconstructed. Reading our own version into the action on stage we reconstruct a vision of historical or personal lives, of the intertwining of the private and the public in the lives of a specific group of people, and we do not judge; instead, we reflect on the meanings – although Parks has denied the significance of meanings – and the signifyings of these lives, and so of our own. What does it mean to die? What does it mean to be a man, a woman? Of a specific race, class, background? We all have to create our own reality, identity, self; the many thousand selves that we can choose from are delimited by what surrounds us, when and where we are, and by who is gazing at us. The certainties of premodern individuality have given way to the relativity of postmodern values: a moneyed, white school-boy can believe that he is sitting next to Abraham Lincoln on the bus – a black man in white-face dressed in an ‘antique frock coat and top hat and fake beard’ (8). The joke of course is on the spectator: there is no fixed identity. Lincoln could be Abraham Lincoln if his actions had created that identity for him, or perhaps he was merely the Lesser Known Foundling Father of The America Play? Postmodernism allows us to play, even when the consequences of identity ‘doing’ are predestined, through their very intertextuality, to end in tragedy. Both Booth and Lincoln need to fulfil certain role requirements that, in their eyes (our eyes?), will make them true men. These requirements hinge on their rivalries and fears in attaining social ambitions that will bring wealth, respect and sexual conquests. The brothers, unable to embody their dreams, to either break out of the strictures of stereotype or to fulfill it, succumb under society’s expectations. In the earlier Red Letter Plays, Parks’s women protagonists had also struggled with a stereotype, with society’s image of the single mother on welfare. In Fucking A (2000) and In the Blood (1998), the two Hesters, with identities thrust on them by a patriarchal society convinced of its (our?) moral rightness, overturn the rules, both written and unwritten, to give expression to their desires as fully sexual beings and as mothers. Both In the Blood and Fucking A resonate with memories of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the novel that shows how a Puritan community accepts that a woman who committed adultery can be transformed into an angel.

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Hawthorne’s Hester acquires new identities with every turn of the Red Letter on her breast. Although the Puritans forbade theatrical performance, their presentation of Hester on the scaffold is one of the most dramatic moments of American literature: social and political violence inflicted on the dignity, on the very identity of the other. Hawthorne, plumbing the tradition of Puritan thought, must have recognized that, as Anthony Kubiak puts it, although ‘there was no established theatre [and]... theatre existed only as a condition or possibility of mind’ (33, Kubiak’s italics), the Puritans did have an ‘uncanny grasp of theatrical consciousness’ (29), and their texts ‘describe the surveillance phenomenology of theatre ... watching and being watched ... but also the awareness of watching oneself watch’ (30). Hawthorne had researched the day-to-day life and thought of his forefathers, and when he placed Hester on the scaffold, he understood the didactic and entertainment value such a spectacle would have had. Parks, writing for a twenty-first century audience does not have to place her Hesters on a scaffold; rather, she confronts us with them on the bare stage, placing the Red Letter on their breasts as a ‘stinking sign’ in Fucking A, and as five bastard children in In the Blood. We are thus obliged to watch, and to watch ourselves watching, how, in these two epic plays, patriarchal society pushes a woman into unacceptable behaviour patterns then to judge and condemn her. Hester la Negrita of In the Blood refuses to give the names of the fathers of her children: she does not want to destroy their careers, or she is afraid of their revenge. Among them are respected citizens of the community to whom she had turned for help but who, instead, had abused her, leaving her with yet another child to care for. Just as Chillingworth rejected Hester, so Chilli rejects Hester La Negrita, deeming her unworthy of the wedding dress and ring he has graciously brought her after many years of absence and neglect. Reverend D., as Dimmesdale before him, is more interested in his Church and in appearances than in his child and its mother. We watch the male characters play out their stereotypical gendered identities that conform to patriarchal models of manhood that know no color boundaries. These men could be white or black; bell hooks laments how, after the abolition of slavery, ‘a large majority of black men took as their standard the dominator model set by white masters ... patriarchal masculinity had become an accepted ideal for most black men, an ideal that would be reinforced by twentieth-century norms’ (4). These norms, as we well know, in spite of the model of shared parenting, still hold for many men; the stereotype that Parks had so carefully deconstructed in Death of the Last Black Man underpins the desires of Lincoln and Booth in Topdog/Undergdog, and returns fivefold in In the Blood. Although In the Blood is far from the innovative romp that Parks presented us with in Death of the Last Black Man, she is still playing with theatrical expectations. The Prologue, a Greek Chorus, recreates for us Hawthorne’s gossiping townspeople in front of the prison door as Hester and Pearl come out into the sunshine. But the young woman who expresses

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some sympathy is missing, and this Hester has no skills to redeem her. The ‘figures’ or ‘lovers’ that Parks has created to chide Hester La Negrita take on the parts of both her children and the adults that abuse and exploit her. The action is divided into nine scenes and six confessions; during the confessions, we, the audience, take on the role of the Puritan worthies who judged Hester. Each figure, throwing us back to the Reverend D.’s confession on the scaffold, tells his or her sins against this modern Hester, laying bare the sexual drives that conform his or her identity: the doctor confesses he took Hester ‘Like I needed to’ (45); the Welfare Lady reveals she is a ‘Bi-Curious Wife’ (61); Friend Gringa sells the fruit of her white womb but enjoys performing porno shows with Hester – ‘They don’t call it Capitalizm for nothing’, she sentences (72). The Reverend D. swears he never ‘hurt anybody in my life’ (79), thus failing to recognize Hester as a human being. Chilli’s confession is almost moving; Hester was his ‘first’ (98) as he was hers, and they both believed that the laws of gravity did not apply to them. The last confession is Hester’s; motherhood, so prized and esteemed by the patriarchy is, in her case, but a burden to society. Her ‘stylized repetition’ (Butler, 1990: 1), before the play begins, of the act that constitutes her gendered identity – copulation and childbearing – meets only with reprobation and Parks presents us with its consequences. For a woman’s identity cannot be circumscribed by motherhood; she must play the double role of wife and mother and so accept the protection of the heroes of the patriarchy. Hester La Negrita’s anguished response is that she should have had more children: ‘A Hundred-thousand a whole army full I shoulda!’ (107, Parks’s italics). Here, then, Parks seems to reinforce the stereotype of the fertile, poor, black woman who bears child after child without a thought of how to care for them; however, by juxtaposing Hester’s love of her children in the scenes from her life with the callous confessions of specific representatives of society who have contributed to her tragedy, Parks presents a more complex vision and forces us to reconsider stereotypical responses that unthinkingly assign guilt. The woman/mother performs before us and before society; both her sensuality and her child-bearing is controlled by an authority that can only see the social ‘gulf between us’ (44) and prevents her from assuming the identity she desires, that of mother. Parks, true to her playful spirit, disconcerts the audience by having Hester La Negrita’s five children played by adults; this is by no means the first time that a playwright insists that adults act the part of children – Paula Vogel did this in How I Learned to Drive, as did Tina Howe in Birth and After Birth. Here, however, Parks gives the screw a further twist: the actors playing the children not only double up as adults, but in three cases, they play their own fathers. Such cross-age doubling decenters identity and emphasizes the relativity of emotions and actions; Jabber and Chilli, son and father, played by the same actor, love and abuse Hester La Negrita. The power of the image invoked by the word ‘SLUT’ – the word that Jabber refuses to read and the image that Chilli sees before him instead of the virginal ‘Jesus and Mary’ (96)

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ideal he had carried around in his mind for thirteen years – overcomes both men. They require a mother/wife to be pure, untainted by sexual desire and ‘Sad and lonely ... struggling ... triumphant’ (96) in a world that refuses to hold out a helping hand. With Fucking A, Parks surprised her audience yet again; as John Heilpern (2003) wrote in the New York Observer: ‘We cannot predict the stories she’ll tell us or even how she’ll tell them’. All we can count on is that Parks will ‘play with plays’, in order to force us to interact with the text and the actors and so shake us out of our self-complacent lethargy. Hester Smith is not only Hawthorne’s Hester; she is also a Brechtian Mother Courage performing in an epic play where song, humor, choreography and lighting recreate a mother’s tragedy. Parks told Dinitia Smith (2003), who interviewed her for the New York Times after the production of Fucking A, ‘I only read the book once, just so I could riff on it’, and insouciantly insisted that ‘The title fits the play ... It’s what led me to the play’ – and if the title is unprintable: ‘So what? Big deal’. In this play, Parks creates a more realistic setting and easily recognizable plot or story line than in most of her previous plays; a Medea story in some ‘small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere’ (129), but also the story of the mother who must avenge the harm done to her son. It is a story that shows how the political and the personal intertwine and how gender identities are enforced and adhered to. Where in Topdog/Underdog Parks gave us two different examples of masculinity, showing how society’s enforced expectations can only lead to a tragic outcome, in Fucking A she creates three women who overturn the stereotypes that society imposes. Mahone has codified these stereotypes of the African-American female protagonist: ‘Historically, male playwrights, both white and black, have molded the image of the black woman into the stereotypes of mammies, ‘ho’s’, bitches and loons. In this way the American theatre has devalued and denied the human dignity of African-American women’ (24). Fucking A gives us Hester the abortionist, a riff on the angel, the mother, the lover, the avenger; Canary Mary, the whore, the Mayor’s mistress, and the good friend; and the First Lady, the rich girl who ‘snitches’ and destroys the lives of those around her, the woman whose privileged situation in life can only be safeguarded by giving birth to a son, so confirming her husband’s manhood. Where in Venus Parks portrayed a woman who was not allowed control over her own body, and in In the Blood a Hester La Negrita consumed by the fruit of her body, in Fucking A she gives us two women that describe themselves as ‘Im a whore. Yr an abortionist Im a whore’ (121) and drink to themselves, knowing that their friendship, wits and willpower will see them through. (Hawthorne, of course, did not see fit to give his Hester the support of a woman friend.) Hester Smith, by accepting the brand of the letter A and the job of abortionist, hopes to earn enough money to get her son out of prison, but she is also the ‘angel’ that gives women a bloody control over their bodies. Moreover, she gains access to the First Lady’s

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body, the woman who, when a child, ‘snitched’ and got her son in prison; avenging her loss with well-calculated symmetry not devoid of irony, Hester removes the unborn child the First Lady has conceived by her son, Monster. But Hester is more than a mother; she is that uncommon figure in literature that is both a mother and a woman who recognizes her sensuality and her need for sexual fulfillment and companionship. She finds this companionship and trust in the Butcher, a man who in spite of his trade and his bloodied apron is far from the violent, exploiting, insensitive males Parks surrounded Hester La Negrita with in In the Blood. Parks has created an abortionist who is respected and needed in the town – a reflection or travesty of Hawthorne’s Hester – a woman who does not fit into any of the categories of female characters that Mahone identified for AfricanAmerican playwrights. For Parks has ‘push[ed] cultural identities beyond the historical binaries and constricting definitions of black and white’ (Elam, 2002: 116); as she insisted in an interview with Alisa Solomon as early as 1990: ‘It’s insulting ... when people say my plays are about what it’s about to be black – as if that’s all we think about, as if our life is about that. My life is not about race. It’s about being alive’ (Solomon, 1990: 74). Being alive, of course, implies ‘doing’ or ‘acting out’ a gendered identity that is interpreted by others as much as by ourselves. Parks, in her adoption of a postmodernist theatrical stance, knows that both racial and gendered identities have been unfeelingly constructed, and recognizes that premodern certainties have no valence in our robotical, consumer world. Thus she can deconstruct no longer valid givens and build anew identities that have been ignored to the point of denial; the man and the woman whose very being was annulled by previous centuries because of their color or their sex now exist in precisely that fragmentation that they have always known to be theirs, a postmodern fragmentation that Parks playfully transfers onto the stage and presents to her audience demanding that we share her fun and create our own history. But for all her playfulness Parks cannot escape the consequences of intertextual ‘facts’ and so the stories of her ‘figures’ either begin or end with death, leaving us with the spectacle of the struggle for identity. She is not afraid to use all the resources of the theatre – light, music, choreography, setting, the suspension of disbelief – to reproduce the stylized acts of this struggle again and again, thus reifying the gendered and racial self before us in an infinite series of ‘Rep & Revs’, which are never as incoherent and random as they may initially appear.

Notes 1 2

In my case, the notion held by a doubly displaced, white (but not Anglo-Saxon) European female. November–December 2004, starring Kes Khemnu and Joe Wilson Jr, who alternated in the roles of Booth and Lincoln.

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Bibliography Beauvoir, Simone de. (1984) The Second Sex 1949, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Butler, J. (1990) ‘Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist thought’, in Sue-Ellen Case (ed.) Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 270–82. Chodorow, N.J. (1994) Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Elam, H.J. Jr (2002) ‘The postmulticultural: A tale of mothers and sons’, in M. Maufort and F. Bellarsi (eds) Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium, Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, pp. 113–28. Faludi, S. (1999) Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, New York: William Morrow, 1999. Heilpern, J. (2003) ‘A is for “abortionist”: Hester’s back and rebranded’, New York Observer 31 March: 17. hooks, bell. (2004) We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, New York: Routledge. Jiggets, S. (1996) ‘Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks’, Callaloo 19(2): 309–17. Mahone, S. (1994) ‘Seers on the rim: African-American women playwrights battle avoidance and neglect to bring their visions to the stage’, American Theatre March: 22–4. Louis, Y. (2001) ‘The black female body and the word, in Susan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World’, in M. Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson (eds) Recovering the Black Female Body: SelfRepresentations by African/ American Women, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 141–64. Malkin, J.R. (1999) ‘Suzan-Lori Parks and the empty (w)hole of memory’, MemoryTheatre and Post-modern Drama, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 155–82. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) The America Play and Other Works. (Includes The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.), New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2001) The Red Letter Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2001) Topdog/Underdog. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Rayner, A. and Elam, H.J. Jr (1994) ‘Unfinished business: Reconfiguring history in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World’, Theatre Journal 46(4): 447–61. Reinelt, J. (1998) ‘Notes for a radical democratic theatre: productive crises and the challenge of indeterminacy’, in J. Colleran and J.S. Spencer (eds) Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 283–300. Saint-Aubin, A.F. (1994) ‘Testeria: The dis-ease of black men in white supremacist, patriarchal culture’, Callaloo 17(4): 1054–73. Shewey, D. (2001) ‘Theatre. This time the shock is her turn toward naturalism’, New York Times, 22 July.

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Smith, D. (2003) ‘Tough-minded playwright chooses a title tough to ignore’, New York Times, 16 March. Solomon, A. (1990) ‘Signifying on the signifyin’: the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks’, Theatre 21(3): 73–80. Stein, G. (1975) ‘Plays’, Lectures in America, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 93–134. Weales, G. (2003) ‘American Theatre Watch, 2002–2003’, The Georgia Review 57(3): 612–22. Winer, L. (2003) Video interview with Suzan-Lori Parks. Taped 01/27/2003 for the CUNY Women in Theatre Audio/Video Archive. Online. Available: www.cuny.tv/ series/womenintheatre/index.lasso (accessed February 2005).

5

Language as Protagonist in In the Blood Len Berkman

Unlike their ‘modern’ European – and their increasingly global – theatrical kin, US playwrights (as distinct from even their magnificently mode-fusing, too often shrugged away, Canadian dramatist cousins) face an either/or approach to realism and style. While, for example, the ‘content’ and ‘form’ of a Samuel Beckett play meld such human concerns as ageing, memory loss, physical disability and poverty with such openly artistic tactics as wordplay, repetition, discontinuity, illogic, conspicuous pace shifts, metatheatrical self-awareness and comically disproportionate response, and are embraced accordingly in such fullness of mixtures by critics and audiences alike, ‘American’ writers for the stage routinely encounter and accommodate compartmentalization of foci that ideally would be entwined. The rich diverse oeuvre of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, not to mention the vibrant span of theatrical routes taken in the curtailed lifetime of Lorraine Hansberry – as with the restless explorations of the looming ‘Mt. Rushmore’ males with whom I group her, one has but to place Hansberry’s ‘realist’ A Raisin in the Sun alongside her strikingly ‘imagined’ Les Blancs to be exalted by her panoramic life/art vista – has satisfied public thirst for ‘authentic’, if also often unfamiliar, locale, for dangerous psycho-physical extremes, for hyper-vivid characters, character voices and relationship risk; but there has been no comparably widespread public thirst in the USA to view events and experiences on stage through a range of lenses, through the revelations afforded us by unconcealed ‘experimental’ styles and forms and especially the uses of language that reflect not only a playwright’s ear (for ‘how people speak’) but also that playwright’s ability to give the vocabulary and structure of language a bloodstream of their own as language strives to encompass the writer’s personal universe. Within our dominant culture, there has been no widespread grasp of how language and situational assemblage – what Suzan-Lori Parks hails as a play’s architecture – capture or shape the very nature of thought processes, of emotion, comprehension and response. In that architectural sense, as Parks’s plays manifest, no either/or can usefully exist: The ‘elements of style’ Parks movingly sustains in her ‘Red Letter Plays’, In the Blood and Fucking A – her Hester, La Negrita,

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and her Hester Smith, abortionist, in the acknowledged scarlet ‘A’ glare of Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne – are at one with her choices of character and event.1 Most graphically in In the Blood, words – like characters – occupy space, suffer pressures, instigate action, tempt, deceive, and are subject to attack, muffling or total erasure. Words invade, retreat and strive for fulfillment in ways inextricable from Hester’s determined, if ultimately despairing, struggle, a struggle highlighted, of course, by Hester’s constant challenge: on the one hand, her keeping her children fed while she starves; on the other, her learning to master, through writing practice, a single character, the leader of the alphabet, the letter ‘A’. The obvious should not go unstated: early comparisons of Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays with the startling adventurous works of Adrienne Kennedy become increasingly irrelevant (if pertinent they ever were, apart from Parks’s frank admiration of Kennedy’s achievements: Viewing Parks’s The America Play and Venus in the shadow of Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro or The Owl Answers spurs myriad notions of ancestral impact, while Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes and Alice Childress smile on them both). Each of these beyond-fathomable authors advances courageously into her unique historical/fictive terrain, distinctively balancing intricate human experience on the head of her African-American pin. Kennedy, no less than Parks, merits ongoing study that accords her interplay of substance within shifts from lens to lens its fullest and most elusive dimensions. But Parks has other increasingly evident influences, from her contact (as a Mount Holyoke College undergraduate German Studies major) with the then University of Massachusetts–Amherst Professor James Baldwin to the films of Spike Lee, one of which she was to write, to the late contemporary playwright August Wilson, most appreciated for his careful, accessible, articulate recording of decades of ‘history’, as though style, form, and linguistic architecture had little say in how our past is retrieved. Where less compelling ‘language dramatists’ or ‘poets of the theatre’ allow their fancy linguistic footwork to distract from what might otherwise be an excruciating portrayal of suffering and injustice, Parks takes on without flinching both the anguish and the vision of those without power. No longer an emblem of the difficult, late twentieth century, off (and off-off) Broadway avant garde, yet without yielding the stage-conscious historyas-performance razzle-dazzle that early electrified her devotees, Parks’s mounting achievement joins the multilayered concern with informationlearning, with word and sound as experience, of Peter Handke, Wole Soyinka and Marguerite Duras (whose ingenious La Shaga contains an invented language precursor of Parks’s TALK in Fucking A). She has laid down the stones of a remarkable dual pathway as she directs the attention of her characters and audiences alike to the shaping and tensions of words, even of components of words; to the event, shock and bleeding of words; and to the shaping and tensions of word absence.

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A cue to her brave theatrical/realist dual path in In the Blood appears initially less through words per se than through Parks’s actor/character assignment and scenic design: Not only will we quickly find actors doubling in adult/child roles, two or three as their own fathers, we encounter in the Prologue ‘All’ the cast (but for Hester) as Hester’s nonindividualized accusers. They are collectively outraged that Hester ‘can’t read can’t write’; sheer letters of words, as we will see, elude her hand and eye. Whatever ‘all’ the angry judges assert is factually true: They decry Hester’s promiscuity, her five babies with serial not-yet-named fathers. They worry that with ‘not a penny to her name’ she threatens to become a welfare parasite, an outcome they treat as personal and voice in vernacular: ‘I’ll be damned if she gonna live off me’. Aiming for the sagacity – take your pick – of street gossip or a classic detached/disturbed Greek chorus, they pronounce her fate: ‘It won’t end well for her’. Should we indeed hear this as indisputable oracular doom? A Brechtian poster board alert? Twice, with nonclassic wordlessness, the chorus falters; the second time, as Hester ‘passes through them’, Hester, too, is struck dumb. Parks signals this by placing each would-be speaker’s name where conventional script format would have speech ensue; she then leaves the speech space blank. The unprotected ‘home’ beneath a bridge that Hester has improvised for herself and her brood must likewise read empty where other homes fill space. Parks’s ‘spare’ design instruction is both metaphor and literal in one gasp, ‘to reflect the poverty of the world of the play’ (1,624–5).2 The sight of Hester and her family’s deprivation is immediate: Upset by a word scrawled on a wall inside his home, Jabber, Hester’s oldest of five, is introduced on stage initially unable to speak or act. Baby, Hester’s youngest, must take upon himself the smashing of scrounged-for soda cans to be redeemed for what few coins of deposit the cans can earn. From the earliest moments of Scene 1, we witness a clash of human and moral forces within a parallel linguistic universe: ‘Zit uh good word or a bad word?’ illiterate Hester asks Jabber of the anonymously scrawled epithet, ‘Slut’. Despite the verbal flow his name suggests, Jabber’s sense of the invasive word and its intended application to his mother prevents his reply. Throughout In the Blood, four-letter ‘S’ words, each with sharp emotional impact, proliferate like babies: Soda and slut fast link to slow, to sack, soup, shoe, soap, sell and – most devastating of all, yet with Hester able to spot only the ‘A’ in it – spay. Whether Hester can survive will depend on such words, on how they are used, aimed, understood, if not by Hester herself then by those she can trust. Already, strictly by context, she too senses that the word on her wall is ‘bad’, is ‘mean’ and is ‘stupid’: Jabber’s sole defense against replying to her question is that he is ‘slow’, so slow, he claims, that to smash a soda can is beyond his ken. Hester’s rebuttal is tellingly with twofold context: ‘Slow ain’t never stopped nothing, Jabber. You bring yr foot down on it and smash it flat’. With Hester’s use of ‘slow’ as a noun unable to ‘stop’, the ‘it’ she asks Jabber to smash – given the soda can we

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see at her feet, she might have asked him to smash ‘this’ – becomes not solely a can (which, last referred to in the plural, ‘the cans’, is grammatically too removed to serve as preclusive antecedent) but the smashing of slow itself: Contrary to the ‘sticks and stones’ verse of defense to which Jabber alludes, presumably harmless words/names turn when not crushed, as Hester somehow apprehends, into self-fulfilling prophecies. To refuse to recognize and oppose a ‘mean ... ugly’ and hurtful word’s destructive power, Hester tacitly believes, is to let it crush you. Her tragic relationship with Jabber – as mother and son give the power of a scrawled and haunting insult its irrepressible play – will ultimately shatter her reasonable belief, her advocacy of nondenial, to smithereens (1,625–6). The invasion of ‘slut’ on Hester’s wall also has functional impact: it usurps Hester’s ‘practice place’ for her learning to form her ‘A’. Though Hester argues she can practice regardless – ‘In my head. In the air. In the dirt underfoot’–and then demonstrates in the dirt ‘with great difficulty’, she is both shakily in need of such systematic effort (which she may forsake, she tells Jabber, ‘if you gonna disparage me’, a stark and telling juxtaposition of a ‘big’ word in Hester’s spoken vocabulary even as she struggles to write a single character of that word) and curiously off track: We will soon learn from Welfare (as we know, too, of course, from standard legal demand) how basic it is that Hester be able to write her name. Conspicuously, there is no ‘A’ in Hester. She is burdened and branded with the obstacle-course tangent of our sequential alphabet. ‘Slow’ Jabber makes the human anatomy of alphabet characters vivid as he confidently describes Hester’s ideal ‘A’: ‘Legs apart hands across the chest like I showed you’ (1,625). Hester’s potential comfort in hearing words foreign to her is yet more poignant for the threat words pose. ‘Read that word out to me, huh?’ she asks Jabber. ‘I like it when you read to me’. The mother-child education process is patently reversed. When Jabber resists, Hester adapts with an opposite expression of comfort: ‘Go scrub it off then. I like my place clean’. Words, then, are inherently ‘dirty’ when they come uninvited; the incivility of words and of the ‘bad boys writing on my home’ carries a glimmer of a smile as Hester muses, ‘Do they write on their own homes? I don’t think so’ (1,626). Clearly, Hester permits no ‘bad word’ to be spoken, much less written, in her home. Indeed, the four-letter ‘S’ word commonly printed with a scarcely disguising hyphen or ellipse never does make an entrance or exit in Hester’s world. When her daughter Bully reports her brother Trouble’s ‘bad word’ response to her warnings about his criminal mischief, she won’t ‘say’ what Trouble said, lest Hester ‘wash [her] mouth’. Hester shows a bit of cleverness as she attempts to sidetrack Bully by having her sack the crushed cans while she persists in prying her daughter for further details of Trouble’s transgression. Not fooled by this evidence of her mother’s acute ambivalence about uncloaked bad language and behavior, Bully ‘buttons her lips’, her adamant silence sparking our first sign of Hester’s violent bent, particularly

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when words withheld or released prod Hester to retaliate on those weaker than she (the sad history of the oppressed victimizing those who are not their oppressors, for which Medea and Wozzeck loom as tragic embodiments). How Hester pits ‘word’ against ‘behavior’ is compact: ‘Worse than a thief is a snitch that don’t snitch’ (1,626). As Hester’s children gather for their meal of soup, virtually an alphabet soup whose chief ingredients are improvised words (with daughter Beauty’s carefully honored wish for a hair ribbon building Parks’s five-ring circus of Hester’s maternal responsibilities), this astonishingly organized single mother, however beset, has strikingly contrasted responses to the specter of Trouble’s defiance of law and his objection to her name-calling: Were her son to end up in prison, he would ‘embarrass’ her, Hester charges, but her retaliatory threat, purely verbal and easily routine, is instantly succeeded by a domestic command: ‘If you do, I’ll kill you. Set the table’. More sustained and ferocious is Hester’s picking up on Jabber’s and Bully’s tease that Trouble’s setting the table is ‘girl’s work’. As Trouble balks, Hester’s verbal slam has no softening domestic end-curve: ‘Set the damn table or Ima make a girl outa you!’ To Trouble’s comeback, ‘You can’t make a girl out of me’–he needed no retort to her transitory ‘kill you’ but her actual and metaphoric challenge to his manhood cannot likewise go “unanswered” – Hester is conclusively, if quietly, his menace: ‘Don’t push me’. Trouble gives his mother no further backtalk (1626–7). With fairy tales as with soup, Hester knows how words count. Her idyllic fantasy of the law-altering Princess who marries five brothers and has a baby with each is transparent alter-autobiography even prior to her announcement of the five baby names as those of her own offspring and listeners. The lullaby of her narrative would loop a loving polygamous harmony around her family’s chaos. But, as with the exclaiming youngster in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, wishful words face combat with words of truth. Her children allow her to reach her ‘happy ending’ before they question it. ‘Where did the daddys go?’, Beauty asks. ‘They went to bed’, Hester persists, with hilarious free association as she hopes with her story to put her children to bed. Trouble won’t let her off the hook: ‘They ran off’. Hester’s reiterated strategic ‘bedtime’ fails to squash her children’s rebellion, which disintegrates into a renewed bout of name-calling. Trouble attacks Jabber as ‘spook’, likely for Jabber’s Caucasian father; Bully and Trouble attack each other as ‘bastard’. Abruptly, however, Hester reclaims the last word, with her simple factual shout that trumps her Princess tale and turns hollow insult into flesh, ‘Yr all bastards!’ (1,627–8). Soothing her children’s resulting tears, getting them to ‘hit the sack’ and to leave shoes, shirts and blouses for her to polish and press, Hester overrides her hunger pains (having refrained from eating the soup she reserved for her brood) with the sight of her unworn white pumps, the chalk with which she repeatedly practices her ‘A’, and the ‘inspirational’ audiotape that is all she can hold onto of Baby’s father, Reverend D., as he drives the

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double-edge of ‘L-I-V-I-N’ (carefully spelled out for his devotees) toward his subsequent exhorting of his fallen flock to rise. Parks introduces us now to others of Hester’s scant social network: her sole and doubtful friend, the duly ironically named Amiga Gringa; Hester’s morally compromised ‘Welfare Lady’; and several errant progenitors (of Jabber, Trouble and Baby): Chilli, the Doctor, and, now in person, the most elaborately treacherous, Reverend D. With each of these encounters, Hester suffers deprivation and duplicity anew through a shell game of words. Amiga Gringa’s likening Hester polishing her children’s shoes to Mother Hubbard and The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe conveys Hester’s poverty and starvation but misses her industriousness and her socialized dedication to her sons’ and daughters’ proper garb. Hester’s hope to get ‘a leg up’ – she turns this phrase into a virtual mantra – draws Amiga Gringa’s swift mockery: Swiping aside Hester’s needful reminder of the money Amiga Gringa owes her, ‘Miga’s disingenuous and cruel display of arrogance is staggering: ‘Is that a way to greet a friend? ... What world is this?’ She counters what she portrays as Hester’s massive affront with words that truly affront in their deceptive intent: ‘I got news for you, Hester. News that’s better than gold’ (1,628–9). Later, Amiga is to take the first bite out of Hester’s hungrily desired sandwich, the food in rare supply that Hester will never get to devour; but Amiga alone is not what keeps Hester starving as Hester prioritizes her child over herself once again and relays to her daughter Bully the sandwich Amiga chews into and returns. Another kind of sandwich recurs in Hester’s life, but it is hardly edible: the street Doctor’s sandwich board with its ominous hidden words, words that come to be revealed as an eye chart Hester can neither fully see nor understand. She can read only the ‘A’ of ‘SPAY’, whose quasi-welfare and animalistic implications for Hester’s body, the removal of her ‘womanly parts’, are achingly apparent (1632). The Welfare Lady’s own abuse of Hester’s body is hideous: Proud that she ‘walk[s] the line’ Welfare and her husband lure Hester to constitute their first threesome in bed, a sadistic sexual venture during which she claims Hester’s permission to slap her across her face. With verbal sleight-of-hand, Welfare converts her admission that this presumably assented-to slap ‘crosses the line’ into a pompous self-justification. Extending her hypocritical ‘line’ metaphor, she clinches her pose of respectability, through legalistic jargon: ‘As her caseworker I realize that maintenance of the system/ depends on a well-drawn boundary line/ and all parties respecting that boundary./ And I am, after all,/ I am a married woman’. Given social class privilege, the erotic extension of ‘married’ into ‘threesome’ does not stop Welfare from total retrieval of the propriety that her culturally approved ID, ‘married woman’, aims to assure (1,636–7). Just as Hester’s welfare access requires word-as-symbol-of-worth via her sheer ability to write her name, words hurled at Hester supplant love, food, cash and truth, willy-nilly. ‘Do you know what the word is?’ Amiga Gringa replies to Hester’s renewed demand for money owed. ‘The word’ is Amiga’s

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‘news’ of Chilli, Hester’s ‘first love’ and Jabber’s dad, supposedly ‘back in town, doing well, and looking for you’. Catching Hester’s bewilderment, Amiga manages to retract even as she reaffirms, ‘That’s the word’, twinning ‘the word’ in one shrug of breath as gospel and rumor. Shrewdly employing words of need herself to cajole pills from the sandwich board Doctor, Amiga instantly contradicts that need as she offers a portion of these pills to Hester. But when Hester keeps her eyes on the prize, the cash due that Amiga still withholds, Amiga bombards her ‘friend’ with ‘economic environment’ gobbledygook, including the day’s roller coaster ride of ‘the Dow’, to make the paltry $5 she finally surrenders seem magnanimous (1,629). Exasperating as she is in her winged comedic betrayal of her ‘friend’, Amiga’s practice of moral turpitude must take its place alongside that of the five fathers, not least the Doctor, whose street maneuvers among the poor can misleadingly confirm his self-image as compassionate, and the indeed backin-town Chilli, belatedly ready to marry Hester pending her agreement to his sexist ‘conditions’ until he encounters Jabber’s younger siblings, whom Hester – in a moment of her own use of words to elude – hopes to pass off as ‘the neighbor kids’. While, not without cause, Chilli and Jabber occupy kindred places in Hester’s shaken soul, it is Reverend D.’s betrayal of his own place in her soul that becomes the most protracted, expectation-filled and devastating. Intriguingly, as Hester prepares her strategy to secure Reverend D.’s help, she accepts Amiga’s advice to bring a snapshot of his Baby with her rather than Baby himself: Whether accurate or false, images can become active dramatis personae as readily as words. Hester comes upon Reverend D. on his soapbox, ‘preaching to no one in particular’, his voice and his audio recordings promoting the same pitch (‘You can pull yourself up’) of encouragement to the blank night air. Reverend D. has all the right words for Hester, who initially conceals who she is behind Baby’s photo. D. seems to set his own trap, insisting to his ‘sister’ that he likes to be bothered, as he urges her to approach Baby’s father to demand that the father not ‘deny what God has made’ and to report the ‘good-for-nothing deadbeat ... to the authorities’ if the father fails to comply. Owning all of Reverend D.’s tapes and armed now with the immediacy of his exhortation (‘Show him this sweet face and yours. He cannot deny you’), Hester lowers Baby’s picture to show her face, only to have all words flee. Again, we see the format of speaker without speech: ‘Hester / Reverend D. / Hester / Reverend D. “and” even this enormity of speechlessness is followed by a further signal of where, at the height of confrontation, words might but cannot follow (1,633–4). When words resume, Reverend D.’s are pathetic: He claims not to recognize Hester but he is thrown: ‘No. God’. He presses frenetically to call a taxi as he tries to brighten the state he is in with such a palliative as ‘we’ll get you home in a jiff’. His army of confused assertions fails to budge Hester from a lucid calm focus on Baby and the value of words: ‘He’s talking now’. Reverend D. stays explosive with hollow promises: of help,

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of agencies, of taking up a collection, of having his lawyers visit Hester, of guaranteeing her an income. (The lawyer is embodied in ‘a card’, a bitterly ironic non-equivalent to Baby’s entrance as photo.) Hester’s eye on Reverend D.’s vulnerability to her takes a heart-wrenching turn, ‘There ain’t no one here but you and me. Say it. You know me’. She waits. But despite his awareness that his avowed God and Hester are alone within earshot, his words again flee. Although D. follows this silence with further verbal masquerade, Hester stays factual, doggedly loyal, keeping D.’s name from “the authorities’ though she had chosen to report the four other fathers’ names. Under the circumstance, her plainness of speech is remarkable, an epitome of beauty, restraint and anguish: ‘Theres so many things we need. Food. New shoes. A regular dinner with meat and salad and bread’. It is impossible not to hear as well Hester’s need for love, and from Reverend D. above all, though he is not her ‘first love’ but her last. His request for a delay in what he can offer her, onto which he loads his plea for secrecy, brings on Scene 3’s third and final instance of word flight. So much should be said and done that won’t be. Instead, we have Reverend D.’s quiet, ‘You better go’; then, Hester’s quiet exit (1,634–5). Hester’s response to words that elbow truth and need from their rightful priority is various and complex. She herself, after all, can insist on untruth: ‘I can write my goddamn name’ is as vain a lie as her allowing Jabber’s ‘All our daddies died in the war, right?’ and then shrugging off (as ‘whatever’) her transparently impromptu mixed metaphor of dead fathers as never-starving worms, ‘happy as larks’ (1,630–1). Doctor, Welfare, Amiga and Chilli’s sexual encounters with Hester – ‘very motherly, very obliging, very understanding/ very phenomenal’ with the Doctor; coming ‘for Tea’ with Welfare; pleasing an ‘invited audience. For a dime a look’ with Amiga; conjuring romance purely through words in a junked Buick with Chilli – collectively evoke the self-compromising plight of a desperate pliable human being (1,633; 1,637; 1,639; 1,645–6). Hester is mildly surprised when another does not cheat her (as when Baby’s ‘good’ photo defies her assumption that the dollar she paid for it was another of Amiga’s scams), but honesty and abuse, kindness and selfishness, seem equally dulled givens when hunger reigns. ‘Here’s a dollar. Go get yourself a sandwich’, the Doctor tells Hester in a moment of token but surprise generosity (the sandwich Hester is to get but never get to eat). Neither grateful nor insulted, and no differently (in exterior containment) than when Reverend D. tells her to go, she simply takes the offered bill and exits (1,633). Elsewhere, too, her emotions seem not to rule or, in selfwarring array, to yield to charlatan-like glide: She ‘recoils from her kids’ when their arrival jeopardizes Chilli’s offer to marry her. As Chilli retracts the engagement and takes back ring, veil and dress, Hester is already in pained acceptance of her loss when she tries to hold Chilli with no more than an excruciatingly subdued ‘Please’ (1,645). In light of Hester’s limited self-regard and expectation of love or help, her perseverance with Reverend D. acquires keen dramatic disproportion.

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A measure of Suzan-Lori Parks’s stunning accomplishment in In the Blood is that with all that we do know of Hester’s life, present circumstances and echoes of others of her race, gender, social class and lack of formal ‘three R’s’ education, with all that we do know of her character and strivings, a vast terrain of Hester’s personhood remains a mystery: like planets and galaxies beyond register on our telescopes, the magnitude of her universe defies the capacities of language and thought. Recurrently (in Scenes 3 and 6), to keep Hester at bay, Reverend D. promises help if she agrees to leave and come back later, a delay he increasingly shields from outsider view as to time and location. His ultimate mix of advice and threat, with its weight of US racist history – the back door entrances, the seats at the backs of busses – is unacknowledged, accepted: ‘If you want your money, it would be better if you come around to the back’. Hester’s accession to each of Reverend D.’s craftily couched commands aches all the harder for his denial of what she experiences, as with her account of the eclipse, and for his nonended exploitation of her as, seated and masturbating on his new church cornerstone, he wheedles Hester into a brief act of oral sex. Wordless, of course, as she satisfies his lust, she is importantly described in two adjectives, not merely the first of these two: ‘Ashamed. Expectant’. Even Reverend D.’s obvious self-serving desires raise Hester’s hopes: ‘Maybe we could get something regular going again’. Reverend D.’s very smarminess, his ability to get a church built ‘just by talking’, carries charismatic magic for her as she reapproaches him via his impressive new church’s back entrance: ‘Must be saying the right things. Nobodyd ever give me nothing like this for running my mouth’ (1,640–1; 1,646–7). We know the uses Reverend D. has for the poor: ‘I want my poor on tv’, he muses as he cleans his church cornerstone, its date carved in Roman numerals confidently ahead of the erection of the church edifice. Grasping a moneyed Western mindset, he envisions a standard reach into the pockets of his softhearted donors, who bear no such impulse to help poor folks locally: ‘Gimme brown & yellow skins against a non-Western landscape ... into the camera’. One cannot underestimate the media power of those children’s struggle to say, ‘Thank you ... the only english they knew’. Reverend D.’s gift for culturally supported manipulation is of a piece with his finding Hester’s suffering, indeed human suffering in general, ‘an enormous turn-on’. The crumpled bill he offers her in place of his larger promised sum carries a fastmoving, readily intended, insult quite distinct from the Doctor’s volunteered dollar for her sandwich. That Hester takes the bill, much as she earlier took ‘enough money’ from Reverend D. to take care of ‘her predicament’, the pregnancy with Baby that Reverend D. does not embrace as his own predicament and that she did not, in the end, abort, stirs Reverend D. to feel ‘hate ... for her/and her hunger’, a hatred embodying his hideously actual attitude toward the poor and toward any whose need for ‘God’ to ‘pull [them] up’ would undermine his ambition (1,639–41).

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Hester stays blind to Reverend D.’s ghastly ego: ‘Why don’t you like me no more?’ In his presence, Hester appears utterly incapable of self-esteem. Her need to be in his good graces exceeds any other aspect of her and her children’s basic survival. This extremity of passion and desperation swoops from one behavioral mode to its opposite: it is to impede Reverend D.’s departure that Hester tries physically to assault him. Repeating for the third time, ‘Why don’t you like me?’ Hester is finally driven to rise up against this scoundrel but, still, without seeing him for what he is. As he overpowers her attempt to strike him with the policeman’s club she took from Trouble after his theft of it, Reverend D. showers her with the barbs previously reserved for thought, not tongue: Denouncing her as ‘slut’ (might he, not the assumed gang of boys, be her graffiti invader?), he hurls his long-withheld truth, ‘You’ll never get nothing from me!’ No more the patter of an abandoned mother’s recourse to authorities; now he dares Hester to ‘Tell the world!’ and warns that, if she does, he’ll ‘crush [her] underfoot’. As Reverend D. vanishes, Hester is speechless. Jabber, having witnessed this disaster and, after another extremity of speechlessness, revealed his presence with a heartsore ‘Mommie’, cannot prod his mother to make a sound. Hester has hit rock bottom (1,646–7). Just prior to this, we had seen Hester lose her chance with Chilli. Chilli, alone, recalls the imaged romantic compensation that words can effect among the poor, subject as rich and poor alike are to a consumerism in which ‘everything [is] pitched toward love in a car’. As his and Hester’s thrust of fantasy converts a rusted Buick ‘that hadn’t moved in years’ into a locale for a quintessential lovers’ date, words and mime do the rest: ‘I would sit at the wheel and pretend to drive/ and she would say she felt the wind on her face’ (1,645–6). Hester and Chilli: first love; Hester and Reverend D., her last chance at love. The romance of words for Hester and Chilli turn, with Reverend D., to a talker’s words, language out to deceive and amass, to slash and destroy. It is Reverend D.’s word ‘slut’ that Jabber has now heard spoken, the word he had kept from saying aloud into his mother’s ears but which he can no longer hold back, question and repeat and repeat. Hester can’t shut Jabber up; ‘slut’ becomes practically his hiccup. He covers his mouth ‘sheepishly’ to prevent yet another slip of consonants, but it is the outbreak of his and his mother’s postoutburst silence that leads to her murderous and soulfully self-destructive act. Though Jabber cries out as Hester wields her club’s fatal blow, she shows no response to his cry. Not that she is Agave of The Bacchae, too drenched in Dionysian blood-thirst to see that the figure she kills and decapitates is her son Pentheus in female garb. Knowing Jabber to be her son, Hester strikes his corpse again and again, her crazed state of a wholly different order than Agave’s. The sight of her daughter Beauty, as this third of her children witnessing her murder of their brother flees from her, coincides with the exhaustion of Hester’s uncontrolled rage. No belated recognition of Jabber ensues; yet she

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is radically transformed. In her isolation and grief, Hester cradles her son’s dead body to form a variant Pietá, with chilling ironic overlay to its iconic anguish. More resonant than the sight of a mother grieving the loss of a child whose life she has ended, the Pietá incorporates Hester’s shaping her final ‘A’ on the ground beside her, with hands wet with Jabber’s blood. Her farewell to her son is a sorrowful boast: ‘Looks good, Jabber, don’t it? Don’t it, huh?’ For her reiterated question, of course, there can be no reply (1,647). The last of Hester’s Scene 8 ‘Confession’, which follows upon the killing but focuses not at all on what she has done, is an interrupted outcry. Initially wishing that none of her ‘mistakes’ had ever been born, she reverses herself: ‘I shoulda had a hundred-thousand ... a whole army full ... Spitting em out/ Bad mannered Bad mouthed Bad Bad Bastards!’ As when she clubbed her son to death, she runs the gamut from passive victim to venomous selfaffirming matriarch to futile abandoned convict. Notably, her sequence of ‘I shoulda’s stops short of its final punctuation. No one shuts her up; she simply runs out of vision, and breath, and whatever shreds of freedom to choose she ever had (1,647–8). A culmination of what the Prologue introduced, Scene 9 (actually an epilogue) frames Hester’s tragic downfall within a spectrum of determinants as ‘All’ her accusers close in on her, blaming her for her lack of education, for her sexuality (‘No skills/ cept one’), for her lack of a husband, and for her poverty. She is accused of getting no further than the first letter of the alphabet, and forced sterilization awaits her to put an end to her ‘mistakes’. What Hester is kept from grasping is how she was not the sole determiner of her fate. As she assents to the description of herself perpetrated by ‘All’, she is the epitome of inner colonization, but she also houses the spirit of ultimate revolt. As In the Blood concludes, we see her looking up, her bloody hands outstretched above her. Parks can reasonably rely on In the Blood’s audience perceiving the forsaken societal and religious responsibilities that led to Hester’s outcast state though Hester herself has yet firmly to locate her nemesis. Exclusively self-recriminatory until the final ambiguous stance and image that close the play, she fuses the alarm of the anguished with an implicit raised-arm call for action, prefigured in her image of the ‘E-clipse’: ‘I ... looked up. Never seen nothing like it. ... It was a big dark thing. Blocking the sun out like the hand of fate ... with its 5 fingers coming down on me’ (1,640). Her echoed words, spoken thrice at the end of the play, point back at unvanquished injustice: ‘Big hand coming down on me’. No fault resides in Hester’s blood that isn’t injected there by the language of those who would convince her of her inherent lesser and immoral being, and who would enlist language as the arbiter of her worth. From Doctor to Welfare to Reverend and beyond, Parks’s ‘big hand ... big hand ... big hand’ evokes the conglomerate of insidious forces, human and divine, that Hester must not be left alone to withstand and oppose (1,648).

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Notes 1

2

Recognizing that most of Parks’s readers and scholars will refer to the publication of In the Blood in American Theatre Magazine’s March 2000 issue, to the Dramatist Play Service’s acting edition (2000), or to The Red Letter Plays edition, which includes both In the Blood and Fucking A, published by Theatre Communications Group (2001), I have nevertheless chosen to cite instead the pages of In the Blood in the anthology Stages of Drama: Classical to Contemporary Theatre (5th edn.), edited by Carl H. Klaus, Miriam Gilbert, and Bradford S. Field Jr. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2003). I wish largely to underscore the usefulness of alternative contexts and lenses through which to experience Parks’s theatrical strides beyond the achievement I select here to pursue. A simple instance of this advantage comes from In the Blood’s having as an anthological companion Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997): Vogel’s big-bosomed Li’l Bit and Parks’s big-bottomed Venus have much to say to each other; Parks, like Vogel, is remarkably inspired by extremes. Stages of Drama has such other assets as Margo Jefferson’s review of the 1999 Public Theatre production of In the Blood, photographs from that production, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s delight of an essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1999). Wherever a cluster of quotations from the script are drawn from a single scene or section, page reference(s) will appear only at the conclusion of the cluster or at the paragraph’s end.

Bibliography Klaus, C.H., Gilbert, M. and Field, B.S. Jr., eds. (2003) Stages of Drama: Classical to Contemporary Theatre, 5th edn., New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press.

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Who’s Thuh Man?! Historical melodrama and the performance of masculinity in Topdog/ Underdog Jason Bush

As I left the theatre after a performance of Suzan-Lori Parks’s newest play Topdog/Underdog in the spring of 2004 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angles, I was still in shock by the curious mix of humour, raw energy and violence on display in the performance. This performance haunted me for days, disrupting how I had previously thought about Parks’s work in preparing my master’s thesis on the relationship between Parks’s aesthetics and the politics of her plays. Here was a play with a consistent linear narrative and a seemingly realistic performance style written by an author who has in the past vehemently rejected these very dominant forms in the American theatre. The performance was also set squarely in the present, a departure from Parks’s previous work, which dealt with the recovery of African-American cultural memory. Since seeing this performance, I have been obsessed with these particular departures. Is this formally innovative writer becoming more conservative as her work moves into more mainstream theatres? Or is there a more complicated relationship between Parks’s newest and most esteemed work1 and the politics and aesthetics of her earlier plays? Suzan-Lori Parks, as well as many scholars, have described her work as a type of recovery project. She intends to counter the erasure of AfricanAmerican history, which post-colonial critics have described as central to colonial discourses.2 In her essay ‘Possession’ Parks asserts: Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theater, for me, is the perfect place to ‘make’ history – that is, because so much of AfricanAmerican history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to – through literature and the special strange relationship between theater and real-life – locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. The bones tell us what was, is, will be; and because their song is

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Suzan-Lori Parks : A Casebook a play – something that through production actually happens – I’m working theater like an incubator to create ‘new’ historical events. (4)

Using the archaeological metaphor of ‘digging for bones’, she relays a desire to counter the dehumanizing effects of hegemonic historical discourses which erase the presence of African-Americans as historical agents making them merely objects of someone else’s subjectivity. Parks does not however intend for her plays to posit a fixed historical identity for African-American subjects. Her dramaturgy of recovery uses an aesthetic with roots in the blues and jazz, traditional African-American musical forms, which she terms ‘repetition and revision’ (Rep & Rev). In her essay ‘Elements of Style’ she defines this aesthetic as: ‘Repetition and Revision’ is a concept integral to the Jazz esthetic in which the composer or performer will write or play a musical phrase once and again and again; etc. – with each revisit the phrase is slightly revised. ‘Rep & Rev’ as I call it is a central element in my work; through its use I’m working to create a dramatic text that departs from the traditional linear narrative style to look and sound more like a musical score. (8–9) Her emphasis on musicality suggests a more poetic narrative of recovery. For example in The America Play, an African-American man who calls himself the Foundling Father, leaves his family to go west and perform as Abraham Lincoln in a carnival midway game where customers are invited to play the role of John Wilkes Booth for a penny. These customers/spectators/actors are allowed to choose a firearm and shoot the pretend Lincoln with a cap gun.3 The emphasis upon repetition in Parks’s work bears a striking resemblance to psychoanalytic accounts of the after-effects of traumatic events. Dr Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman have suggested, ‘Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that ... has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as the survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect’ (69). The historical experience of African-Americans which Parks tracks in her work, from the slave ships to contemporary poverty and violence can be characterized as a history of repeated cycles of trauma. Today’s African-Americans must deal with the traumatic memory of slavery and the repetition of cycles of violence and poverty in order to reclaim a sense of individual personhood and communal identity. The dismemberment of African-American history by the hegemonic project of white colonial domination has obscured the traumatic details of slavery and racism throughout the middle passage and the everyday historical experience of life in the USA. Parks’s work could be argued to be an attempt to recover and mourn a historical narrative about black suffering in order to work-through and politicize the social and

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historical conditions of the everyday experience of African-Americans. The emphasis on ‘repetition’ and its destabilizing ‘revision’ work between the borders of mourning and melancholia, if mourning is described as taking possession of the traumatic past and melancholia is the continued possession of the subject by the past.4 The task of writing down narratives about the figures that haunt her is an act of personal working-through and taking control of these narratives, however unfixed they remain. The task of performing these plays for an audience becomes a social ritual about mourning a communal yet contingent history of suffering. Unlike much of Parks’s early plays Topdog/Underdog is set squarely in the present. Two African-American brothers named Lincoln and Booth live together in a small shabby apartment. Lincoln, a former 3-card Monty hustler, works at an amusement park performing the death of his namesake, Abraham Lincoln, in whiteface. Booth, a master shoplifter, attempts to learn his brother’s former trade as a 3-card Monty hustler, having a boastful personality but little skill. The brothers struggle for dominance until the expected replaying of the murder by Booth ends the play in violent tragedy. As Shawn Marie Garrett points out, the play is the latest in a larger progression towards realism and a concern for contemporary violence in Parks’s work, ‘her new works In the Blood, Fucking A and particularly Topdog/Underdog do not look backwards, towards the catastrophes of history, but forwards, towards individual and psychologically motivated acts of violence that take place on-stage’ (134). In Topdog/Underdog the existence of the linear plot towards a psychologically motivated violent act is disrupted however, by the symbolic weight of the links between the brother’s names, Lincoln’s profession, and the replaying of Booth’s murder of Lincoln. The disjuncture between the symbolism of the historical narrative and the linear realistic plot it is juxtaposed with seems to drive the rhetorical power of this play in performance. In two separate sources, Parks has offered small insights into how this disjuncture might be interpreted. In an interview in Jet magazine, she tell us, ‘Topdog/Underdog has a lot to do with the artifice of everyday life, with the performative aspects of life, with the masks we wear, with characters who are between a rock and a hard place’ (quoted in Suzan-Lori Parks, ‘1st Black Woman’, 2002: 25). The metaphor of ‘performance’ as a way of describing the way that identities are produced and maintained has a varied and complex genealogy. Concepts like Dubois’s ‘double-consciousness’,5 Bakhtin’s ‘heteroglossia’,6 Erving Goffman’s ‘face’,7 and James C. Scott’s ‘hidden’ and ‘official transcripts’8 all contribute to an understanding that cultural, gendered, and racial identities work in relation to shared discourses which act like script’s for an individual’s performance of a particular identity. Perhaps the most mature stem of this genealogy is Judith Butler’s description of gender as a ‘performative act’. Drawing on speechact theorist JL Austin’s notion of ‘performatives’,9 she describes gender as a ‘stylized repetition of acts’ (1988: 519). This stylization consists of numerous

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historical conventions of behaviour which become naturalized as a way a person comes to think about their own self as a member of an ‘essentialized’ gender category. Parks’s second insight relates this performance of identity with larger histories of discourses and practice within the USA. In an interview with Susan Lester Cole, Parks maintains Topdog/Underdog ‘is about personal history and family history and about this overriding history that they can’t escape. Their history catches up with them. Lincoln quits playing 3-card Monty. Booth changes his name. And the cards are their death’ (quoted in Cole, 2001: 99). The reader is left to wonder what is this ‘overriding history’, and how does it relate to the names of the characters, Lincoln’s profession, and the outcome of the play? In this chapter, I describe how Lincoln’s and Booth’s performances of socially defined roles and identities and the emergent genre of black masculinity known as ‘hustling’ are intertwined with an overriding history of American national narratives, capitalism and patriarchy. I argue that this intertwining of subcultural and hegemonic performative discourses leads to an inevitable violent act, which is mourned by particular performances of this play hopefully becoming a social ritual of healing and community building. The title of Topdog/Underdog already contains a spatial and hierarchical metaphor which implies role-playing as a form of struggle for dominance. The dramatis personae lists Lincoln as ‘the topdog’ and Booth as ‘the underdog’. This characterization corresponds to the roles in the national hierarchy of President Abraham Lincoln, fresh from civil war victory, and the southern actor John Wilkes Booth. This correspondence further links the characters to their already obvious namesakes. Lincoln’s status as the older brother, and his former role as a highly successful 3-card Monty hustler, something his brother desperately wants to be, places him firmly as the dominant brother in the relationship. The multilayered metaphorical title also suggests the use of the term ‘dog’ in African-American vernacular speech, suggesting virility and status. The two words tied together by the slash represent the link between the two roles. The ‘topdog’ needs the ‘underdog’ to continually define and redefine his dominance. The ‘underdog’ needs the ‘topdog’ to complete that ever present Davidian American narrative of the underdog rising to the top against all adversity. From the opening curtain, one of the most striking visual aspects of Topdog/Underdog is the bare and impoverished space Lincoln and Booth inhabit. The brothers’ apartment is described in the stage directions as ‘a seedily furnished rooming house room. A bed, a reclining chair, a small wooden chair, some other stuff, but not much else’ (5). There is only one of everything, clearly making the point there is only room for one dominant figure. The lack of space and sufficient material possessions heightens the struggle for power. According to Una Chaudhuri, ‘instead of openness and diffused spatiality that so powerfully conveyed the searching nature of her earlier dramaturgy, this stage is not just a room, but an archetypal room, a room with a vengeance ...

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A very emblem of limits and boundaries’ (Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, 2001: 289). The claustrophobia of the space clearly leaves the brothers little room to maneuver in creatively forming their own unique identities. The stage space physically embodies a sense of claustrophobia where economic factors limit the possibilities of community sharing rather than competing. The realistic stage picture of the impoverished apartment environment becomes a dramatic symbol of the lack of means to establish themselves as patriarchs, and the struggle between the two brothers overcompensating for this lack with hyperreal performances of masculinity. Lincoln and Booth were abandoned by their parents at an early age, leaving them to fend for themselves with no links to family or any sort of community. Throughout the performance of the play they seem to live in social isolation. Even the characters which they bring up in conversation, Lincoln’s boss and his former posse, and Booth’s girlfriend Grace, seem to have no real relationship to either brother except for the imaginings of each respective character as a means of establishing dominance within this fraternal relationship. Their lack of social bonds and community symbolically embodies a process in contemporary black urban dwellings Cornel West has described as ‘black postmodernism’. According to West (1994: 5), post-modern black America has witnessed: the collapse of meaning in life – the eclipse of hope and absence of love of self and others, the breakdown of family and neighborhood bonds – that leads to the deracination and cultural denudement of urban dwellers, especially children. We have created rootless, dangling people with little link to the supportive networks ... that sustain some purpose in life. Lacking any familial or community bonds except for themselves as well as the monetary and social capital to pursue any semblance of upward mobility, both brothers have invested themselves in highly symbolic and ritualistic performances of overly-endowed masculinity. The private sphere of the brother’s relationship that the play represents involves conflicting role-playing masks in which Lincoln and Booth struggle to define the ‘other’ within a particularly gendered familial hierarchy in order to establish the ‘self’ as the patriarchal breadwinner and the controller of the space within the alternative figuration of familial roles. The play opens with Booth playing the role of a highly-successful 3-card Monty hustler. Awkwardly dealing the cards he enthusiastically but just as awkwardly exclaims the repeated patter of the game itself: Watch me close watch me close now; who-see-thuh-red-card-who-seethuh-red-card? I-see-thuh-red-card. Thuh-red-card-is-thuh-winner. Pick-thuh-red-card-you-pick-uh-winner. Pick-thuh-red-card-you-pickuh- winner. Pick-uh-black-card- you pick-uh-loser. Theres-thuh-loser,

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Suzan-Lori Parks : A Casebook yeah, theres-thuh-black-card, theres-thuh-other-loser-and-theres-thuhred-card, thuh winner. (7)

Of course, despite his awkward moves, he repeatedly wins the imaginary game. He is so engrossed in his card-playing and his fantasy he doesn’t even notice his brother entering the tiny apartment. Booth’s memory of his brother’s former life as a 3-card Monty hustler is a romanticized portrait which erases the rough edges and violence which have driven Lincoln to quit hustling. Booth’s romanticization of the ‘hustler’ image corresponds with Richard Majors description of the performance of ‘cool’ as a primary emergent cultural form of black masculinity. In his book Cool Pose, Majors describes, ‘Some African-American males have channeled their creative energies into the construction of a symbolic universe. Denied access to mainstream avenues of success, they have created their own voice. Unique patterns of speech, walk, and demeanor express the cool pose’ (Majors, 1992: 2). Majors’s book generally describes this emergent cultural genre as a form of resistance to the demeaning lack of resources African-American males generally have in order to gain a foothold in the capitalist American economy and assert themselves as patriarchs. He does recognize the limitations of such a strategy as it tends to produce an overcompensation of masculine performance as a replacement for a lack of material means. Diverse manifestations are produced, from strained relationships with female companions, overly competitive relationships with other African-American males, as well as more insidious manifestations such as rampant drug use, domestic, and street violence. The act of hustling and the icon of ‘the hustler’ dominate the ‘cool’ imagination. The term hustling represents a diverse set of practices where the hustler’s skill at deception and performance are used to trick willing customers out of certain a amount of money. 3-card Monty is an iconic form of hustling in itself. Majors attests to the symbolic importance of this genre for urban black males, ‘Hustling for the cool cat represents not only an alternative economic form, but an alternative form of masculinity’ (79). The iconic image interacts with a diverse historical iconography of the black male imagination represented by various trickster figures, blues heroes, and the stylized pimp of 1970s blaxploitation pictures. The icon of the ‘hustler’ is nearly always a lone figure, although he may have a posse of underlings. His stylized performance fetishizes capitalistic gain and the illegitimate means of this monetary gain are frequently flaunted as a source of pride and anti authoritarianism. Caught by surprise by his brother’s entrance in the middle of his personal fantasy, Booth immediately must restake his claim to masculinity. In the first rehearsal of the repetitious echo of their namesakes violent encounter, Booth pulls his gun on Lincoln still wearing his Abraham Lincoln costume and white face paint. Booth is spooked by his brother’s appearance and

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immediately demands he take his costume off. The disjuncture between Booth’s remembrance of Lincoln’s former self and Lincoln’s present humiliating appearance causes a crisis of identity in Booth. His previous pride demonstrated by his playful imitation of his brother is confronted with the present reality of Lincoln dressed as a poor imitation of a famous white man complete with white makeup. The first scene amply develops the primary themes of contestation of the space and gendered roles in the play. Both brothers lay claim to the apartment as their own. Booth’s claim is based upon his original tenancy of the apartment, taking Lincoln in after his separation with his wife Cookie. Lincoln’s claim is based upon his status as the elder and the paycheck he provides which pays the entire rent and the other expenses of the household. Attempting to assert a more dominant masculine identity, Booth derides Lincoln, ‘It’s my place. You don’t got a place. Cookie, she threw you out. And you cant seem to get another woman. Yr lucky I let you stay’ (15). He not only points out Lincoln’s lack of a home, but accuses his brother of not being able to get another woman. Lincoln responds by putting down the squalor of their dwelling, ‘You don’t got no running water in here, man ... You don’t got no toilet you don’t got no sink ... You living in the Third World, fool’ (15). Lincoln disconnects himself from any connection to the apartment, directing his insults towards his brother’s ownership of the space. His reference to the ‘Third World’ discursively affronts his brother’s claim to any semblance of the ‘American Dream’. The fact that the apartment is in America makes no difference as it becomes a part of an unknown land far away from America, at least the America of dominant narratives. Conflicts over the control of space are a manifestation of a larger veiled conflict over gender roles within the space. Booth as the ‘underdog’, the neophyte hustler attempting to become his romanticized image of Lincoln’s former self, and the brother without an income of his own, is cast in the submissive ‘feminine’ role in a patriarchal framework. He struggles against this casting, attempting to both coax his brother to become a mentor to his hustling aspirations and emasculate Lincoln’s present status as a denigrated lowly member of the establishment. If Lincoln does take on a patriarchal role of mentoring Booth in the practices of hustling, Booth can escape markings of the ‘feminine’ by laying claim to the role of ‘younger brother’ or even ‘son’ to Lincoln. Caught between a desire for the ‘fatherly’ mentor his life has lacked and a desire to become the dominant ‘man’ himself, an oedipal conflict ensues which prefigures the violent ending of the play. Booth continually attempts to gain his brother’s mentorship. While they are eating in scene 1, he asks ‘how about we play a hand after eating?’ (18). Lincoln refuses this request, ‘I don’t touch the cards, man’(19). Booth persists with, ‘How about for money’ (19). The act of bringing up money acts as a challenge to Lincoln. If he won’t take his proper ‘patriarchal’ role as a hustler/mentor to Booth, then Booth will challenge his authority.

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In scene 5, after Booth has been stood up by Grace and the two brothers have been reminiscing about their childhood complete with parental guidance, Booth exclaims: I didnt mind them leaving cause you was there. Thats why Im hooked on us working together. If we could work together it would be like old times. They split and we got that room downtown. You was done with school and I stopped going. And we had to run around doing odd jobs just to keep the lights on and the heat going and thuh child protection bitch off our backs. It was you and me against thuh world, Link. It could be like that again. (70) Booth appeals to a sense of camaraderie between him and his brother in dealing with the trauma of their abandonment. He is also referring to a period of time that he looked up to his brother in order to bring about a renewal of what Booth views as the ‘patriarchal’ Lincoln. Related to this appeal are Booth’s frequent attempts to emasculate Lincoln’s present life. In scene 2, as Lincoln tries on the suit Booth has stolen for him, Booth notes, ‘You look sharp too man. You like the real you. Most of the time you walking around all bedraggled and shit. You look good. Like you used to look back in thuh day when you had Cookie in love with you and all the women in the world eating out of yr hand’ (30). Booth relays a backward compliment drawing a clear distinction between the real Lincoln of the flashy hustling days and the faded Lincoln of the present reality. He idealizes the real Lincoln of his memory by claiming that all the women in the world surrounded this ‘other’ Lincoln. At other times Booth is more openly hostile in his attacks on Lincoln’s manhood. After Lincoln challenges Booth’s claim to have ‘an evening to remember’ with Grace, Booth accuses Lincoln ‘You a limp-dicked whiteface motherfucker whose wife dumped him cause he couldnt get it up and she told me so. Came crawling to me cause she needed a man. (Rest) I gave it to Grace good tonight. So goodnight’ (45). He makes a connection between impotence and the white face-paint Lincoln wears as a professional uniform. The impotent costume represents bowing to the establishment and is further connected to Lincoln’s wife leaving and a momentary breaching of Lincoln’s masculine authority by Booth. Booth’s claim that Cookie slept with him represents a claim to have replaced Lincoln in his former role. Booth’s final line in the previous quote clearly delineates himself, the male, as subject, and Grace, the female, as the object of sexual intercourse. Grace is clearly only an object of discourse becoming a means for Booth to acquire a masculine authority to replace his image of Lincoln’s former self. She doesn’t appear on-stage. Even when she is supposed to come to the apartment for a dinner date with Booth she never shows up. Another moment which casts severe doubt on Booth’s boastful claims about his relationship with Grace comes after he tells Lincoln about the sexual license

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of his ‘evening to remember’. He goes to bed attempting to discreetly masturbate to his personal stash of pornography. Their relationship exists merely as a cipher in which for Booth to place his desires as they are negotiated in discursive action with (and against) Lincoln. After his ‘evening to remember’, he exclaims: Grace Grace Grace, Grace. She wants me back. She wants me back so bad she wiped her hand over the past where we wasnt together just so she could say we aint never been apart. She wiped her hand over our breakup. She wiped her hand over her childhood, her teenage years, her first boyfriend, just so she could say that she been mine since the dawn of time. (38–9) This fantasy becomes totally dominated by Booth’s desires. He is able to erase the emasculating fact that she dumped him and do this by ascribing agency to her. Booth’s performance of his relationship with Grace is intertwined with three different idealistic memories which define Booth’s notion of the ‘masculine’ relationship with the ‘feminine’. The first of these memories is his former relationship with Grace. The second memory is Lincoln’s former relationships with Cookie and other women as a 3-card Monty hustler. Booth claims that, ‘Grace let me do her how I wanted. And no rubber’ (41). He later admits, ‘She said next time Ima have to use a rubber ... What kind of rubbers did you use?’ (42). Lincoln replies, ‘Magnums’ (42). Quickly Booth agrees, ‘Thats the kind I picked up. For next time. Grace was real strict about it. Magnums’ (42). This exchange is perhaps the clearest place where Booth derives his own definitions of masculinity from his romanticized image of Lincoln’s former life. He can’t even decide what kind of condoms to use without finding out which ones his brother used to use. He then states in the past tense that he had already bought the same kind, performing as if he has already become Lincoln’s former self. Booth also derives his definitions of masculinity from his memories of his parents, especially his father. When Lincoln asks him, ‘Remember how Dads clothes used to hang in the closet?’ (29). Booth responds ‘Until you took em out outside and burned em. (Rest) He had some nice stuff. What he didnt spend on booze he spent on women. What he didnt spend on the two of them he spent on clothes. He had some nice stuff. I would look at his stuff and calculate how long it would take till I was big enough to fill them. Then you went and burned it all up’ (29). His definition of masculinity is derived from boozing, womanizing and having nice clothes. His accusation towards Lincoln effectively implies that Lincoln has erased their father’s presence. He may even be implying that the moment that Lincoln burned their father’s clothes was the moment he quit hustling and took a job performing in whiteface. This action also effectively makes it more difficult for Booth to imagine himself becoming their father.

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By quitting hustling and taking a real job, Lincoln is trying to redefine his own performance of masculinity. He shifts from an African-American iconic performance as a hustler to a more ‘legitimate’ role as a breadwinner with a ‘respectable’ job. It is quite apparent that he feels degraded and uncomfortable in his new role. He lives a nearly completely solitary life only interacting with Booth and leaving the apartment for work. The rest of the time he drinks. In his conversations with Booth he seems to make up ways to show that he is still ‘cool’. In Scene 1, he tells Booth a story about a kid on the bus who wanted ‘Honest Abe’s’ autograph. He told the kid ‘he could have it for 10 bucks. [He] was gonna say 5, cause of the Lincoln connection, but something made [him] ask for 10’ (11). He goes on to tell Booth, ‘all he had was a 20. So I took the 20 and told him to meet me on the bus tomorrow and Honest Abe would give him the change’, (12) and that he ‘bought drinks at Lucky’s. A round for everybody. They got a kick out of the getup’ (12). The story seems to be a convenient excuse to boast of his status as a man who buys drinks for the guys. Although he refuses to touch the cards Lincoln still very much desires the status of his former life. He refuses to grant Booth’s wish to mentor him in the hustling lifestyle but he throws out little critiques of his brothers moves and strongly defends his former profession. In Scene 2, Booth accuses, ‘You was lucky with thuh cards’ (35). Lincoln retorts, ‘Lucky? Aint nothing lucky about cards. Cards aint luck. Cards is skill. Aint never nothing lucky about cards’ (35). He is still serious about what it takes to be a hustler and defends the legitimacy of the hustling lifestyle despite the fact that he has quit dealing. In Scene 3, he asks his brother a number of questions about his night with Grace even though he knows his brother is lying to him. He lives vicariously through Booth’s fantasy at one point exclaiming, ‘Amazing Grace ... Her face her breasts her back her ass. Graces got a great ass’ (41). He seems to legitimate Booth playing the hustler role because he needs this vicarious pleasure in order to live through his degrading life. Lincoln can’t stay out of hustling for long. In Scene 4, he tells a long monologue about the glories of his past life and the event that made him quit hustling. His friend and partner, Lonny, died during a hustle. Lincoln swore off the cards after this event, awakening to the dangers of this ‘illegitimate’ lifestyle. This monologue interweaves boasts about his skill and descriptions of the tragic event. After the boast, ‘But I was good’ (56). Lincoln ‘sees a packet of cards. He studies them like an alcoholic would study a drink. He then reaches for them, delicately picking them up and choosing 3 cards’ (56). Struggling to stay afloat in the life of respectable work, which for a black man of his social standing means constant degradement, he picks up the cards addicted to the empowering performance of hustling. His delicacy in picking up the cards communicates the fetishism of the small objects themselves as a means to empowerment. In this sequence he becomes the image of his former self once again. He doesn’t notice that Booth has woken up and witnessed Lincoln’s virtuosic performance. In the

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second act, he doesn’t go back to the ‘legitimate’ Lincoln in white face paint, but returns to the life of hustling, at first attempting to keep this fact a secret from Booth. The few moments in the play that there is a genuine sense of camaraderie among Lincoln and Booth occur when the gender roles are clearly defined. This happens when one brother implicitly agrees to take the ‘feminine’ role out of expediency. In scene 2, after Lincoln has brought home his paycheck, the brothers enter an extended performed dialogue with speech patterned on minstrel shows. Booth says, ‘Lord amighty, Pa, I smells money!’ (26). Lincoln follows, ‘Sho nuff, Ma. Poppas brung home thuh bacon’ (26). This sequence continues with Lincoln taking the masculine role of ‘Pa’ and Booth the feminine role of ‘Ma’. Booth takes on the feminine role in order to secure part of Lincoln’s paycheck. These roles are reversed when Lincoln wants Booth to help him spice up his Lincoln act. During this rehearsal, which becomes the second repetition of Booth shooting Lincoln wearing his Abraham Lincoln costume, Booth takes on both the dominant and masculine roles of theatrical director, while Lincoln is the actor on display and the victim of the shooting. Booth demands that Lincoln ‘Hold yr head or something, where I shotcha. Good. And look at me! I am the assassin! I am Booth!! Come on man this is life and death! Go all out!’ (52). The stage directions read ‘Lincoln goes all out’ (52). Both brothers are then discomforted by the reality of the play-acting. It is as if the violent ‘historical’ act has ceased to be strictly ‘historical’ and crashes into the present. Lincoln recognizes this, ‘People are funny about they Lincoln shit. Its historical. People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming. You trying to get me fired’ (52). This moment brings together the past, John Wilkes Booth’s shooting of Abraham Lincoln and the future, Booth killing Lincoln at the end of the play, into the present breaking open the shocking inevitability of the outcome of the play. Scenes of play-acting and contestations of gender roles are the primary ways that Lincoln and Booth relate to each other. A contrast develops between the public and private performances of identity. Lincoln tells Booth how his best customer waxes philosophical while he shoots Lincoln. The customer asks ‘Does thuh show stop when no ones watching or does thuh show go on?’ (32). At another time he exclaims, ‘Yr only yrself when no ones watching’ (32). When Lincoln and Booth are interacting they are always performing with (and against) the other. However, when Lincoln and Booth are alone are they truly themselves? That is, do they have an essential identity beyond the performance and contestation of gender roles and the icons of emergent subcultural genres of African-American popular culture? Are the brothers ever truly alone, that is free from the gaze of social norms? The play puts these notions into question. Lincoln and Booth each have only a few moments alone which are represented in the performance. In the production I saw at the Mark Taper

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Forum, at the beginning of Scene 2 Booth enters with two suits he has just shoplifted from an expensive department store. To the music of James Brown, an African-American subcultural icon himself, he tries on each suit almost dancing as he moves around the room. To the audience he is clearly a very different Booth. He is happier and more playful than the Booth who competes in almost every moment with Lincoln. However, he is still orientated towards a particular performance of ‘coolness’, but it is more improvised and less rigid. In other words, this performance has become naturalized into his body and behaviour. At the end of Act one, Lincoln has a similar moment when he finally touches the cards again and begins to deal a 3-card Monty hand. Again, there is little pretense in the performance but it is still orientated towards a particular image of ‘cool’ which has been naturalized into Lincoln’s body and behaviour. In Topdog/Underdog the primary linear realistic narrative is overlaid with three particular performance scenarios which are repeated and revised throughout the play. The first is the patter of the 3-card Monty game, which reinforces the ideal image of black masculinity the brothers aspire to. The second is the stories that the brothers tell about their childhood memories, which ties together their understanding of ideal familial and gender roles, and definitions of ‘home’, which interrelate with dominant American narratives. The third is Lincoln’s performance of Abraham Lincoln’s death, which serves to demonstrate the inevitability of the final act of murder and the relationship of the hustler image to the dominant American historical narratives of capitalism and patriarchy. This third performance also highlights the disconnect between the power relations possible for poor African-American men in ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ lifestyles and professions. In the final scene, these rehearsed performances are all tied together. Lincoln has begun hustling again and has been giving Booth mentorship. He has also decided to leave the apartment for a place of his own, since his income has drastically increased from his hustling profits. The fact that Lincoln is leaving further raises the stakes for Booth, who is being abandoned by another parental figure. He convinces Lincoln to put on his costume one more time for the photo album. They decide to play a final hand of 3-card Monty. Lincoln deals and Booth picks the right card, confusing Lincoln. Booth exclaims, ‘Who thuh man?! ... Who thuh man, Link?! Huh? Who thuh man, Link?!?!’ (96). Lincoln agrees, ‘You thuh man, man’ (96). Booth has won and he finally has a moment he can uncontestedly take the dominant masculine role. Yet he isn’t satisfied. He insists they play again for money. Lincoln puts up the five hundred dollars he has just made from hustling, and Booth puts up his inheritance, the money their mother gave him on the day she left. In that final contest all three performative elements, the 3-card Monty game, Lincoln in costume, and the stakes of the fetishized memorial object are on display. Lincoln wins the hand, thus taking away the physical embodiment of Booth’s familial memories. When Lincoln sees that Booth

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has never opened the nylon stocking which holds the money, he takes a knife out to open it. Booth pleads with him, ‘You won it man, you don’t gotta go opening it’ (106). To stop Lincoln from opening the stocking, Booth admits he killed Grace. Lincoln tries to give him the stocking back, but instead Booth orders him, ‘open it open it open it open it. OPEN IT!!!’ (109). As Lincoln brings the knife to the stocking, Booth takes out his gun and shoots Lincoln, still in his Abraham Lincoln costume in a replay of the historical act of murder. The question I still haven’t answered yet is how Lincoln and Booth’s particular performance of ‘cool’ masculinity relates to ‘overriding histories’? The relationship between Lincoln and Booth and the historical Lincoln and Booth is far from exactly clear, and seems open to a number of different interpretations. It could be simply a device to show a certain inevitability of the murder. It could be related to Booth as the underdog, like that of John Wilkes Booth, standing up to the authority of an overarching patriarchal figure. These interpretations are certainly valid and important to understanding the multilayered metaphorical relationship between the characters and their historical namesakes. However, I contend the power of this relationship is derived primarily from the melodramatic role of Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth in American national mythology. The murder of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth lends itself nearly perfectly as a melodrama which fascinates the American mythological imagination. The nation had just fought a war in order to keep itself intact. Lincoln had just issued the Emancipation Proclamation canonizing him as the freer of the slaves. This characterization of Lincoln erases any agency to slaves and free African-Americans in acquiring their own liberties, and obscures the continuing history of racism after the civil war. Lincoln has further been canonized as a ‘founding father’, even though he was president eighty years after the founding of the nation. The melodramatic scene of murder pits the president, a national ‘father’ figure against a southern actor, a rebellious ‘son’ attempting to usurp the father’s authority and break away from the nation itself. Lincoln becomes a martyr and Booth is analogous to the role of Pontius Pilate. Mythological accounts of this murder scene emphasize the saintly portrait of Lincoln, and a contaminating outsider portrait of Booth, obscuring both the complicated characters of these particular people, and the very real and horrible violence of the civil war and the murder scene itself. Despite negative characterizations of John Wilkes Booth, he has long been subject to national fascination. In recent years, Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins has featured John Wilkes Booth as a primary character. In both The America Play and in Topdog/Underdog, Parks demonstrates national fascination with Booth by the popularity of the Lincoln assassination carnival game with customers, who are allowed to perform the outsider role of Booth. Booth’s oedipal murder of a national ‘father’ fits in well with a number of other outsider figures which populate the mythology of American

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popular culture from gangster and action films to rap videos. Parks may be suggesting that the popularity of supposedly anti authoritarian forms of black popular culture have themselves become so popular with a mainstream American audience, that images of black hustlers, pimps and gangsters have become our contemporary melodramatic outsider images. While such cultural forms may seek an alternative to hegemonic legitimate forms of employment and capital gain, they also reproduce their own version of capitalism and patriarchy which fetishizes money and the signification of male power. The hustler may be a kind of trickster figure which subverts portions of the hegemonic capitalistic economy, yet this particular image produces and fetishizes individualism, capitalism and patriarchy in other forms leading to a breakdown of community within urban culture. These discourses are produced in relation however, to a history of oppression, and social inequalities as well as a devaluing of traditional African-American values within the larger American society. Topdog/Underdog allows for a celebration of the creativity of black male emergent cultural forms while deconstructing the patriarchal and individualistic values which inform these genres. The final moments of Topdog/Underdog are among the most emotionally powerful moments in all of Parks’s work. Realizing what he has done, Booth goes to the dead Lincoln. Clutching him in his arms he lets out a primal scream of pain as the lights fade, and the chaotic cacophony of urban street noise blares in the background. It is this tragic moment which provides any sense of hope or renewal to the play and connects it most firmly to Parks’s previous work. The play tackles the urban problem of black male violence, overlaying a linear narrative about a particular instance of this fratricidal violence with the structure of ‘Rep & Rev’, highlighting how violence is produced out of performances of highly codified black masculine identities. The aesthetic also connects this violence to larger histories of inequalities, degradement, stereotypical representations and discourses of capitalism and patriarchy. The hope is by spinning this particular type of contemporary trauma into a creative and flexible narrative, mourning might be able to take place and the cycles of violence might be disrupted.

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In 2001, Suzan-Lori Parks became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Topdog/Underdog. Frantz Fanon writes colonial historiography ‘turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it’. (See Frantz Fanon (1990) ‘On national culture’, in D. Walder (ed.) Literature in the Modern World, Oxford: OUP, p. 266. In The America Play, various repetitions of the foundling father being shot are played and replayed as he retells his story in third person autobiography form. The foundling father repeats standard tropes of the hegemonic historical narrative and yet he has agency to revise history. The play demonstrates a complicated relationship between the hegemonic American patriarchal narrative, with its

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frontier border crossings and violent individualistic melodramas, and AfricanAmerican masculinity. Sigmund Freud describes mourning as the replacement of the lost object by another object and melancholia as the inability to do this. The replacement of the lost object is usually in the form of a narrative memory which recognizes the distance between past lost and the present situation. (See Sigmund Freud (1957) Mourning and Melancholia, Standard Edition 14. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 243–58.) For detailed descriptions of the use of these terms in subsequent trauma theory, see also Dominick LaCapra (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; and Judith Butler (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. See W.E.B. Dubois (1988) ‘The soul of black folk’, Literary Theory: An Anthology, Maldon, MA: Blackwell, pp. 868–73. Dubois describes a split consciousness in African-American subjects where they perform completely separate roles depending on whether they are among whites of among other blacks. See M.M. Bakhtin (1986) ‘Speech genres’, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin theorizes that we are always already using somebody else’s words. These intertextual bits he called ‘speech genres’. People makes speech their own by using socially codified speech genres for their own individual uses. See Erving Goffman (1967) ‘On face-work’, Interaction Ritual, New York: Pantheon, pp. 5–49. Goffman develops the concept of ‘face’ to describe the ways people perform to meet an image they construct of how they want to be perceived by the outside world. See James C. Scott (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press. In a move similar to that of Dubois and Goffman, Scott describes that in oppressive societies there exists both ‘hidden’ and ‘official’ transcripts. The ‘hidden’ transcripts are offstage discourses which the oppressed use to strategize the possibilities of attaining more freedoms. The ‘official’ transcript are on-stage discourses where the oppressed perform social norms created by hegemonic forces. See J.L. Austin (2000) ‘Performative utterances’, Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language: A Concise Anthology, Petersborough: Broadview, pp. 239–52. Austin makes a distinction between ‘constative’ and ‘performative’ speech-acts. ‘Constative’ speech acts refer to or describe something. ‘Performative’ speech acts perform an action. Austin’s famous example is the saying of ‘I do’ in a wedding ceremony has an illocutionary force beyond the meaning of the actual words.

Bibliography Austin, J.L. (2000) ‘Performative utterances’. Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language: A Concise Anthology, Petersborough: Broadview, pp. 239–52. Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) ‘Speech genres’, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press. Butler, J. (1988) ‘Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory’, Theatre Journal 40(4): 519–31. Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Chaudhuri, U. ‘Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog’, Theatre Journal 54(2): 289–91. Cole, S.L. (2001) ‘Suzan-Lori Parks in rehearsal: In the Blood and Topdog/Underdog’, Playwrights in Rehearsal. New York: Routledge.

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Dubois, W.E.B. (1998) ‘The soul of black folk’, Literary Theory: An Anthology. Maldon, MA: Blackwell, pp. 868–73. Fanon, F. (1990) ‘On national culture’, in D. Walder (ed.) Literature in the Modern World, Oxford: OUP. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. (1957) Mourning and Melancholia, Standard Edition 14. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 243–58. Garrett, S-M. (2000) ‘The possession of Suzan-Lori Parks’, American Theatre 17(8): 22–6, 132–4). Goffman, E. (1967) ‘On face-work’, Interaction Ritual, New York: Pantheon, pp. 5–49. LaCapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Majors, R. (1992) Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America, New York: Lexington. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. ‘An Equation for Black People Onstage’, The America Play, pp. 19–22. Parks, Suzan-Lori. ‘Elements of Style’, The America Play, pp. 6–18. Parks, Suzan-Lori. ‘Possession’, The America Play, pp. 3–5. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2001) Topdog/Underdog. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2002) 1st black woman to win Pulitzer for a drama’, Jet 101(9): 25. Rasbury, A.R. (2002) ‘Pulitzer winner Parks talks about being a first’, Women’s enews, 15 July. Online. Available: http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/ Aid/874 Scott, J.C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press. West, C. (1994) Race Matters, New York: Vintage.

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Re-enacting: metatheatre in thuh plays of Suzan-Lori Parks Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

In his excellent book Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre, Freddie Rokem (2000) argues that the theatre allows ‘the dead heroes from the past to reappear’ in front of contemporary audiences (2000: 6). Rokem cites the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his analysis of performing history, noting that one of the first lines is, ‘What, has this thing appeared again tonight?’ (6)1 Rokem contends that this line is not only indicative of the ghost manifesting again in the world of the play, but also indicative of the nature of theatre, in which ‘this thing’ (i.e. the play, or the character, or the events, etc.) appears every night on stage, a metatheatrical reference to the fact that ‘repressed ghostly figures and events from that (‘real’) historical past can (re)appear on the stage and in theatrical performances’ (6). In other words, the stage becomes a site by which history can literally be staged. History can be re-enacted or performed again. Yet the drama of Suzan-Lori Parks offers a complication of this idea as the Lincoln of The America Play, the Hottentot Venus of Venus and the Lincoln of Topdog/Underdog are not the dead historical figures brought back to life on stage but very different kinds of metatheatrical echoes. Parks is not simply re-writing history, through her plays she re-enacts a variation on that which has been performed before. Through her technique of ‘rev & rep’, in other words, revision and repetition, we see scenes repeated on stage with variations, reminding the audience of the nature of theatre – each night’s performance is a repetition with revision. The on stage creation becomes not merely a re-enactment of history, it is also its own event enacted: I’m remembering and staging historical events which, through their happening on stage, are ripe for inclusion in the canon of history. Theater is an incubator for the creation of historical events ... (America 5) Unlike in Rokem’s analysis, theatre does not merely re-enact history for Parks, but also Parks’s theatre is the enactment of a whole new history. Theatre does not simply re-write history for Parks, it enacts it, re-enacts it, and demands continual re-enactment.

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Parks’s plays demonstrate a proclivity towards metatheatre. Both Venus and The America Play have sections from other plays performed within them, For the Love of the Venus (a fictitious play of Park’s invention, but based on a real French play) and Our American Cousin (the play Lincoln was watching when assassinated), respectively. These two and her other plays also contain further moments that go beyond mere performativity and into metatheatre – a reminder that not only is theatre life but life is theatrical. In this chapter, I propose to examine these instances of metatheatre in Parks’s plays and why they are there. The five key aspects of metatheatre that consistently occur to varying degrees in Parks’s work include the wearing of costumes and make up, rehearsing, performing, the staging of an audience, and a play within the play. Although examples will be cited from several plays, four key works will serve as the focus: Devotees in the Garden of Love, The America Play, Venus, and Topdog/Underdog. Parks’s plays often emphasize clothing as costume. While characters may wear naturalistic garb, just as often as not they wear a costume which is demonstrated as a costume. In Devotees in the Garden of Love, for example, George and Lily both wear wedding gowns, though only George is a bride-to-be. She has not even met the man she will marry. ThisOne and ThatOne fight to decide who will be her husband. She wears the wedding gown not to indicate that she is a bride; it serves as a marker of her future status. Lily is not a bride, and yet she also wears a gown. Lily educates George to receive her suitor and speak romantically to him. For both women, the wedding gown is not natural clothing but a costume that serves as a costume. In this play we first see Parks’s notion of the clothes literally making the person who is wearing them. For example, in The America Play the Foundling Father is literally defined by his costume, which is a literal costume, complete with fake beard. In an interview with Michele Pearce, Parks sees Lincoln as ‘the sum of his outfit. You know, his beard ... and his hat, coat, vest, and shoes’ (quoted in Pearce, 1993: 26). Indeed, the cover photo for the Theatre Communication Group edition of The America Play and Other Works features a photograph not of the Foundling Father (the Lincoln character), but of his hat, beard, and suit, as if Lincoln were standing in front of the flag but his face (except the trademark beard) had been erased. Lincoln is his ‘costume’, and the costume (and beard) is what makes The Foundling Father Lincoln. The beard may be even more important than the costume. In The America Play, the Foundling Father’s opening monologue contains a discussion of his use of different beards: The Lesser Known had several beards which he carried around in a box. The beards were his although he himself had not grown them on his face but since he’d secretly bought the hairs from his barber and

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arranged their beard shapes and since the procurement and upkeep of his beards took so much work he figured the beards were completely his. Were authentic as he was, so to speak. (159–60) Not only does language determine character in The America Play, the Foundling Father becomes the Lesser Known because of his costume, just as in the theatre an actor becomes Hamlet or Medea or the Hottentot Venus via the transforming properties of costume. This aspect of costume is further demonstrated in Venus, which makes no attempt to be realistic in the costume of the eponymous character. In the Yale Repertory Theatre production the artifice of the costume drew attention to itself, not only to emphasize the physical characteristics of the Venus, but also to show how the performer inside the costume is ‘normal’. The logical extension of this presentation of the Venus is that even the body becomes a kind of costume, a visual marker of who and what an individual is, which may or my not be accurate. In fact, Harry Elam and Alice Rayner argue that the artificiality of the costume is designed to highlight the reality of the performer’s body inside of it (1998: 271). The costume, by highlighting the reality also echoes the artificiality, the theatricality of bodies and dress. Metatheatrically, the play draws attention to the theatrical manner in which costume can change physicality and even identity. The Mother’s solution in the play-within-the-play is to dress the Bride-to-Be as a Hottentot: ‘We’ll get you up, make you look wild. Get you up like a Hottentot’ (122). By dressing the Bride-to-Be as a Hottentot, in the mind of the Young Man she is a Hottentot, perhaps even a more real Hottentot than the Venus. Costume construction results in physical transformation and even a newly constructed identity. In the next scene from the play-within-the-play, the stage directions read, ‘(The Uncle presents The Bride-to-Be disguised as the Hottentot Venus)’, and this disguise is enough to fool the Young Man into desiring the Brideto-Be again (132). He is warned that she will lose layers of skin. ‘Shrug all you want’, he tells her, ‘but keep thuh core’ (154). The stage direction then reads, ‘She removes her disguise and again becomes The Bride-To-Be’, and she says, ‘Dearheart, your true love stands before you’ (154). Though he loves ‘thuh core’, he needed the costume in order to commit to his ‘true love’. The Bride-to-Be, by dressing as the Venus became the Venus. The stage direction clearly indicates that when she is in disguise she is NOT The Bride-to-Be. In Venus, costume literally makes character. We might further note that the costume also continues to affect, even after it is removed, a theme that is echoed in Topdog/Underdog, as the Young Man loves the Bride-to-Be since he thinks she is the Venus Hottentot, and yet when she no longer is he still loves her. This metatheatrical construction serves as an ironic counterpoint to the main narrative, however, because

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in Venus, Venus and the Baron Docteur have an affair, she becomes pregnant and though she is his ‘True Love’, and would ‘make uh splendid wife’, he also gives her syphilis, leaves her to be a ‘2-bit sideshow freak’, and reads his notes of her dissection out loud to an audience at Tübingen (140, 144, 147–9). He cannot ever go beyond the costume, beyond the construction, beyond the unreality of appearance to ‘thuh core’. This preoccupation with costume reaches a pinnacle in Topdog/Underdog. Lincoln enters from work in his Lincoln costume and whiteface. As part of his evening ritual the audience watches him remove his costume and make up. They say the clothes make the man. All day long I wear that getup. But that don’t make me who I am. Old black coat not even real just fake old. Its got worn spots on the elbows, little raggedy places thatll break through into holes before the winter’s out. Shiny strips around the cuffs and collar. Dust from the cap guns on the left shoulder where they shoot him where they shoot me I should say but I never feel like they shooting me. The fella who had the gig before I had it wore the same coat. When I got the job they had the get up hanging there waiting for me. (27) This passage reveals many aspects of the nature of costume. Lincoln acknowledges the history of the costume, acknowledging that the clothes are not only not his, but that they have been worn by others who had the ‘Lincoln’ identity. As any theatre artist will note, especially one who has worked in repertory or university theatre, oftentimes the costume one wears has had a previous life, either worn by another actor who originated the current role, or used for another character in another show. The costume has a separate life from the performer or even the character. He notes the utter unreality of what is a physically real coat. While the coat is real, it has been artificially aged, what is commonly referred to in the theatre as ‘distressed’. He notes the transforming nature of the costume when wearing it – they don’t shoot ‘me’, but Lincoln when he is wearing it. Finally, he notes that the costume conveys an identity, not an authentic identity, yet one that is accepted by others as real. He continues: Worn suit coat, not even worn by the fool that I’m supposed to be playing but making fools out of all those folks who come crowding in for the chance to play at something great. Fake beard. Top hat. Don’t make me into no Lincoln. I was Lincoln on my own before any of that (28). While this monologue continues some ideas from earlier, the key shift is the idea that the audience believes costume, and that it has a transforming effect on them as well. Not only does the costume make him not himself but the ‘Lincoln’ who is shot, those who shoot see the costume and get to ‘play at

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something great’. Ironically, he has contempt for them being fooled by the costume and for ‘playing’, juxtaposed with the pride he displays at performing his job well. Lastly, his concern about his own identity in costume reveals a blur between Lincoln, Booth’s brother and Abraham Lincoln, the historic figure. Parks’s Lincoln was Lincoln ‘before any of that’, though chronologically Honest Abe came first, and this Lincoln will also be killed by his Booth. He rejects the costume, the history, the performance, the audience, and yet they all become real in a different way for him. Booth arrives later in the play wearing three sets of clothing, one over another. Booth and Lincoln then wear stolen suits for the rest of the scene, dressing and undressing, changing clothes and exchanging accessories, forming a metaphor for the transference of both identity and power between the two brothers. As Lincoln said, ‘the clothes make the man’, and the costume makes the character. In addition to costumes worn in the plays, characters in Parks’s works also rehearse – they practice for later performances, a rather theatrical tendency. In Devotees in the Garden of Love, George and Lily watch the battle through binoculars, but they also rely upon the ‘reportage’ of Madame Odelia Pandahr. As they watch they are ‘practicing conversation’ according to the stage directions (135). Note that they are not ‘conversing’ or ‘having a conversation;’ they are ‘practicing conversation’, i.e. rehearsing. The rehearsal continues, with Lily playing the suitor to George’s ‘Bride-who’ll-be’: LILY: Okay. Our lingo first. Tuh warm up. Suitor: ‘My sweetest flower of the morning, when your eyes open it is the dawn and when they close the sun cannot resist and sets with you. My sweetest flower, you have dropped your handkerchief’. Bride-who’ll be? GEORGE: ‘As the sun itself returns to its house after providing light unto the entire world, so may you, kind Sir return my scented cloth unto my scented hand’. LILY: Uh- More like this: ‘After providing light unto the entire world which wakes first for you then proceeds upon its course, so may you, kind Sir ... –’ and et cetera. (152) Lily expects George, even when improvising, to speak the correct lines. She corrects George, offers her direction, and leads her to a characterization. In short, Lily directs George. She also gives George a prop – a handkerchief, which has a rich stage history2 – which George can use to pursue her objectives and interact with the ‘kind Sir’. The rehearsal continues and Lily must prompt George: LILY: Uh uhnn. GEORGE: Oh. Gimmieuhhint.

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LILY: ‘My image –’ GEORGE: Oh oh oh. ‘My image – which you keep with such care in your heart, my image, fair as it may be is not nearly so fair as –’ LILY: Uh uhnn. ‘My image, Sir, is merely a –’ GEORGE: ‘My image, Sir, is merely – a reflection in that safe keeping mirror of your heart’. LILY: Good. (152) Lily continues to serve as director for George and prompts her. The lines now seem less improvised and more scripted. George is being prepared to perform a particular way when her suitor arrives from the battlefield. Although there are many unique interactions between George and Lily, they also rehearse, a fundamentally theatrical practice. Similarly, in Fucking A, Hester rehearses meeting her son, Jailbait: He sees me on the ground like this he may think I shrunk. I’ll stand. (Rest) ‘Son!’ Too eager. (Rest) ‘Son’. Not eager enough. (Rest) I look like I’m waiting for a bus. (Rest) Kneeling. This is good. Kneeling in thanks. Put the past behind us and lets be thankful for this sunny picnic day – although he’ll think Ive lost my legs. I’ll stand. (175) Hester not only plans what she will say, she is concerned about how her performance will be perceived by her ‘audience’, her son. She judges her first attempt as ‘too eager’, and her second as ‘not eager enough’, though they are simply readings of the same line, ‘Son’. Not only is the line reading key, Hester recognizes that meaning is also generated by the physical semiotics: should she stand or kneel, does she look like she’s waiting for a bus? The character is aware of her future performance and wants to control meaning and reception, thus she rehearses. Topdog/Underdog begins with a rehearsal: Booth rehearses 3-card Monte: ‘3-card-throws-thuh-cards-lightning-fast, 3-card-that’s-me-and-Ima-last’ (5). He is alone, yet clearly has created a character for himself, practices gesture and line, follows a plot and imagines an audience. The closing stage direction for this sequence notes, ‘Having won the imaginary loot and dodged the imaginary cops Booth sets up his equipment and starts practicing his scam all over again’ (6). One should note that Booth is not just practicing 3-card Monte, he is rehearsing an entire scenario. If he were just practicing

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his patter and throwing, there would be no need to pretend to run from the cops or that he won a huge pot. When Lincoln arrives, he even gives rehearsal advice: ‘You wanna hustle 3-card Monte, you gotta do it right. You gotta break it down. Practice it in smaller bits. Yr trying to do the whole thing at once thats why you keep fucking it up’ (16). Booth and Lincoln rehearse Lincoln’s act. Unlike Lincoln’s regular patrons, who use lines similar to those in The America Play, Booth cries, ‘I am the assassin! I am Booth!!’ (Parks emphasis, 50). It is a rehearsal, but one that shifts into both performance and reality. Booth asserts not only his character (‘Booth’) but himself in his lines. Booth plays ‘Booth’, Lincoln plays ‘Lincoln’, and the scene will be echoed in the reality at the end of the play. In the next scene, Lincoln, depressed, rehearses his 3-card Monte patter, also changing his name. Just as Booth becomes ‘3-Card’ when he practices, Lincoln becomes ‘Link the Man’ (56). In rehearsal, though it is not a full performance for others, we begin to take on a persona that is not real. In rehearsing, Booth and Lincoln both take on characters other than the one they are with each other. Rehearsal leads to performance, and in Parks’s plays, performance is a key aspect of the characters’ lives. In Devotees in the Garden of Love Lily tells George how messengers used to re-enact the battles in the days before television: That messengers specialty was thuh death throes. Kept us in stitches up here showing us who dropped dead and how. And they was dropping dead down there like flies drop so that messenger kept busy. (143) George, intrigued, asks if the current unit can do ‘double duty:’ ‘Keep us here abreast of thuh action and after thuh wedding serve as uh device for entertainment’ (143). Messengers, whose principle duty is to inform are instead transformed into entertainment through the performance of their message. The messenger’s job is now to recreate the real (and the horrific) for the amusement of the viewer. Parks points out the voyeuristic nature of the theatre, focusing on the spectator’s desire for entertainment at a cost to both the original subject (who was killed) and the performer (who must present the death in an entertaining fashion). Theatre is, in fact, rooted in the performance of the horrific and cruel for entertainment. In The America Play, the Foundling Father explains that he was able to get his job because of his strength as a performer of Lincoln’s speeches while in costume: When someone remarked that he played Lincoln so well that he ought to be shot it was as if the Great Mans footsteps had been suddenly revealed: instead of making speeches his act would now consist of a single chair, a rocker, in a dark box. The public was cordially invited to pay a penny, choose from a selection of provided pistols enter the

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He then performs Lincoln, as visitors perform Booth. He sits in a chair in costume. He laughs, ‘Haw Haw Haw Haw’, which is the cue for them to ‘shoot’ him (164): A MAN: (theatrically): ‘Thus to the tyrants!’ (165) The Foundling Father remarks that many choose to say this before they shoot, as Booth supposedly said it. He also notes, however, that many people say ‘The South is avenged!’, and the audience proceeds to witness the next participant yell just that (165). Parks’s stage directions indicate the performed nature of the repeated shooting of Lincoln. All ‘Booths’ must ‘Stand in position’. The stage directions then indicate, ‘(Booth shoots. Lincoln ‘slumps in his chair’. Booth jumps)’ (165). There is literally a stage direction within the stage direction dictating how the actor playing The Foundling Father playing Lincoln should perform the death. Parks presents stages within stages. In the next act, Brazil relates how Digger also taught his son the performance of mourning: “This is the Wail’, the father said, ‘There’s money in it’’ (182). Digger also teaches his son ‘the Weep’, ‘the Sob’, ‘the Moan’, and ‘the Gnash’, all of which allow the son to become a professional mourner, acting sad at funerals in order to make money. He does not feel the emotions, but rather performs them for personal gain. The more genuinely sad his mourning appears, the better paid he is. What is that, if not a summary of acting professionally? Last, the Foundling Father performs what he calls ‘the centrepiece of the evening:’ Uh Hehm. The Death of Lincoln!: The watching of the play, the laughter, the smiles of Lincoln and Mary Todd, the slipping of Booth into the presidential box unseen, the freeing of the slaves, the pulling of the trigger, the bullets piercing above the left ear, the bullets entrance into the great head, the bullets lodging behind the great right eye, the slumping of Lincoln, the leaping onto the stage of Booth, the screaming of Todd, the screaming of Todd, the screaming of Keene, the leaping onto the stage of Booth; the screaming of Todd, the screaming of Keene, the shouting of Booth ‘Thus to the tyrants!’, the death of Lincoln! (188) The Founding Father offers a summary of the staging of the assassination of Lincoln. He gives a title (‘The Death of Lincoln’) and, invoking the theory of Rokem, offers a ghostly re-enactment: a man dressed as Lincoln narrating the death of Lincoln. Venus openly acknowledges that it is a performance as well. The Man’s Brother remarks at the opening of the show, ‘I regret to inform you that the

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Venus Hottentot iz dead. There won’t be inny show tonite’ (3). This phrase is repeated several times during the performance, acknowledging that the audience has come to see ‘a show’. Yet the death of the Venus means there can be no show. The chorus asks in response, ‘What’s thuh show without thuh star?’ (5). Of course, these pronouncements are then followed by a two hour performance about the Venus. The onstage performance of the Venus is linked to the play within the play. The Negro Resurrectionist tells the audience: On one end of town, in somewhat shabby circumstances, a young woman, native of the dark continent, bares her bottoms. At the same time but in a very different place, on the other end of town in fact, we witness a very different performance. (24) Venus is then brought out on stage and the audience observes her. Her mere presence is a performance. The difference of her body (she is black, she is African, she has enormous buttocks) becomes the performance. Yet, as will be noted below, her ‘performance’ is also echoed by the idea that the audience is also performing, and the Venus is observing them. The display is put on display.3 When Lincoln brings his pay home in Topdog/Underdog, the two brothers immediately begin a performance of being a married couple: Booth: Put it in my hands, Pa! Lincoln: I want you to smells it first, Ma! Booth: Put it neath my nose then, Pa! Lincoln: Take yrself a good long whiff of them greenbacks. Booth: Oh Lordamighty Ima faint, Pa! Get me my med-sin. Lincoln quickly pots two large glasses of whisky Lincoln: Don’t die on me, Ma! Booth: I’m fading fast, Pa! Lincoln: Thinka thuh children, Ma! Thinka thuh farm! (24) At once their performance is a parody of traditional family relationships (Lincoln as breadwinner, going out and earning money, Booth as the stayat-home wife), a structuring and performance of their own relationship (in which Lincoln does go out and make money while Booth steals what he can and stays at home), and a flight of fantasy that denies their reality (a farm, rather than ‘a seedily furnished rooming house room’ (5)). Playful and subversive, this performance is also a reminder of their reality and ultimately a futile attempt to deny their own dynamics: rather than a mother and father who work together to raise the family, as the lines suggest, they are in actuality two brothers deeply in conflict for power over one another. Their escape brings them back home in the end.

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Lincoln later explains to Booth that 3-card Monte is a performance. There are five roles: ‘thuh Dealer’, ‘thuh Stickman’, ‘thuh sides’, ‘thuh Lookout’ and ‘thuh Mark’, and each has a different role to play (71). Parks also ensures to construct 3-card Monte as a performance by highlighting the differences between Lincoln and Booth’s performances of it. Lincoln is smooth, skilled and masterful, whereas Booth’s is awkward and clumsy. Both are performing the same actions, but Lincoln is the better performer. Not only are performances staged in Parks’s metatheatrical plays, but audiences are also staged, beginning in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. After Charlene and Molly’s discussion opens the play, the lights come up onstage ‘with canned applause’ (26). This artificial break further emphasizes the staged nature of their exchange as a character called ‘The Naturalist’ discusses ‘the fly’, a device that allows him to view his subjects unobserved: When in Nature Studies the fly is an apparatus which by blending in with the environment under scrutiny enables the naturalist to conceal himself and observe the object of his study – unobserved ... In our observations of the subjects, subjects which for our purposes we have named ‘MOLLY’ and ‘CHARLENE’, subjects we have chosen for study in order that we may monitor their natural behavior and after monitoring perhaps – modify. (27) This passage introduces the recurrent theme of the unobserved observer versus the observed observer. The Naturalist wants to remain unobserved, but he is being watched by the audience. The observer observed is a theme Parks will return to in Venus, below. The Naturalist’s comments also demonstrate how observation modifies the behavior of the observed – by watching we change things. Although the Naturalist indicates that one can choose to modify behavior, we might note that the play indicates that any observation modifies what is observed, whether the observed knows it is being observed or not. Eventually, one is driven to modify or act upon that which one observes. The Naturalist enters the action as Dr Lutzky, further interacting with those he observes. All of these ideas are repeated in Devotees in the Garden of Love. George states: Madame Odelia Pandahr says that because all the eyes of the world are on the heart of the bride-who’ll-be’s heart thuh bride-who’ll-be’s heart thus turns inward, is given to reflection and in that way becomes an eye itself. Seeing inward to examine her deepest thoughts and feelings and seeing outward too tuh give her form and grace that’ guide her in her most natural selection, that is her choice of suitors. (136)

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As Imperceptible Mutabilities demonstrates that the viewer effects and changes the action viewed, in this case, however, the doer responds to viewer consciously – the audience changes the action because the viewer is aware of their gaze, just as in theatre. And, just as in theatre, the performer, needing to gage the effect of the performance on the audience observes him or herself as well – the gaze is both inward and outward, the performer watching the audience to gage the effect of the performance on the audience yet also watching him or herself in order to determine how to alter the performance in order to create the desired affect on the audience. During the performances of the play-within-the-play in Venus, the script indicates the presence of an audience that varies in its composition. For the first scene, The Baron Docteur ‘is the only person in the audience’, reads the stage direction, ‘Perhaps he sits in a chair. It’s almost as if he’s watching TV. The Venus stands off to one side. She watches the Baron Docteur’ (25). Later, when the Baron grows bored of the Venus and begins to neglect her he stops watching the play within the play. The Negro Resurrectionist watches ‘half-heartedly’ (121). For the conclusion of the play-within-the-play, the Baron Docteur returns to watch the play and the Venus returns to watch him. One might argue that on a larger scale Venus is nothing but observation from the micro to the macro. The Grade-School Chum asks The Negro Resurrectionist, ‘You watch The Venus Hottentot?’, to which he replies, ‘I’m her Watchman, that’s right’ (150). One of the five choruses in the play is ‘The Chorus of the Spectators’, who watch the major events of the play. The very name also suggests that the audience (Spectators) also play a role in the drama unfolding before them. Viewing in Venus is not only complicit, it is active. The act of viewing is an action and makes the audience member part of the spectacle. ‘Watchman’ is a job – one is paid to watch something, and the act of spectating, of watching makes one a part of it. This theme will form a centre in Topdog/Underdog. Lincoln’s customer who whispers deep things to him before he shoots him: ‘Does thuh show stop when no one’s watching or does thuh show go on?’ and ‘Yr only yrself when noones watching’ (32). These are complimentary, but contradictory notions: it is not a performance if no one is watching, but it is only real if no one is watching. But the play demonstrates that the boundary between performance and reality is often blurred. The play opens with Booth pretending (rehearsing) winning at 3-card Monte and then escaping the cops, clearly an artificial performance. The fact that no one is watching does not make it any less of a performance. Sometime, the audience one most needs to convince with a performance is one’s self. In other words, even when one is alone, one is still performing for an audience. One is still under observation. Theatrically speaking, performing even if no audience is present is still a kind of performance. One is always imagining an audience. One is also performing for the director, for the other actors, or for the technicians. The specific reasons may differ (in search of praise, understanding of the role,

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attention, admiration, or discoveries about the character, to name but a few), but even in rehearsal, one performs. In instructing Booth in 3-card Monte, Lincoln explains the five different roles, and that each has their own part to play. ‘Thuh Mark’, who observes the performance of ‘Thuh Dealer’, is also active as a participant, and a victim. The ‘performance’ of the game is for the current mark and for potential future marks. ‘Dealer always sizes up the crowd’, states Lincoln (73). When Booth objects that as he is on the team and thus part of the performance and not part of the audience, Lincoln informs him that, ‘Everybody out there is part of the crowd’ (73). Those who aid the dealer are part of the ‘onstage audience’, just as the Chorus of Spectators are part of the onstage audience in Venus. The conclusion of Topdog/Underdog demonstrates the shift from performance to reality, comparing the rehearsal, the performance and the real: Booth: You gotta do to for real, man. Lincoln: I am doing it for real. And yr getting good. Booth: I dunno. It didn’t feel real, kinda felt – well it didnt feel real. Lincoln: We’re missing the essential elements, the crowds, the street, thuh traffic sounds, all that. (96) Lincoln argues that it is the context of the performance that makes it truly real, whereas Booth argues that it is the performer that ultimately controls the reality of the performance. Booth does not believe Lincoln’s performance, and the play reveals that he is right not to trust it – Lincoln is too good a performer for the performance he gives Booth. Yet Lincoln is also correct when he argues that the context also shapes the performance and its believability. One needs to be ‘in the theatre’ and have the conventions associated with the performance (in the case of 3-card Monte: a street, crowds, traffic, etc.) in order to have the performance truly believable. It is the unreality of performance and the constructed reality of the theatre that ultimately blend in the plays-within-the-plays of Suzan Lori-Parks. In the second act of The America Play the audience is shown two scenes from Our American Cousin: Act III, Scene 5 and Act III, Scene 2, presented out of order and with the Foundling Father in the second one as ‘Mrs. Mount’. Historically, Act III, Scene 2 is what was on stage when Lincoln was shot. The two scenes from Our American Cousin are very brief. The first concerns the inability of Miss Keene to find her father’s deeds and Mr Trenchard’s threat of suicide by pistol to the head. Note, ‘Miss Keene’ is the name of the actress who played the role of Mrs Trenchard, Laura Keene. There is no ‘Miss Keene’ in the original play. Thus the actress playing the character is actually playing the actress who played the character. Parks sets up a chamber of mirrors in which performers and roles echo and ghost each other. The second scene concerns the wooing of Augusta by Mr Trenchard in front of her mother, Mrs Mount. It is the last line of this scene that was

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spoken as Lincoln was shot. By including it, Parks reminds the audience of the moment in history that was also a moment in a theatre. The theatre of history was presented in a real theatre and now that history is being reenacted in another theatre. In the original production at Yale Repertory Theatre, the sequences from Our American Cousin were presented on a raised stage behind the hole with the words ‘Lincoln’ and ‘Butte’ written on the wall surrounding the raised stage. Lucy and Brazil sat next to the hole watching The Foundling Father on a television set perched on the rocking chair while The Foundling Father performed with the Cousin actors above; multimedia metatheatre, if one will. The play For the Love of the Venus in Venus has its antecedent in a real play that was on stage in France at the time Baartman was also being presented to audiences. La Vénus hottentote, ou haine aux Françaises (The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen) by Théaulon, Dartois and Brasier opened at the Theatre de Vaudeville in response to Baartman’s presence.4 As the subtitle suggests, the erotic attraction of European audiences to the ‘Black Venus’, was seen as a ‘hatred’ toward Frenchwomen and a threat to European standards of beauty. The Negro Resurrectionist links the ‘performance’ of the Venus with the play-within-the-play, connecting the relationship between the Baron Docteur and the Venus and the relationship between The Young Man and The Bride-to-Be in ironic counterpoint. The audience is not shown the entire play, merely selections. Scene 26 in Venus presents Act II, Scene 9. Scene 23 is Act II, Scene 10. During the intermission, the Bride-to-Be from the play-within-the-play reads her letters in front of the audience, followed in scene 11 by Act II, Scene 12. Scene 8 features Act III, Scene 9, and Scene 4 marks the conclusion of the playwithin-the-play. In other words, the play-within-the-play is incomplete, missing entire sections or the big picture. In comparison, the drama of the Venus is also incomplete. We are only given selected moments from her life, and not much of her life before Europe. Just as the audience is shown nothing from the first act of For the Love of the Venus, in which, presumably, the situation and characters were established, the audience is shown nothing from the first act of the Venus’s life. Parks reminds the audience of the incompleteness of all dramas in general and the story of the Venus in particular. Likewise, the absence of a first act indicates an absence of an inciting incident. Causality is less significant that the playing out of the story (and its variations) and conclusions. He audience is given a sequence from the end of Act II, including Scenes 9, 10 and 12 and from the end of Act III, including Scenes 12 and Conclusion. Parks links her play not only to the French play about the Venus but with classical drama in general. In Scene 11 (Act II, Scene 12 of For the Love of the Venus), the Bride-to-Be bemoans the fact that the Young Man no longer loves her, he loves the Venus Hottentot. Her mother offers a variety of means of suicide as a solution, citing a variety of classical plays:

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Suzan-Lori Parks : A Casebook The Mother Uh multitude of responses are available. Thuh antiquity response would be thuh Asp. Get yrself uh poison-snake. Clasp it to yr bosom. On thuh left side. Let it fill yr heart with death. Cleopatra. Very moving. Old hat now though. Thuh classical response would be tuh hang yrself. Phaedra did that. Elizabethan response would be tuh drown yrself. A la little wassername. The Bride-to-Be Ophelia. (122)

Parks could have invoked historic or mythic examples, but the three given examples together suggest dramatic antecedents: Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra and Hamlet and the variety of Phaedra stories: Euripides, Seneca, and Racine. Parks’s play-within-the-play creates an intertext with the classical dramas it references, as well as with the larger play. The Bride-to-Be is presented as a potential dramatic heroine driven to suicide by the man she loves. This construct is in direct counterpoint to the Venus who not only does not kill herself in response to the man that she loves, but also is the centre of her ‘tragedy’, whereas Cleopatra, Ophelia and Phaedra are forced to the margins by the respective centres of their lovers: Anthony, Hamlet and Hippolytus and Theseus. Also, the classical heroines are mourned by those who drove them to suicide. After her death, the Venus is not directly mourned by the Baron Docteur, although the script suggests his sadness at the loss of her, although it is not an uncomplicated loss. All of these metatheatrical constructions raise the larger questions of why Parks uses metatheatre and to what purpose. First, as noted above, Parks seeks to re-enact history and sees the theatre as an incubator for historic events. Theatre as history and the theatricality of history are reflected by the presentation of performance, rehearsals, and plays-within-plays. Second, the use of metatheatre indicates the performative nature of African-American culture and specifically in Topdog/Underdog the notion of ‘cool pose’ as performance. Parks herself writes of looking for ‘An Equation for Black People Onstage’ that is not rooted in a dynamic with white oppression. Yet African-American performativity is rooted in the black experience in the Americas and specifically in response to an oppressive society. Richard Wright contends that African-Americans historically had to engage in a kind of ‘black acting’ in order to survive within Eurodominated society (16), a process called ‘masking’ that Richard Majors and Janet Mancini-Billson explore in Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America.

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‘Cool pose’ is a performative identity adopted by African-American males: Some African-American males have channeled their creative energies into the construction of a symbolic universe. Denied access to mainstream avenues of success, they have created their own voice. Unique patterns of speech, walk, and demeanor express the cool pose. (Majors and Mancini-Billson, 1992: 2) In other words, society forces the black man to adapt a character that is both physical and emotional, that is determined and indicated by physical performance as well as a constructed identity. In short, by acting: The mask is fabricated to defend against his fear of total disintegration and his loss of self ... As with an actor who has played the same role night after night, the line may become automatic. (61) The mask becomes as real if not more real than the true self. The performer begins to live the role ‘off stage’, so to speak, because in life there ultimately is no off stage. ‘Cool pose’ is responsible for much of the metatheatre in Topdog/Underdog. Although there is no play-within-a-play, two characters must adopt a cool pose, must construct their identities, amidst all the other identities they construct: ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’, ‘Lincoln’, boyfriend to Grace, ‘3-Card’, ‘Link the Man’, and ‘Booth’. The two brothers refuse disintegration, as when they are confronted with their respective difficulties, they adopt their street personas. The tragedy of the play is the fact that the cool pose in a Topdog/Underdog dynamic indicates that one must ultimately be either subsumed to the other or see his identity disintegrated. Booth must kill Lincoln, as otherwise the performed identities they have now made real indicate that Booth (‘3-Card’) will see his new identity disintegrate and he will effectively cease to exist, denied the opportunity to be himself and living on the hyphen between African and American, between a horrible, ‘seedy’ reality and the imagined successful world of ‘3-Card’. Unlike what the customer whispers to Lincoln, you are not ‘only yrself when no one is watching’, although that is certainly bourn out by the ‘cool pose’ theory, you’re not even yrself if no one is watching. Only by performing yourself can one be real. When the performance ends, one ceases to exist. ‘Cool pose’ is also related to the need to pose as a cool cat, a tough guy, or a thug in order to obscure anger and disappointment, cope with societal pressure, counter inescapable inequality and disenfranchisement, and be defined as a man. Booth embodies these characteristics, and Parks’s play demonstrates the performance of cool pose and the danger it poses. Considering that Parks is uninterested in white oppression, one might consider the idea that Booth and Lincoln are not stuck in the performance of cool pose by societal oppression but because of their own choices in life.

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The key aspect of performance is that in order to end it, one simply stops performing. It is because they are unwilling to stop performing that Booth and Lincoln end as they do. Third, by using metatheatre, Parks is able to signify the culpability of the audience in the creation not only of theatre but of historical situations. The audience is no longer passive but active in Parks’s plays, responsible and even culpable for the actions carried out in front of them. By placing audiences onstage and evincing their influence on the events they observe, Parks comments on the role of the audience in shaping not just their theatre but also reality. By means of an example, a key issue in Venus is Venus’s own culpability in her exploitation. Jean Young (1997) argues that Parks constructs Venus as ‘an accomplice in her own exploitation’, but historically Venus ‘was a victim, not an accomplice’ (699). Young objects to the play for re-objectifying Saartjie Baartman for contemporary audiences and ‘subvert[ing] the voice of Saartjie Baartman’ (1997: 699). But, as Shawn-Marie Garrett (2000) observed, ‘Venus is the one in the spotlight, being described as subhuman, but the discomfort is felt equally by the spectators, who can’t take their eyes off her’ (2000: 132). Young is arguing about the historic Baartman, but Parks’s Venus is not Baartman, but a ghostly performance of Baartman. Baartman was a victim, but Parks is not interested in mere victimization of a black woman, nor is Venus denied a voice. Her very presence is a reminder of her existence. Parks constructs a play in which it is ultimately those who observe the Venus (including the audience in the theatre) who are responsible for the exploitation of Venus. To return to the idea of the performed identity of African-Americans, we should note Majors and Mancini-Billson’s call, similar to Parks’s in ‘An Equation for Black People on Stage’, to move beyond the simple black/white binary in which black identity/behaviour/theatre is always in direct response to historic oppression by whites: For that black mask to drop, the stage must be altered. Props, lighting, scenery, parts, scripts, and rewards must be completely reconstituted into a new production. (66) Parks’s dramaturgy does precisely that. She states in ‘an Equation for Black People Onstage’ that black drama that is obsessed with black oppression by whites is ‘bullshit’, and that ‘new dramatic conflict’ and ‘new territory’ is her goal (20). By metatheatrically engaging not just history, but the constructed and performed nature of African-American identity, by literally showing the man behind the curtain and the audience watching the show, Parks can reconstitute the theatre, the identity inside and outside of that theatre, and that history. In ‘An Equation for Black People on Stage’, Parks states that ‘there are many ways of presenting blackness on stage’, other than simply using

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whites as an Other to define the black self (19). Through metatheatre, Parks presents a multitude of blacks performing on stage, creating new identities, no longer reliant upon the presence of whites to define themselves. Each new production of a play by Suzan-Lori Parks is, in fact, Majors and Mancini-Billson’s ‘new production’. The characters are no longer victims of history or objects of the audience’s gaze. They are literally actors on the stage of history and the history of the stage who are rewriting their own dramas and thus are in control of both the show and their destinies.

Notes 1 2

3

4

The line from Hamlet is Act I, Scene 1, line 22. See Andrew Sofer (2003) The Stage Life of Props, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, for a summary of the stage history of the handkerchief as prop in Western theatre. I am in debted to Jason Bush, whose research into Parks’s plays in general and Venus in particular shaped my thinking for this essay. His master’s thesis chapter on Venus was entitled ‘Putting the Display on Display’ and dealt with this theme. The play is thoroughly documented and the script translated into English, in T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (1999) Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French, Durham: Duke University Press.

Bibliography Elam, H. and Rayner, A. (1998) ‘Body Parks: Between story and spectacle in Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks’, in J Colleran and J Spencer (eds) Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 265–82. Garrett, S-M. (2000) ‘The possession of Suzan-Lori Parks’, American Theatre 17(8): 22–6, 132–4. Majors, R. and Mancini-Billson, J. (1992) Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America, New York: Touchstone. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori (2001) The Red Letter Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2001) Topdog/Underdog. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1997) Venus. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Pearce, M. (1993) ‘Alien nation’, American Theatre 11(3): 26. Rokem, F. (2000) Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. (1999) Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham: Duke University Press. Sofer, A. (2003) The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Taylor, T. (n.d.) Our American Cousin. New York: Samuel French. Wright, R. (1964) White Man Listen! Garden City: Doubleday. Young, J. (1997) ‘The re-objectification and re-commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus’, African American Review 31(4): 699–708.

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Digging Out of the Pigeonhole: African-American representation in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks Andrea J. Goto We should endeavor to show the world and ourselves our beautiful and powerfully infinite variety. (Suzan-Lori Parks, ‘An Equation for Black People Onstage’)

Like a quiet, destructive mould, lingering racist ideas thrive in the dark shadows of our history and language, threatening our attempts to fully achieve equality. In 1776, Americans supported the idea of a democratic country, as evidenced by the institutionalization of the anti autocratic sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence; however, an emphasis on the differences between racial communities overshadowed this ideal, even as the country became socially aware and progressive. For the past 200 years, a majority of African-American critics have demonstrated again and again a preference for racial equality while still insisting upon an essential difference between the races. Rather than drawing communities together, this condition divides, a division often drawn on ambiguous lines such as language and history. In W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1897 essay, ‘The Conservation of the Races’, he warns against the theory of difference because the culture could potentially misuse this thinking against blacks by equating difference with inferiority (294), which is exactly what happened. All kinds of racist rhetoric ensued – ideas ranging from claims that blacks originated at a different time than whites,1 to those citing medical conditions that affected only African-Americans, such as ‘Dysæsthesia Æthiopica’, otherwise known as ‘rascality’ (Cartwright: 390). Though fearing this misuse of difference theory, Du Bois nonetheless reinforces it, suggesting that profound differences exist between African-Americans and Caucasian Americans, ‘spiritual, psychical differences—undoubtedly based upon the physical, but ultimately transcending them’ (292). The times have changed, but contemporary critics still echo Du Bois’s position. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks perceives America and its people as racially divided, a rather vague division based upon what she considers the unique black experience. Making this argument, hooks, like Du Bois, prevents African-Americans from shedding (metaphorically) their skin colour to express themselves in more diverse ways. Just as

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racist rhetoric restricts the possibilities for blacks, critics, such as Du Bois and hooks, can ultimately restrict the ways in which AfricanAmericans can express themselves. They do this by assuming that there is such a thing as a ‘correct’ way to express blackness. Though great strides have been made, criticism founded in difference theory falls short in that it does not allow blacks to access an identity independent from the culture’s construction of ‘blackness’. Besides, if African-Americans do look to this model to inform their identities, they find the black race predominately presented in one way – as oppressed. Suzan-Lori Parks comes to the stage when the discourse on race appears most vulnerable to change. Today, in the afterglow of a highly successful Civil Rights movement, the fight for equality has grown stale. True, many equal rights advocates continue to persevere, but there no longer exists the same sense of urgency because America has successfully dismantled legal racial apartheid. Does that mean racism no longer exists? Absolutely not. It only means that now we must look harder and longer into our language, history, and movements to extract that mold of racism harming our democratic potential. The extraction requires new tools – new ways of seeing, acting, and speaking that may seem unconventional, if not outright strange. Parks rises to the challenge. Her plays, despite all of their ambiguity and strangeness, provide a means to dislodge this mold from the nooks and crannies of our national character. Using the stage as her medium, Parks creates new ways for AfricanAmericans to express an identity that goes beyond the idea of essential blackness and oppression. This new kind of representation for AfricanAmericans challenges the oversimplified discourse on difference, which critics and audiences seem to expect and demand from African-American artists and their work. Parks often appears poised against critics who repeatedly read her African-American characters as unilaterally oppressed, to which she always responds in the same general spirit by asking, ‘Can a Black person be onstage and be other than oppressed? For the Black writer, are there Dramas other than race dramas? Does Black life consist of issues other than race issues?’ (Parks, ‘An Equation...’ 21). Defending The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1989) against such critics, the artist insists that her play is neither about the ‘black experience’ nor about ‘sorrows and frustrations and angers of people who have been wronged’ (quoted in Elam and Rayner, ‘Unfinished Business...’ 1994: 456). What, then, are her plays about? Parks’s distrust of the critical interpretation of her plays does not suggest that she rejects meaning or that her work is meaningless. In fact, precisely at the moment when the meaning of a character, event, or image becomes obscured, the playwright’s work comes to life. As Christopher Innes insightfully notes, Parks ‘challenge[s] us to rethink our categories. [She] destabilizes received views of the world, moving beyond standard feminist and antiracist positions’ (2000: 27). Reversing or revising ideas such as

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‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’, ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’, or the ever-confounding notion of an ‘American Identity’, the playwright treats them as malleable, dynamic concepts rather than as fixed ones, thus exposing the layers that compose an African-American identity and challenging her audiences to rethink racist assumptions and in its place see the human experience. Appropriating the characteristics of those in power remains one way to access authority within American society, yet this method makes racial communities very nervous because some fear that it requires them to compromise their ethnic identity. bell hooks often speaks against what she perceives as the inherent dangers of appropriation. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, she posits this theory: [B]lacks who imitate whites (adopting their values, speech, habits of being, etc.) continue to regard whiteness with suspicion, fear, and even hatred. This contradictory longing to possess the reality of the Other, even though the reality is one that wounds and negates, is expressive of the desire to understand the mystery, to know intimately through imitation, as though such knowing worn like an amulet, a mask, will ward away the evil, the terror. (166) According to hooks, blacks appropriate the language of the ‘Other’ (referring here to white Americans) as a means to ‘possess the reality of the Other’, to be more white-like (166). Demonstrating an understanding of the power of language, hooks acknowledges how language maintains the ability to construct, and sometimes deconstruct, communities. Communities form and divide by regional dialects and languages because ways of speaking greatly influence identity. [H]ooks oversimplifies language, however, dividing it into two distinct black and white parts, implying that African-Americans speak one way, and white Americans another, a position that Parks rejects outright as a stereotype. The stereotype on which hooks relies presents African-Americans as speakers of black vernacular and white Americans as speakers of Standard American English (SAE). However, as current demographics demonstrate, economics, education, and geography all challenge the notion that race alone shapes our ways of speaking. Unlike hooks, Parks’s black characters manipulate language, and the power that it evokes, as they see fit. In Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1986), Parks plays with language to challenge preconceived notions of what ‘black’ and ‘white’ languages sound like, allowing for an expansion of meaning. ‘Part 1: Snails’ begins with Molly explaining to Charlene that she is contemplating suicide because she cannot master the ‘standard’ language. Expelled from school for her inability to pronounce ‘ask’ instead of ‘axe’, Molly must now look for work (25). In the workplace, she again finds herself rejected because of the way she speaks. Retelling the incident to Charlene, Molly says, ‘Straight up. ‘Talk right or youre outta here!’ I couldnt. I walked. Nope. ‘Speak correctly

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or you’ll be dismissed!’ Yeah. Yeah. Nope. Nope. Job sends me there. Basic skills. Now Job dont want me no more’ (26). Molly finds herself dismissed because she fails to learn the apparently important lesson that that ‘ “SK” is /sk/ as in “ask”’ (25). As the voice of the subaltern, or colonized person, Molly expresses the cultural assumption that the black vernacular remains an undesirable pattern of speech in certain American communities. Parks juxtaposes the women’s black vernacular with SAE to further demonstrate her awareness of how certain patterns of speech elicit racist assumptions. The Naturalist/Dr Lutzky, a scientist turned roach exterminator, represents the stereotypical SAE speaker. Charlene describes him as an ‘exterminator professional with uh PhD. He wore white cause white was what thuh job required’ (28). Regardless of the race of the actor playing Lutzky (Parks refuses to specify in the text), his ‘wearing white’ evokes multiple meanings. Literally speaking, a scientist wears a white lab coat, but this character, metaphorically, covers himself in whiteness by appropriating the language associated with that community. Thus, Lutzky ‘performs whiteness’ even if a black man dons this role. When his linguistic performance collides with the women’s stereotypically African-American linguistic one, Lutzky becomes confused as to which are the lower life forms – the women or the cockroaches – and turns his exterminating gun on the women. Through the violent intersection of two linguistic communities, Parks illustrates how such divisions deepen people’s notions of inequality because her characters, like many Americans, make sweeping generalizations about language and its speakers. Linguistic discrimination is yet another by-product of the essentialist thinking that the playwright seeks to revise. By performing ‘whiteness’, an ‘exercise’ conventionally associated with power in racist America, Lutzky has the privilege of rejecting the way the dispossessed speak. On the other hand, as Alisa Solomon points out, the female characters are forced to ‘negotiate between two disparate but intersecting worlds’ – worlds distinguished, in part, by ways of speaking (76). To ‘negotiate’ implies an act of compromise or sharing which allows people to come to an agreement; in other words, Charlene and Molly must adapt to their environment. They must slowly, but deliberately (almost ‘imperceptibly’), change their ways of speaking in order to access power, epitomized as education and employment, in America. At this point, Parks does something new; she embraces appropriation as a means for survival – and does not apologize for it. Through her characters, Parks proves that linguistic appropriation does not require African-Americans to relinquish their ‘blackness’ because such linguistic patterns are only generally ascribed to particular races. In particular, ‘black vernacular’ is a misnomer, given that all speakers are not black. Similar to all dialects, black vernacular can represent a racially and regionally diverse community of speakers; hence, dialects fail to serve as accurate markers of racial identity. In her interview with David Savran, Parks explains that ‘[t]here’s a kind of joy with language shared by a lot of black

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people I know and a lot of Southern people I know, white and black. The joy of playing with words and the sound of words. It’s not black or white, it’s just a love of saying things ...’ (157). Parks’s characters thus exist in a transitional space, sometimes using, sometimes losing, black vernacular. Illustrating how language repeatedly fails to express or define blackness, Parks’s characters remain unchanged in spite of their varying use and disuse of black vernacular. For example, Charlene and Molly ‘sound like’ very typical Anglo-American names, but as the drama unfolds, Parks textually renames Charlene, Molly and Veronica as ‘Chona’, ‘Mona’ and ‘Verona’ – names that sound ethnic. Perhaps surprising to readers, the renamed characters remain physically the same women, just as they do when their speech patterns change. Charlene/Chona uses Standard English as a survival tool. In an attempt to prevent Lutzky from exterminating them, Charlene/Chona says, ‘I am going to make a peach cobbler. ... I’ll cut you off a big slice. Enough for your company. Youre a company man’ (35). Just as she pacifies Lutzky by offering him pie, she soothes him by addressing him in a way in which he is familiar (in his same dialect). Mona’s way of speaking, on the other hand, troubles the doctor: ‘You are confusing the doctor, Mona. Mona, the doctor is confused’ (33). Charlene/Chona’s transition to a Standard English speaker appears subtle, again, almost imperceptible, but along with the pie, it ultimately prevents the women’s extermination. Her linguistic appropriation thus becomes a clever and powerful vehicle for survival. Parks also stages a space in which two ways of speaking can exist harmoniously, and the speakers, therefore, contest assumptions about their social worth (as evidenced by their dialects). Veronica/Verona concludes ‘Part 1: Slugs’ with a speech that combines the black vernacular, when speaking of her childhood, and Standard English, when speaking of herself as an adult professional. Though this may seem to reinforce generalizations about speakers of the black vernacular and SAE, a closer look reveals that the speech actually challenges them. After her speech (the longest, uninterrupted monologue in ‘Part 1: Snails’), Veronica/Verona retells the story of a stray dog that was brought into the veterinary hospital where she works as a euthanasia specialist (36–7). She says that she classified the dog simply as ‘black dog’ before putting it down (36). Audiences can interpret the ‘black dog’ as a metaphor for how racist America views African-Americans – as strays that are too much trouble to care for and, therefore, must be put down. Further textual evidence supports this reading. For instance, in the previous section, Molly/Mona speaks to herself in the third person as if she were a dog: ‘Lie Mona lie Mona down. ... Down, Mona, bites!’ (34). But Parks also allows for a different, more meaningful reading in the scene following the one in which Veronica/Verona puts down the dog; she explains why she had to dissect the black dog: ‘I had to see I just had to see the heart of such a disagreeable domesticated thing’ (37). Not surprisingly, she discovers no essential difference between the black dog’s heart and that

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of other dogs: ‘But no. Nothing different. Everything in its place. Do you know what that means? Everything in its place. That’s all’ (37). Thus, by implication, a superficial signifier such as ‘colour’ fails to indicate an authentic distinction between individuals, just as speakers are misrepresented by assumptions made about their speech patterns. Veronica/Verona makes her presentation in two dialects, but the same woman stands unchanged before the audience. Whereas the language of these female characters may change, the fact that they are human beings never does. It would be a mistake to claim that Parks wants African-Americans to resist expressing their ‘blackness’, or that she wants this community to overlook an oppressed past. Her plays, however, do suggest that AfricanAmericans must be aware of how both positive and negative ideas of blackness can be limiting. Reductive ‘typing’ – whether by stereotyping, ‘archetyping’, or limiting the roles available to a person based upon their race – strips the individual of his or her autonomy, and no clearer demonstration of absurd and oppressive stereotypes exists than in Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1989). In this play, the lead characters’ names, Black Man With Watermelon and Black Woman With Fried Drumstick, are reminiscent of popular images of folk plantation life. Few critics would argue that such images figure as authentic representations of African-Americans at any time in American history, and yet these names evoke ‘types’ with which the culture seems entirely familiar. In her essay, Elinor Fuchs identifies Black Man With Watermelon and his wife, Black Woman With Fried Drumstick, as ‘two rural characters’, but more importantly, she considers them potential ‘stereo-archetypes, archetypal in their rural simplicity and mutual devotion’ (48). Taking possession of the stereotype, the playwright destabilizes its traditional meaning, its power. She does not, however, challenge the folk stereotype by creating folk characters that exhibit a deep, personal psyche. Parks creates her characters in the exact image of the two-dimensional stereotype to expose how it is utterly absurd and completely nonrepresentational of African-Americans. Fated to live out his life as the embodiment of a folk stereotype, Black Man With Watermelon remains trapped in the worst part of AfricanAmerican history. Parks illustrates how his stereotypical slave experience, like his stereotypical name, operates as a double oppression. Oppression renders Black Man With Watermelon unsure of what, if anything, really belongs to him: I kin tell whats mines by what gots my looks. Ssmymethod. Try it by testin it and it turns out true. Every time. Fool proofly. Look down at my foot and wonder it its mine. Foot mine? I kin ask it and foot answers back with uh ‘yes Sir’ – not like you and me say ‘yes Sir’ but uh ‘yes Sir’ peculiar tuh thuh foot. Foot mine? I kin ask it and through uh look that looks like my looks thuh foot give me back uh ‘yes Sir’. Ssmymethod. Try by thuh test tuh pass for true. Move on tuh thuh

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Taking inventory of his body parts as he would goods on a store shelf, Black Man With Watermelon illustrates the utter dislocation and alienation of his character. Unsure that his body parts are his own, the character, a bodily manifestation of a stereotype, exemplifies the oppressive power and yet absurd nature of stereotypes. Quite simply, Black Man With Watermelon cannot determine how his body bears any resemblance to a watermelon, though his name suggests such a relationship. Revealing the ridiculousness of the stereotype, he asks his wife if he is, in fact, a watermelon: ‘Was we green and stripedly when we first comed out?’ (107). Though Black Man With Watermelon does not literally resemble a watermelon, he embodies the oppression characterized by the folk stereotype. However ridiculous the stereotype, Parks nonetheless exposes how the historical burden of the stereotype that he bears limits the roles that Black Man With Watermelon has available to him. For example, because of the stereotype, he cannot find success in the corporate world traditionally comprised of white males. In Parks’s play, Black Man With Watermelon believes that white America requires that he present himself in a way that is consistent with the stereotype. For instance, in order to work, Black Man With Watermelon thinks he must look like a melon from the melon patch by donning a ‘stripey [suit coat] with thuh fancy patch pockets’ (127). Not surprisingly, his playing this part threatens to kill him because what he mimics, like the name he bears, relies upon a stereotype that originated at a time in America’s racist past: Black Woman With Fried Drumstick: ... Let me loosen your collar for you you comed home after uh hard days work. Your suit: tied. Days work was runnin from them we know aint chase-ted you. You comed back home after uh hard days work such uh hard days work that you cant breathe you. Now. Black Man With Watermelon: Dont take it off just loosen it. Dont move thuh tree branch let thuh tree branch be. Black Woman With Fried Drumstick: Your days work aint like any others day work: you bring your tree branch home. Let me loosen thuh tie let me loosen thuh neck-lace let me loosen up thuh noose that stringed him up let me leave thuh tree branch be. Let me rub your wrists. (118) Black Man With Watermelon’s tie, a metaphorical rope, hangs him. The stymied condition that Parks stages makes Black Man With Watermelon incapable of doing anything – he remains perpetually enslaved: ‘Hands behind my back. This time tied’ (118).2 In an interview with Savran, Parks argues that the ‘black police’ – those voices responsible for ‘making sure that you’re black enough’ – are at least partially to blame when

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African-Americans feel trapped by an oppressed history (157). She explains that the black police ‘mak[e] sure that your writing is black enough, who you’re dating is black enough, and what comes out of your mouth is black enough, and what you wear is black enough’ (157). As Parks suggests, the essential blackness that the ‘black police’ demand of African-Americans makes little room for personal representation – just as racial stereotypes hamper the ways in which blacks can express their identities. For example, Black Man With Watermelon’s name exhibits his inability to express himself as anything other than a metaphor for the folk experience. Referred to simply as ‘Black Man’, the character could really stand for any African-American man as though no differences exist amongst them. Parks’s figure thus remains a representation of the ‘black experience’ constructed over time, a burden that the playwright considers impossible and absurd given her insistence that ‘there is no single “Black Experience”’ (‘An Equation...’ 21). As a metaphor, Black Man With Watermelon illustrates the paradoxical trap African-Americans may encounter when constructing identity. The ‘black police’ insist upon a universal representation of African-Americans, but such representation enslaves individuals by insisting that they express themselves in only one way – in other words, as a stereotype even if it is deemed a positive one. If an African-American rejects the expectations of the ‘black police’, however, and assimilates into the culture that once oppressed him or her, this individual duly risks playing the minstrel to white America. Using Black Man With Watermelon as the proverbial ‘Every[black]man’, who cannot express himself beyond his name or the oppressive history it signifies, Parks stages the paradox with which AfricanAmericans live everyday. In addition to playing with the powerful stereotypes of folk tradition, The Death of the Last Black Man evokes the infamous African-American archetype originating from Richard Wright’s Native Son. Parks recasts Bigger Thomas, Wright’s young black character who murders a white woman, in The Death of the Last Black Man as her character And Bigger And Bigger And Bigger. By turning Bigger Thomas into an archetype of looming black potential, what Elam and Rayner refer to as ‘the prototypical, angry, savage, and dangerous black brute’, Parks exposes racist assumptions about African-Americans that trap them within restricted roles (‘Unfinished Business’ 453). Elam and Rayner rightly interpret Parks’s version of Bigger Thomas as a downtrodden victim, one who suffers when others control his representation, which proves far more insightful than a pop-culture reading which envisions Bigger as nothing more than a ‘black brute’. To say that Bigger Thomas fuels racist assumptions about violent and dangerous black men, or to say that Wright’s novel provides an unfair representation of all African-Americans would be to misinterpret the text. As Elam and Rayner suggest, Bigger serves as an example of a man taunted by the possibilities

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of America because the culture continually denies him, and black men in general, access to opportunity. Wright risks critical attack for creating a character that mirrors, at least to some degree, the black brute stereotype, yet the fear of unintentionally perpetuating racist stereotypes should not restrict a writer’s creative license. In ‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’, Wright argues against the claim that Bigger damages the black man’s image in America because he does not represent ‘blackness’ positively. According to Wright, Bigger defies racial categories, suggesting that there exists ‘literally millions of him, everywhere’ (441). In fact, Wright describes Bigger more as a condition than a man: ‘he is a product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out’ (447). Changing the face of AfricanAmerican literature, Wright depicts a character living within a restricted reality, frustrated by the fact that infinite possibilities exist just beyond his reach. He explains that literature written by African-Americans prior to Native Son fails in getting ‘down to the dark roots of life’ (443), a condition not confined to any one race. Critics note that Parks, too, shares Wright’s desire to expose the ‘dark roots of life’. Shawn-Marie Garrett explains that the playwright’s characters ‘rarely “do the right thing”,’ and they, inadvertently, perpetuate the fear that any unfavorable representations may threaten an entire racial community (132). Instead of blaming Parks for omitting romantic lead characters from her plays, her audience should understand that her interest lies in what is present, not what is absent from her work. She intends her audiences to recognize that culture constructs stereotypes as a means of supporting absurd and racist assumptions. By understanding how a reading culture misappropriates Bigger Thomas, seeing him as a racial archetype rather than as a representation of the modern condition, Parks’s audiences can best approach And Bigger And Bigger And Bigger. Parks’s ‘Bigger’, lifted straight from the pages of Native Son, demonstrates the effects of being ‘icon-ified’ as a representative African-American man, as a symbol rather than as a human being. In The Death of the Last Black Man, written some 50 years after Native Son, Parks illustrates how Bigger Thomas’s character has grown so out of control that his original purpose in the novel (as defined by Wright) has been lost or obscured at best, a distortion And Bigger And Bigger And Bigger identifies when he says, ‘I am grown too big for thuh world thats me’ (116). As an archetype, And Bigger And Bigger And Bigger fears that he has lost control over his representation, thus he begs to return to the pages of the book from which he originated: ‘I would like tuh fit back in thuh storybook from which I camed’ (116). The oppressive stereotype that he comes to bear, like most of Parks’s stereotypical character constructions, forces him to beg for his freedom, not from the pages that constructed him, but from the culture that continues to misuse him, as made evident when he cries out,

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‘WILL SOMEBODY TAKE THESE STRAPS OFF UH ME PLEASE? I WOULD LIKE TO USE MY HANDS’ (110). Parks exercises her ability to challenge the tradition which places these ‘straps’ upon African-Americans by casting her characters in unconventional roles, those traditionally possessed by white characters. Because the theatre relies upon the visual experience, Parks does not expect to prevent her audiences from ‘seeing’ race. She does, however, seem set upon challenging them to see beyond it. Black actors generally perform Parks’s plays, but this decision really remains up to the director, given that the playwright does not insist upon the race of her characters. The absence of such direction from Parks is, in itself, a political statement to directors, actors, or audiences that may assume whiteness unless otherwise informed.3 Elaborating on this insistence in an interview with Savran, Parks makes the point that her audiences do not always respond well to ambiguous, undefined characters: I guess I don’t specify [the race of the characters]. Maybe I should so that everyone will know they’re black. But in other people’s plays, they don’t say they’re white. Sam Shepard [she picks up Seven Plays] ... let’s see, he’s a damn good writer. ‘Dodge, in his sixties. Hallie, his wife, mid-sixties. Tilden, their oldest son’. The problem is that as the years go by, people will continue to assume that these people are white and assume that my people are whatever they want them to be – a lot of lightening up as time passes, or whitening out. (156) Parks admits that she has her preference as to whether black actors or white actors play certain roles, but she acknowledges that ‘everybody else doesn’t have to share that preference’ (156). Parks’s plays open the door to new territory where one cannot presume to know or predict the roles of her characters – these roles, obscured, are not simply reversals. Through this technique, the playwright encourages her audiences to move beyond preconceived notions of race and character. Just as the role of the African-American mother/wife became obscured during slavery, it becomes ambiguous in Parks’s plays. In ‘Part 3: Open House’ of Imperceptible Mutabilities, the newly emancipated Aretha Saxon bids goodbye to the family that she has served her whole life. As the family prepares for her departure North, their departing words illuminate Aretha’s humble role within the home. Patient, she remains submissive to the children, Anglor and Blanca, for whom she has cared, while they treat her disrespectfully: Anglor: Today is her last day. She’s gone slack. Blanca: Is today your last day, Aretha? Anglor: Yes. Aretha: Smile for your daddy, honey. Mr. Charles, I cant get em tuh smile.

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Blanca: Is it? Is it your last day?! Anglor: You see her belongings in the boxcar, don’t you? Blanca: Where are you going, Aretha? You’re going to get my doll! Aretha: Wish I had some teeths like yours, Miss Blanca. So straight and cleaned. So pretty and white. – Yes, Mr. Charles, I’m trying. Mr. Anglor. Smile. Smile for show. Blanca: Youre going away, aren’t you? AREN’T YOU? Anglor: You have to answer her. Blanca: You have to answer me. (41–2) Aretha’s clearly established role at the beginning of ‘Part 3: Open House’ turns hazy near the end as audiences begin to wonder who is Aretha Saxon? Who is her husband? Who are the children? The initial clarity – yet later confusion – about Aretha’s character is grounded in the assumption that Parks makes about how her audiences will perceive a character based upon his or her race. Parks encourages such assumptions about her characters, then destabilizes them as ‘Part 3: Open House’ progresses. Aretha Saxon maintains her black, female self throughout the narrative, but her name seems problematic from the start: reading Aretha’s name, the former slaveholder says, ‘Funny name for you, Mrs. Saxon’ (45). ‘Saxon’ refers to the Germanic portion of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, which denotes the white colonizers of America. Therefore, the character’s name suggests that white slaveholders have ‘colonized’ her black person, a mark that she will bear as long as she keeps the name. Parks further demonstrates the power of slave names in ‘Part 1: Snails’ when Chona instructs Verona to sign Dr Lutzky’s extermination invoice. Verona says for Mona to sign ‘X, Mona’, with ‘X’ signifying the rejection of her slave name (35). In ‘Part 3: Open House’, the slaveholder requests that Aretha sign her dead husband’s name: ‘An ‘X’ will do’, he says (45). Historically, slaveholders would sometimes rename enslaved Africans with ‘Americanized’ names. As the formerly enslaved gained freedom, some wished to reclaim their heritage by assuming African names. For example, Malcolm X altogether rejected an assigned surname, explaining, ‘For me, my ‘X’ replaced the white slavemaster name of ‘Little’ which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears’ (Haley, 203).4 Unlike Malcolm X, Aretha retains her name and, perhaps ironically, her power. Viewing Aretha’s character as one dispossessed is a perspective shared by Parks’s critics who remain always alert for representations of oppression simply because of the character’s ‘blackness’. In spite of this reading, there exists the possibility that the play celebrates Aretha’s agency. For example, ‘Saxon’ represents just as much an expression of Anglo-Saxon history as it does an expression of Aretha’s character. Perhaps by taking possession of the name, ‘wearing’ it unapologetically, Aretha has made it hers. Similar to Parks, Salman Rushdie considers this kind of appropriation as positive

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because through it one expresses a dynamic, rather than a stagnant, identity. Speaking as a native Indian about his adoption of the English language, Rushdie encourages others in postcolonial times to embrace the colonizer’s language because the native language, like the native Indian, has undergone a profound change: The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally opposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained. (17) Rather than perpetuating the idea of a colonized figure, Aretha’s name represents an identity likened to Rushdie’s ‘translated character’. This dynamic concept of identity thus allows Parks to create characters who exhibit a wider range of self-expression than simply oppressed. Aretha Saxon’s family name may also serve as a reminder that AfricanAmericans and Euro Americans share, at least, a few similar historical narratives. Traditionally referred to as ‘African-Americans’, the race suffers from compulsive ‘over-hyphenation’. For example, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison claims that within the USA ‘Africanist people struggle to make the term [‘American’] applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen’ (47). White Americans, who somehow assume that ‘American’ means white, seem to forget that they too come from a ‘hyphenated’ and colonized history as ‘Anglo-Saxons’. Viewed this way, Aretha Saxon’s character reminds audiences that both white and black Americans have roots in a past marked by violence and colonization. Aretha’s full name thus serves as an expression of an inclusive human experience, rather than an exclusive racial one. By combining ‘Aretha’ (one may think of Aretha Franklin) with ‘Saxon’, Parks prevents the character’s identity from being interpreted as either entirely black or white – an inclusion that emphasizes her membership to the human race. In his essay on Imperceptible Mutabilities, James Frieze acknowledges that Parks stages dynamic identities that transcend race, and, therefore, oppression. He writes, ‘To show how Black people carry the relationship to Whites within them, and to think beyond that relationship, Parks dramatizes Black people relating to each other and themselves, trying on Blacknesses which are defining but also mutable’ (527). Exhibiting this mutable blackness, Parks’s characters first appear conventionally oppressed, but then Parks turns that oppression on its head, transforming them into powerful figures. Pairing Aretha Saxon’s ambiguous character with another ambiguous figure, Parks further problematizes how she expects her audiences to perceive her characters in terms of race. Charles, whose name brings to mind the Anglo tradition, is both the name of Aretha’s former slaveholder and that of her

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deceased husband. Aretha asks Miss Faith, a character which embodies the historical record, ‘You wouldnt know nothing ubhout uh Charles, wouldja? Charles was my master. Charles Saxon?’ (51). Perhaps Charles Saxon and the slaveholder are one and the same. Perhaps the master raped Aretha, or maybe she willingly engaged in a relationship – or perhaps these nebulous lines also intimate that Charles Saxon was a tyrannical husband. Regardless of the audiences’ interpretations, the various possibilities of meaning obstruct any one reading, thus allowing a dynamic and multifaceted meaning. Two dream sequences occur in ‘Part 3: Open House’ in which Aretha and Charles (as the slaveholder) engage in a dialogue. In the first one, Aretha tries to secure a home, explaining to a dismissive Charles that her deceased husband is unable to sign the property documents: Aretha: We split up now. Charles: Divorce? Aretha: Divorce? Charles: The breakup of those married as sanctioned by the book. Illegal, then. Non legal? I see. Were you legally wed, Charles? Wed by the book? Didn’t – ‘jump the broom’ or some such nonsense, eh? Perhaps it was an estrangement. Estrangement then? You will follow him, I suppose. Aretha: He’s—He’s dead, mister Sir. Charles: I’ll mark ‘yes’, then. Sign here. An ‘X’ will do, Charles. (45) In this scene, Charles’s response to Aretha demonstrates implicit racism. Not only does he presume to know her answers before she gives them, but also he insists that she act agreeably, marking ‘yes’, when clearly a ‘yes’ does not convey Aretha’s circumstances. Charles’s condescending and racially bigoted reply to Aretha turns to shallow impatience as he dismisses her concerns: Charles: There is a line— Aretha: Mehbe— Charles: that—that has formed itself behind you— Aretha: Mehbe—do I gotta go—mehbe—maybe I could stay awhiles. Here. Charles: The book says you expire. No option to renew. ...................................... Charles: Move on, move on, move on! (45) Ironically, Aretha appropriates Charles’s position of power in the second dream sequence, which also brings ‘Part 3: Open House’ to a close. She reclaims her power by making an ‘Historical Amendment’ (53), which renders Charles powerless, as demonstrated when Aretha tells him to smile for the camera, to play the happy subaltern: ‘Dont care what you say you done, Charles. We’re makin us uh histrionical amendment here, K? Give

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us uh smile. Uh big smile for the book. ... Mmm goin tuh take my place aside thuh most high’ (53). Charles desperately tries to come up with a reason for Aretha to stay, but she rejects his attempts saying, ‘Dont matter none. Dont matter none at all’ (54). Rather than merely switching roles, Aretha reclaims her power in a very unconventional way – she imaginatively rewrites her reality. In The America Play (1992), Parks manipulates representations by casting her characters in paradoxical roles. Referring to Parks’s tendency to play with representations, S.E. Wilmer in ‘Restaging the Nation’ remarks that they ‘are not always able to keep up with their multispatial and multitemporal existence, and they sometimes seem lost in the polysemic confusion of presence and absence’ (444). Indeed, in The America Play, The Foundling Father finds himself trapped within a series of paradoxes, simultaneously occupying the space of presence/absence, margin/centre, and father/son – divisions deeply instilled into his, and America’s, psyche. In this way, Parks’s plays fit Jeannette R. Malkin’s description of the postmodern theater. In Memory-Theatre and Postmodern Drama, Malkin explains that post-modernist writing means ‘a release from control, a collapse of boundaries, a rejection of centre and hierarchy’ (19). Again, first acknowledging the well-established centre and its function, Parks’s The America Play then distorts it, instituting a theater in which ‘greater freedom and greater chaos seem to occur simultaneously’, a space where margin and centre merge (19). If The America Play creates a space in which hierarchies fall to pieces, then the roles once organized by that system become subject to interpretation. The Foundling Father spends his life straining to grab hold of Abraham Lincoln’s historical legacy, and in some ways, he succeeds. Liz Diamond refers to The America Play as ‘a riot’, though she adds, ‘I mean, it’s completely heartbreaking, but I think it’s unbelievably funny ...’. (quoted in Drukman, 72). Humour springs from the play’s unconventional action: a black man dresses up as Lincoln, allowing customers to play the role of Booth and shoot him with blanks. The Foundling Father explains that he shares a real physical likeness to Lincoln, a ‘virtual twinship’ (164); however, his blackness, otherwise referred to as part of ‘his natural God-given limitations’, makes the entire play look like a minstrel show in reverse (163). Elam and Rayner argue that the ‘perpetuation of the Lincoln myth has created real scars for African-Americans’ (‘Echoes’, 183). While the Lincoln myth, like any myth, remains problematic in the way such constructions tend to distort truth, The America Play focuses more on possibilities than on oppression. Conventional readings, such as the one Elam and Rayner offer, regard The Foundling Father as reflecting the dangers of appropriation in the way he attempts to be like Lincoln, ‘The Greater Man’. Through this attempt, The Foundling Father loses his sense of self, he ‘forgets who he is and just crumples’, whereas ‘The Greater Man

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continues on’ (The America Play 173). Without a legacy like Lincoln’s, The Foundling Father believes that his name will disappear with his death; his memory will not transcend his time on earth. If his goal is to be remembered, then The Foundling Father should foster at least a relationship with his son, a sure way to ensure a kind of legacy, if not a ‘famous’ one. Yet when The Foundling Father goes out West to perform his role, he leaves his wife and son behind. Playing with the role of the father in The America Play, Parks conflates the domestic, or private, with the political. For example, in choosing to name her character ‘The Foundling Father’, Parks toys with the idea that the black character acts as foundling father, whereas Lincoln represents a Founding Father. This distinction has a profound meaning, given Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), because it suggests that Lincoln functions as the surrogate father to the foundling, or orphan. Herein lies the inflammatory concept that black Americans rely upon white paternalism in order to survive in the world, yet Lincoln’s paternalism possesses another meaning that does not again view the black man on stage as oppressed. In his essay ‘The Instability of Meaning in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play’, Haike Frank interprets The Foundling Father’s reverence for Abraham Lincoln as an example of how ‘Parks challenges the preconceived notion of the African-American population as minors who depend on whites for representation’ (2002: 10). If her audiences accept Lincoln as America’s Founding Father (which implies surrogacy since this one man cannot be credited for populating the whole country), then why does Parks expect her audiences to feel uncomfortable when an African-American character sees Lincoln as a paternal or political ideal? The man has been historically memorialized as one of America’s Founding Fathers, an icon for democracy. Therefore, the Lincoln myth belongs to African-Americans at least as much as, if not more, than to white Americans. If Parks’s partiality toward universalism prevents her from distinguishing between ‘kinds’ of Americans, then The America Play celebrates The Foundling Father’s efforts to reclaim a history as much his as every American’s. Looking beyond race and viewing the nature of icons through some alternative lens, then The America Play, as Parks anticipates, ‘solve[s] for x’ (12). When a black actor comes to the stage dressed as Lincoln, one would expect audiences to find the image absurd for various reasons, but this initial reaction intrigues Parks. Whereas critics may wonder wherein the humour lies in The Foundling Father’s revision of the icon, or what stumps audiences when they hear Aretha’s last name, Saxon, they should consider the larger question, asking why cannot markers of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ co exist? Parks allows for these racial markers to thrive in the figure of Aretha Saxon and The Foundling Father. Though critics can read these characters as oppressed, another reading always becomes available.

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These ambiguous characters thrive because of their ambiguity, their double consciousnesses, allowing them to embody, reflect, and express new meanings beyond conventional ones. In Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance, Martin Favor advocates a vision similar to the kind Parks expresses in her plays. Poignantly arguing that we must widen the meaning of race, he insists that we move beyond conventional assumptions to foster ‘the largest possible space in which coalitions may be formed and diversity displayed’ (152). Taking possession of racist stereotypes and unconventional roles, Parks’s characters demonstrate how a racist culture assigns social limitations based upon a person’s skin colour. If Parks succeeds in convincing her audiences of the absurdity of such limitations, she accomplishes, at the very least, creating a theater filled with possibilities for African-Americans. Her work begins and ends with the stage, and upon it Parks accomplishes something unique: she invents an unconventional space in which races co exist harmoniously, an idealistic vision for America. In spite of this romantic vision, many audiences remain reluctant to embrace what Parks calls the ‘new territory’ which her plays explore. Expressing her unique vision for African-Americans in theatre, Parks drafts the following equation: ‘Black People + x = New Dramatic Conflict [New Territory]’ (‘An Equation...’ 20). The playwright believes that if black actors stage ‘x’, which, as she explains, represents ‘the realm of situations showing African-Americans in states other than the Oppressed by/Oppressed with ‘Whitey’ state’, then a new and important dramatic conflict will emerge (20). According to the playwright, this ‘new dramatic conflict’ will provide a kind of theater in which ‘the White when present is not the oppressor, and where the audiences are encouraged to see and understand and discuss these dramas in terms other than that same old shit’ (20). To move beyond ‘that same old shit’, about which Parks complains, the playwright first needs to reveal the unnaturalness of imposed structures and hierarchies, and then systematically break them down. Dismantling the imposed structures upon which racist assumptions thrive, she moves beyond simply pushing the theater’s boundaries, she explodes them. Excavating both the discourse on race and the space of the theater remains a difficult task even for a visionary such as Parks. Not surprisingly then, some of the author’s more recent works, such as the 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning play Topdog/Underdog (2001), or her first novel, Getting Mother’s Body (2003), mark a departure from the postmodern surrealism that infests Parks’s history plays. Perhaps the playwright has become frustrated, falling prey to the conventional demands of popular culture to provide work that appeals to a larger audience. More likely, however, Parks’s momentary divergence reflects how she works in a way that is consistent with the message of her earlier plays – as an African-American playwright, she resists being pigeonholed, either by her own expectations or the expectations of her audience. Here is the point at which the ‘plight’ of the African-American and the

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artist converge, as each struggles to resist the expectations of American culture in order to tap their potential. As the playwright herself explains: ‘I think that everybody, if they’re able to let go, just for a moment, of the person they assume themselves to be, will realize that they are anybody. On the surface, it’s tied into the African-American experience because that’s who I am. But one step back, it’s part of that big, primordial soup’ (Savran, interview, 155). Instead of separating individuals into categories and communities, Parks challenges her audiences to dive into the ‘primordial soup’ – her nourishing version of America’s ‘melting pot’.

Notes 1 2

3 4

The term for this theory is ‘polygenesis’ (Cartwright, 2000: 390). He remains incapable, that is, until near the end of the play when, it appears, he may be able to move beyond the oppression through the cathartic experience of telling [his]story and even writing it down. This assumption also occurs when directors, actors, and audiences assume that black actors will perform in plays written by African-Americans. Malcolm X explains: ‘The receipt of my ‘X’ meant that forever after in the nation of Islam, I would be known as Malcolm X. Mr Muhammed taught that we would keep this ‘X’ until God Himself returned and gave us a Holy Name from His own mouth’ (Haley, 1999: 203).

Bibliography Cartwright, S.A. (2000) ‘Diseases and peculiarities of the Negro Race’, in Robert S. Levine (ed.) Clotel; or The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of the Slave Life in the United States, by William Wells Brown, 1853. New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, pp. 390–4. Drukman, S. (1995) ‘Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond: Doo-a-diddly-dit-dit’. Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond. The Drama Review 39(3): 56–75. Du Bois, W.E.B. (2002) ‘The conservation of races’, in N. Bentley and S. Gunning (eds) The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chesnutt, 1901. New York: Bedford/ St Martins, pp. 288–98. Elam, H. and Rayner, A. (1999) ‘Echoes from the black (w)hole: An examination of The America Play’m in J.D. Mason and J.E. Gainor (eds) Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 178–92. Elam, H. and Rayner, A. (1994) ‘Unfinished business: Reconfiguring history in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World’, Theatre Journal 46: 447–61. Favor, J.M. (1999) Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance, Durham, SC: Duke University Press. Frank, H. (2002) ‘The instability of meaning in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play’, American Drama 11(2): 4–20. Frieze, J. (1998) ‘Imperceptible mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: Suzan-Lori Parks and the shared struggle to perceive’, Modern Drama 41: 523–32.

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Fuchs, E. (1994) ‘Play as landscape: Another version of Pastoral’, Theater 25(1): 44–51. Garrett, S-M. (2000) ‘The possession of Suzan-Lori Parks’, American Theatre October: 22+. Haley, A. (1999) The Autobiography of Malcolm X, New York: Ballantine. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End, 1992. Innes, C. (2000) ‘Staging black history: Re-imaging cultural’, South African Theatre Journal 13(1/2): 20–9. Malkin, J.R. (1999) Memory-Theatre and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Morrison, T. (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) The America Play. The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communications Group, pp. 157–99. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. The America Play and Other Works., pp. 99–131. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) ‘An Equation for Black People Onstage’, The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communications Group, pp. 19–22. Parks, Suzan-Lori. Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communications Group, pp. 23–71. Rushdie, Salman. (1992) ‘Imaginary homelands’, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta, pp. 9–21. Savran, D. (1999) ‘Suzan-Lori Parks’, The Playwright’s Voice: American Dramatists on Memory, Writing, and the Politics of Culture, New York: Theatre Communications Group, pp. 139–63. Solomon, A. (1999) ‘Signifying on the signifyin’: The plays of Suzan-Lori Parks’, Theater 21(3): 73–80. Wilmer, S.E. (2000) ‘Restaging the nation: The work of Suzan-Lori Parks’, Modern Drama 43: 442–52. Wright, R. (1998) ‘How ‘bigger’ was born’, Native Son. New York: Perennial Classics, pp. 431–62.

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It’s an Oberammergau Thing: An interview with Suzan-Lori Parks Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

This interview took place on 12 July 2006 in Venice, California. Parks was preparing for the world premiere of 365 Days/365 Plays as well as working on a new screenplay and the book for a Ray Charles musical. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr: Well, let’s start with your writing; specifically, the process. How do you start writing a play? Suzan-Lori Parks: I think it varies. [Pause while she thinks] KJW: I find it interesting that when I asked you about writing, you picked up a pen. SLP: [laughs] I picked up the pen because I wanted to try it out, and then I could give you an accurate answer. Because it’s different with every play – with 365, and those are the plays that are most on my mind because we are going to perform them, God willing, starting on the 13th of November and continuing for a whole year. When I wrote them, I would just wake up in the morning every day, wiggle my fingers around in the air and say, ‘God, what is the play?’ and some notion of some play would descend, and I would write it down. That’s how I wrote those. With Fucking A, I was in a canoe with a friend. We were paddling along a river or lake – this was years ago. I was in the back of the canoe and I said to her, ‘I’m going to write a play called Fucking A, and its going to be a riff on The Scarlet Letter. Ha, Ha, Ha’, and I started laughing really hard. I hadn’t actually read The Scarlet Letter, of course. It was one of those books that was assigned in high school but I hadn’t read it. I hadn’t wanted to. So we paddled around in the canoe, laughing, and we got back to land and drag the canoe up onto the shore and the idea was still with me – I had been hooked. That was the beginning of that play. So then I had to read The Scarlet Letter. Then figure out what about The Scarlet Letter had so sneakily hooked me. KJW: So what started out as a joke became a serious play. SLP: Exactly. It started as a stupid joke in a canoe ... KJW: Wonderful! SLP: Or maddening. It’s maddening. KJW: Is writing a kind of madness?

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SLP: I think so. We think writing cures the madness but it actually further exacerbates the cause. So you’re never done – you’re always chasing your tail. Or digging the hole. Or scratching. The itch that’s never fully scratched, and the scratching just makes you want to continue – scratching, right? And, as you know, Fucking A started off as Fucking A and then split into two plays: Fucking A and In the Blood ... KJW: Has that happened in your other writing? Where a play leads to another, different play? Did it happen with 365? SLP: The America Play led to Topdog but there was more than a 5-year gap between those two. FA and Blood came out as almost-twins. And with 365? My intention to write a play a day led me from one play to the next. The plays are strung together like beads with grace as the string – but they’re not plot- or story-connected. KJW: So there was no writing the play, and while you were writing, thinking, ‘Oh, there’s tomorrow’s idea’? SLP: Not really. It was such a crazy and wacky thing that I was doing all on my own. A newspaper interviewer a few weeks ago said, ‘We should do this every year; commission a writer and get them to write a play a day and then produce it all over the country’. And I said, ‘Yeah, but this project is writer initiated’. This was done all alone. I wish I could thoroughly describe the feeling of writing the 365. It’s like running a marathon without the crowd cheering you on. You know? Like the first guy who ran the marathon [in Greece]. There was no crowd cheering, ‘Go! Go!’ He was just running on his own, with a mission. But to return to your original question, every play starts differently. Topdog/Underdog was kind of the same thing, in that it was a joke: ‘I got an idea for a play: two brothers named Lincoln and Booth. Ha ha ha!’ Same maniacal laughter and my friend, Emily Morse, who is now working at New Dramatists (and has just had a baby that she and her hubby have named Lincoln) – Emily said, ‘You better go home and write that play’. And I was like, ‘Yeah, I know’. So I went home and wrote it and 3 days later I was done. It was wild. But the writing of other plays sometimes feels like working the rockpile. Hard labour, baby. You know it. But yeah – so my plays start in different ways – but often with laughter. That’s the thing. Laughter is interesting. I was reading the Bible the other day. I know that sounds like a joke, but I really was. I was reading the Bible and Sarah, you know, the wife of Abraham, is there, and God says, ‘You’re going to have a baby’. And she’s like, ‘Ha! You’ve got to be kidding!’ And God says, ‘You laughed!’ And she’s like, ‘No, I didn’t’. And he says, ‘Yes, you did’. And she says, ‘OK, I laughed’. And the laughter is a kind of handmaid to her conception. The birth comes from the laugh. OK, maybe biblical scholars would differ, but it seemed like that to me.

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KJW: Moving from beginnings, once you start writing, how do you settle on a form for the play? SLP: There’s a quote from Charles Olson, the poet – at least I think it’s him, or it may be Robert Creeley – they used to write letters back and forth. And in one of their letters, one of them said, ‘Form is nothing more than an extension of content’. So form and content are arm in arm. Sometimes my students would ask me, ‘How do I write more poetically?’ And I would ask them, ‘What does that mean – to write “poetically”?’ And then I would encourage them to listen more and think less about writing poetically. I don’t really decide on a form. Form is the shape the thing takes in order to live, you know? It’s not a decision, like ‘I’m going to buy the green car’. KJW: So it’s organic? SLP: Yeah – the play takes the shape that fits it. KJW: Do you revise or re-write a lot? SLP: Oh, sure. I’m a good re-writer. I think that’s my talent – re-writing. KJW: How do you know when you’re done? SLP: I can hear it. You know Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? He’s a drunk. He says he drinks until he hears the click. That’s the same thing – I listen for the click. Not in drinking [laughs] but in writing – I listen for the click. And I can hear the click. And then the play’s done. KJW: So there was a click after 3 days for Topdog? SLP: Uh-huh. I didn’t even have to think about that play. It came to me like – zoom! Playwriting like that can totally ruin you because it’s like being struck by lightning. And you have to be strong to be able to take the next step and after you write a play in that way you can’t go tripping on yourself if you ever want to write again. Not when you write a play like that, but when you write a play in that way – when it just comes to you like lightning. There’s no struggle, no effort. I’ve never been struck by lightning, but writing Topdog – was like being struck by lightning. I mean it was very much like – I tell people that it was like silver liquid was being poured from a silver gravy boat, poured down through the air and into the back of my head. I swear if I turned around I would have seen silver liquid being poured into the back of my head. In fact, it wasn’t like that – that’s what it was. KJW: Is the process any different when you’re writing for film? SLP: Yes and no. There’s the writing, the re-writing, the listening to the voices, the organic thing – all that – it’s the same even with film, because I find that I can write the story only if it really comes from my guts. Lots of people think screenwriting is like paint-by-numbers writing, and some might write that way. But I think most screenwriters would agree that, even with a set structure, there should be a passionate from-the-guts writing brought into that structure. And I have to write from the guts.

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KJW: Given the way Hollywood devalues writers, does that make a difference for you? I mean there is a respect for the writer in the theatre – the playwright is sacrosanct and, in theory, we aim to put what the writer intended on the stage. There are numerous discussions in rehearsal about what the playwright meant. In Hollywood, it’s, ‘Here’s your cheque, now get the hell out and we’ll do what we want with it’. SLP: It’s a shame. It’s a shame. It’s like devaluing a person. It’s like having a factory and not valuing the folks on the assembly line. What it is, is short-sighted and stupid. And it’s not true for everybody in the business. There are producers who value writers. There are directors, especially if they write themselves, who value the writer they’re working with [laughs]. Actors – I went to the set of Their Eyes Were Watching God and it was incredible. The actors were so appreciative. The costume designers, the lighting designers, everybody who was part of that project was valued. Even though all I did was an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s book, and I felt so privileged to have a chance to work on the project and adapt the novel, they all said, ‘If you hadn’t come on board, we wouldn’t be here today’. So there are Hollywood folks who value writers. But too often, there are the industry people who don’t see the connection between what the writer does and the final product. Just like there are people who don’t respect their parents, or don’t respect the earth. We all come from the earth, and, in a movie, the writer is the person who first creates the thing we all play with. There are people who disrespect the writer’s creative process – but, like, whatever to them, right? KJW: You’re a couple of decades into your writing career, but you’ve said there is no such thing as a Suzan-Lori Parks play. SLP: Yep. KJW: It makes me think again of Hollywood, where an actor friend of mine says he knew he had made it when he saw his name as a ‘type’ – ‘we’re looking for a so-and-so type actor for this role’. One can become a type out here, regardless of what you do. SLP: In the late 80s, when we were doing Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, a lot of people loved it. And some people didn’t know what the hell we were doing. They said, ‘What?’ And then we won the Obie for it. That was really great. Then I wrote Last Black Man and so many people said, ‘Why didn’t you just write a sequel to Third Kingdom?’ Because they’d caught up to what I was doing by then and so they expected me to repeat myself. But I had written Last Black Man. I was already doing something else. And not because I wanted to do something else, but because I had to be true to the Spirit. The Spirit says ‘Write the next thing’. And I write it. If it means I’ve got to go into uncharted waters to write it, well, there I go. But people were like, ‘Do the Suzan-Lori Parks thing’, which in 1988 to them was Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom.

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That’s was what they thought was my thing. But, actually, my thing is to listen. And there are plenty of people who get to tripping on one swell and just ride the same wave forever. Maybe that one swell is their thing. Not me. I listen to the Spirit. The Spirit speaks through a channel and the channel has to be kept relatively clean. I say relatively because we all have our gunky habits. Like, I like cake – I eat too much cake, and I am sure cake gunks the channel. So if you stop doing your thing, and start doing only what the world dictates – then the channel becomes gunked up and it becomes more and more difficult to hear what you should be doing. KJW: So it’s not just a refusal to conform to expectation ... SLP: It’s not a refusal, it’s an awareness. An awareness that there is a greater knowledge and a higher power. That there is a higher source that is much smarter than me. The me that was born in 1963 and grew up in Germany – you know what I’m saying – there is a source that is much more knowledgeable than I am. There is a Self that is a lot bigger than my self. I’m very aware of the source that makes my plays and I want to stay in tune with that source and so I keep listening. It’s an active, not a passive listening. So I keep listening and I write Last Black Man. I keep listening and I write The America Play. And just like Black Man isn’t Third Kingdom, America Play is not Black Man. America Play isn’t 12 figures with strange names all telling this jazz poetic story about a man who died and doesn’t know where he’s going to go now that he’s dead. America Play is not Black Man. It’s something else. It’s this Lincoln thing. Why Lincoln? I don’t know why exactly. But I am staying true to the voices. KJW: Do you listen to music while you write? SLP: I used to. KJW: Not so much anymore? SLP: I find it distracting. Because, these days I actually listen to the music. My husband, Paul Oscher, is a musician and music is a big thing in our lives. It’s hard to write and actively listen because I get distracted. These days music totally pulls my head. KJW: So is writing actually an act of listening for you? SLP: Oh yeah. It is for me. It’s not thinking. It’s not imparting a message. It’s not having something to say to the people. For me, it’s just listening. I tell people I don’t have things to tell, but I have things to show. People say, ‘What does your play mean? What should I think about? What are you trying to tell me?’ Watch the play. Tell me what you think. KJW: One of my teachers used to say, ‘Plays don’t mean – they generate meaning’. SLP: That’s a great line. That’s true. That’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s the role of the audience. When you go to see a play you shouldn’t just sit there like you’re being fed tapioca pudding with your mouth open.

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You’re actively divining meaning. You’re there in the theatre with a divining rod, going, ‘Where’s the water at? Where’s the meaning? What is the meaning?’ That’s your job as the audience member. But to get back to your question about what is a Suzan-Lori Parks play. Fast-forward to after The America Play. These days, there are so many people who don’t know my early work when they meet me they say, ‘Oh, you’re just a Broadway playwright’. And I just crack up laughing. And then there are people in the downtown art scene, you know, New York City below 14th Street, folks I love and adore, because that’s where I came up artistically, but so many down-towners hated that Topdog was on Broadway. So many of them were like, ‘You betrayed us and your roots because you did a play on Broadway. You’re not “Suzan-Lori Parks” anymore’. It’s big-time funny to me. Who is Suzan-Lori Parks? Look at this [points to tattoo]. It’s Sanskrit. Written on my arm forever. A gentle translation would be ‘Follow God, the inner guide’. It’s from the Yoga Sutras. It’s Sutra 1:2.3, which is very important to me. It says ‘Follow God’. Not ‘Follow the fans’. Not ‘Follow the audience’. Not ‘Follow the market – make sure you make money’. It says: ‘Follow God, the inner guide’. KJW: The Sutra number makes me think of the importance of numbers in your plays. 365 being the most obvious example, but you play a lot with the meanings of numbers. SLP: [laughs] I don’t know about numerology. I don’t know anything about it. I read my horoscope in the newspaper, but my knowledge of numerology is limited. My choice of numbers has something to do with rhythm. But, yeah, the numbers themselves – in The America Play, Brazil keeps saying, ‘I was only five. I was only five’. And in Last Black Man there’s ‘6 by 6 by 6’. And there are the five fingers of fate in In the Blood. Although that’s also just because there are five fingers on my hand – meaning: The meanings here go way deep but they’re not ‘intellectual’ and they’re not pre-thought out. With 365 – it just rhymed: 365 Days/365 Plays. That was why I thought a play a day would be so fun: the title rhymed. That kind of stuff is like the heartbeat. It’s there and it’s strong but most of us don’t have to think about it much. KJW: There’s such a sense a sense of the interconnectedness of things in your plays ... SLP: Wow. That’s a play in 365. The Interconnectedness of All Things. KJW: Synchronicity, eh? [laughs]. That’s one of the things that strikes me about your work. You talk about ‘rev & rep’, but I would add a third: ‘ref’. It’s not just revision and repetition, but also reference. SLP: Oohh, that’s good! ‘Rev and rep and ref’. KJW: Reference to outside elements runs through all your plays, whether it’s Booth and Lincoln, whether it’s the Scarlet Letter, or even your

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own work, there is this constant stream of outside reference that always gets drawn back in. Rev, rep and ref. SLP: Yeah. It’s weird. I mean, what’s smart about Topdog, for me, is that it does keep pointing toward to The America Play. KJW: But The America Play already points toward so many other things, and in some ways points forward toward Topdog. SLP: Sure, but the first Lincoln character doesn’t know that he was pointing forward toward this other play in the future. Although, the Foundling Father is following in someone’s footsteps – so we could assume that he’s thinking of someone who is ahead of him. Hmmm ... But, hey, that’s a LONG conversation. We would have to re-invent the wheel of time to figure that one out. [laughs]. KJW: Well, speaking as someone who has been in the audience for both, I was retrospectively sitting in the audience of Topdog thinking I was in a funhouse, wondering which is the real thing and which is the mirror. SLP: [laughs] Right. Don’t ask me, I don’t know. KJW: But what is the experience for you then, when you see these things on their feet? What do you feel when you’re looking at your own creation? Are there moments of discovery? Does someone else take your work and show you things about it, and it’s a sort of accidental genius? SLP: Moments of ‘genius’ are all blessings, but I wouldn’t say my moments of genius are accidental, in the sense of the one who stumbles on a nugget of gold and doesn’t know it. Mostly I write something that’s good, I know it. It’s like on a train or a subway. I always stand at the place in the car where you can see all the other cars. And I love that moment when you round a corner and all the cars line up and you can see all up and down the whole train. I love that. I could just stand there and do that for hours. And that’s how you know when it’s good – it all lines up and you can see it straight down the middle. And the parts of my plays that people think are really good, I usually know beforehand. It’s not a surprise. That doesn’t make it any less cool when people dig it, it’s just not a surprise. Cause I felt it while I was writing – that lining up with the Bigger Thing. It’s not, ‘Me me me – I did this’. It’s more like, ‘I got in line with that Bigger Thing’. It’s like an eclipse or a sunset. Like that moment at sunset where there’s that flash of green light or a full moon when you go, ‘Whoa – look at that!’ KJW: So you’re writing, looking for a particular conjunction or alignment. SLP: Right, right. Like the hole in Lincoln’s head and the (w)hole of history, and they line up and all of a sudden, through that (w)hole hole comes the play.

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KJW: There’s something very Zen about that, very satori. That lightning flash that briefly illuminates the landscape and makes everything clear. SLP: Right. And you can capture it and write it down so that it can offer illumination to the people who do the play, or see the play, or read the play. That’s what I’ve found with a play like Topdog that has been read by so many people. The lighting comes, the writer writes it down, and then the people are able to re-experience that illumination. I just met two people – I was in Denver for meetings on 365 – and two different people at two different theatres doing Topdog in Colorado. One at Shadow Theatre in Denver and the other was at Steel City Theatre in Pueblo, Colorado. Or the groups of college students I met in India did staged readings of Topdog. Far out. It’s cool knowing you made something that years later is still giving off light. It’s wild how theatre works, because it’s a living thing. Unlike a film, which is up on the screen and, while it provides pleasure and entertainment for those who watch it – it’s not a living thing. A film is pretty much a done deal by the time a mass audience sees it. With a play, you’re hanging a script out there, saying ‘enter into this, step into these shoes, feel the fire’, and, through their living-witness energy, lots of people get to participate in a very direct and immediate way and they get to create something new and specific to their own experience. You’re hanging a naked live electric cord out there and saying, ‘Hey, hang on to this’. KJW: What is America? You wrote The America Play. Many people see you as one of this generation’s great American playwrights. So what is ‘America?’ SLP: America is different now from what it was when I wrote The America Play (around 1994). Does the definition of America change depending on the political dynamics – who’s in the White House? Who is in the big (White) House? [laughs] It changes. KJW: Can you give a snapshot of right now, before the premiere of 365, what is the America that that play is being born into? SLP: I get to go to all these communities where people know my work from long before Topdog/Underdog. And I get to say to them, ‘You’re invited to the party’. These are theatre people – and granted, it’s tricky – some are conservative, but most of them aren’t. We’re not in it for the money. So our politics may be more progressive than someone who owns a chicken slaughterhouse in Arkansas. I’m not down on America. America is a place where so many things can happen. I think often we get steered in the wrong direction. There are an overwhelming number of people in this country committed to doing the right thing, even though we’re going in the wrong direction. And it is a country of diversity, and that is our strength. And it is a country where, thank God, because of the sacrifices a lot of people have made, there has been some positive change. I’m still amazed at that. I grew up in the 1960s. We’ve still got a long way to go, but we have,

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as a country, come a long way. We are more accepting of our diversity than some other countries. Remember that World Cup of Football shit, where some Europeans shouted monkey chants at guys of African descent? Sometimes we are more accepting of Others. We’re not the most accepting, but we are working at it. I think we’re making progress. We do a lot of shitty and stupid things also, but I am not one of those America-haters. Hate is the easy road. Too many of my people shed real, live blood so that I can be sitting here talking with you. And I will never forget that. I think a lot of people take for granted the progress this country has made. But I will never forget that. I know my parents worked hard so that I could live in a house a block from the beach in California. The meter maid, a black woman whose name is Sharon, we hang out and chat. She says, ‘Girl, there ain’t none of us on but you on that street’. She wants me to know that there aren’t a lot of ‘us’ living on my street. So what is America? America is working toward progress. And we can do so much more good. And the dream is so beautiful – that’s why the heartache is so great. Most of my characters are consumed by heartache. But that’s because the dream is beautiful, not because America sucks. KJW: Because there is a promise and a hope. And there is a recognition that it doesn’t have to be this way, but we’re not there yet and that causes the heart to break. SLP: Right. Right. Or we’re so far from it. My characters often feel that, no matter what they do they can’t seem to make any progress. Lincoln in The America Play is following in the footsteps of a man who lived in the past. He’s walking forward in the footsteps of someone who is behind him. What does that mean to him? He gets terribly confused and angry and lost. KJW: Isn’t that a wonderful metaphor for life in America anyway – we’re all confused and angry about the past. And the idea is, can you transcend it? SLP: Sure. Yeah. We try. We all try. KJW: You said you don’t write for audiences and you don’t write for yourself. I believe the word you used was ‘figures’ – you write for the characters themselves. SLP: Now I write for God. Let’s just cut to the chase. Now I write for God. That’s all. Not God in the, ‘Oh you go to church and it’s the God that your priest with his limited ability to talk about God is allowed to talk about God because he is hampered by the Vatican and stuff’. KJW: You grew up Catholic. SLP: Yeah, I grew up Catholic. KJW: I feel your pain. SLP: [laughs] So you understand what I’m talking about. Not in that kind of God, but the God without limitations. The Source. The ‘That

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That is All That’. KJW: ‘I am that I am’. SLP: Yeah – that one. I write for That One. It’s like being a lightning rod – you’re struck and then you pass the voltage along to the people. KJW: Let me switch gears. Your plays are full of violence: emotional, physical, verbal, deadly. People get shot. Marlin Perkins has a gun. SLP: Horrible. Horrible. [Laughs] KJW: Why all the violence? SLP: I don’t know. I always liked Greek tragedy. So that’s part of it. KJW: Does it relate to what you were saying earlier about having hopes and dreams, but the everyday reality gets in the way. Like Lincoln, for example, he’s following ... SLP: Do you mean the Foundling Father as Lincoln or Abraham Lincoln? We have to distinguish. KJW: I actually meant Booth’s brother [in Topdog]. SLP: Oh – that I don’t know. I was talking about the Foundling Father. KJW: Even with the Foundling Father, if you take a job as Abraham Lincoln, there is a bullet at the end of your career. Or at least there is a bullet at the end of the job. And in his case, there is a bullet every 5 minutes. Although, now I’m going to move away from my own question, one of the things I found most beautiful about that play in an intellectual sense, is that its all about the inaccuracy of history. We’re not even sure about Booth’s words – Sic semper tyrannus, or ‘The South is Avenged’. SLP: Right, right. KJW: That history itself is rev, rep and ref. SLP: Well, it’s just like us sitting here going over the details of my chronology. Apparently I’ve been born in five different years and places and I went to Yale and a lot of this isn’t true. What you read about me is not always true and sometimes different every time. KJW: You’ve become one of your own characters. SLP: But I think I was all along. KJW: That’s deep. That’s deep. SLP: [laughs] But, you know, right? I must have been. KJW: Bonnie Metzgar calls In the Blood a ‘now play’. But you’re known for history plays. So ‘now’ means ‘history’? SLP: Well, I’m known for history plays, but actually, the plays were never ‘history plays’. Like Faulkner says ‘History is IS’. So my plays often feature historical figures. But they’re all ‘now’ plays. Especially the ones after Venus – Venus was like passing a test. I always felt that Venus was my black belt. These days I practice yoga, but before that I practiced karate for about 7 years. Word is, after the black belt, everything changes. It’s like you start all over again. I always felt when I was writing Venus that I was getting my black belt in playwriting, and after the black belt you start all over again. I knew the

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characters would be different after Venus and after Venus came In the Blood, and Fucking A and Topdog and 365. But, to me, the plays have never been history plays. They’re all about the intersection of the historical and the now. Even In the Blood is about that intersection because it is not based on The Scarlet Letter but The Scarlet Letter is one of its parents, let’s say. KJW: Is writing plays a joy, or is it a form of suffering? SLP: It is a joy. I mean, it’s difficult. Hard work is mandatory, suffering is optional. I’m more like the Buddhist kind of writer – suffering is an option. Hard work is not an option, but I think you choose to suffer. There’s a lot of joy in writing. And when you get to meet the people who do the plays – everyone from the movie star people like Don Cheedle and Mos Def and Jeffrey Wright to the people at the Steel City Theatre in Pueblo, who are like the Mod Squad, they are so cool, Dorothy, Corey and Kennedy are their names – and there are hundreds, thousands like them all across the country and when I get to meet them, I feel very lucky. KJW: Your first novel came out a couple of years ago. SLP: Loved writing it. KJW: Is there another one coming? SLP: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m writing one right now. I started out as a short story writer. KJW: Mr Baldwin’s class and influence. SLP: Yeah, that’s where I began. KJW: How is it different that writing plays? SLP: It’s not, really. KJW: It’s the same thing? SLP: Not the same – because when you write a play, your writing constructs a doorway, and through that door will enter the audience, the actors, the director, the people who will create your play onstage. Writing a novel, you still write a doorway. But it’s a different kind of doorway – because they don’t need to bring a novel to life and walk in it and inhabit as they would a play. But the writing process is similar whether a novel, a play, a song, a screenplay, because it’s all still writing. It’s all still this [picks up pen and mimes writing]. Same thing. I write more on a computer now. KJW: Do you ever write long hand? SLP: I wrote 365 long hand. KJW: Really? SLP: Yep. It was while I was teaching at CalArts. I quit CalArts a few years ago. KJW: You’ve taught at several places now. How does writing shape your teaching and teaching shape your writing? SLP: My writing doesn’t change. I keep the two activities pretty separate. I didn’t go to grad school myself, so my teaching methods are totally

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informed by my own writing process: ‘Here, hold this live wire. Here, hold this live wire. Here, hold this live wire. Go straight to the nerve. Go straight to the guts’. Not much theory and lots of practice. I love writing. I enjoy my students quite a bit. But it’s also something I can only do in short bursts – teaching. After a while I gotta get back to full-time writing. My students are all great, though – I love you all. KJW: You’ve talked before about voyeurism and certainly a lot of your writings have people watching other people. In Devotees in the Garden of Love the women watch the battle. People watch the Hottentot Venus. Girl 6 certainly concerns voyeurism. I actually want to flip the question and ask you the opposite – about performing. It seems to me that your characters are very self-aware of their own performances in their circumstances. And they perform for each other. Is there an interest in human performance? As a species, can we not stop performing? SLP: That’s an interesting question. As you were asking it, I was looking around and watching these other people. As my husband Paul says, ‘we’re more of ourselves when we’re being watched because, as a species, we don’t live alone’. An essential part of human being is performance. So there’s a play about a brother who pretends he’s someone else in the daytime and he has the same name of the person he is pretending to be, and when he gets home he has to pretend to be someone else to hide his underhanded motives from his brother. All that makes for hall of mirrors, or a wave pattern. The characters perform and they’re aware that they are being watched. They are each other’s audience and their awareness of audience somehow makes them aware of us. The hall of mirrors is also a wave pattern. And in every wave pattern there is a spot where it goes quiet – where the mirrors go blind. But I don’t intentionally write it in. It just happens because I’m writing a play in which the characters are trying to be – or, at least, figure out who they are. Gee, the weird way I write plays. KJW: Weird but successful. It seems to be working for you. What was the impetus behind 365 Days/365 Plays? SLP: It started as a far out joke. I was hanging out at home with Paul, my husband, and I said, ‘I’m going to write a play a day for a year and call it 365 Days/365 Plays. Ha ha ha’. And I started laughing, right? And he says, ‘That’d be cool’. And he’s a blues musician, so he doesn’t think theatre is cool. Because he really is cool, right? So he got me to thinking maybe it would be cool, maybe it would be fun. And I started. Now, looking back, I realize I was making a sort of daily offering, a daily devotional gift to the art form that has given me so much. And now it’s huge. It’s a love train. Shortly after I finished writing the plays I showed them around and a couple of theatres wanted to produce them, but in a very conventional way. But 365 is so different, I wanted them produced differently. At the core of the

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plays is something I’ve started calling ‘radical inclusion’. To write a play a day for a whole year, you have to dismiss the bouncer who works the door of your creative mind. All ideas are welcome. All ideas are worthy for play-making. Somehow I wanted the production of the play cycle to dovetail with this ‘radical inclusion’. But I didn’t know how. So one day I’m hanging out with Bonnie Metzger, who I’ve known since 1989, and we’re sitting around thinking about how a production of 365 can be different and fun. And we’re like, ‘Maybe lots of theatres could do it – like 365 theatres!’ And that was crazy. It was like saying, ‘And then we’re going to go to the moon!’ It was just that nutty – 365 theatres doing the plays. And we were driving around Denver in her car. She’s the Associate Artistic Director of Curious Theatre Company and she also teaches at Brown University. And we’re just riffing, driving around and talking wild and the more we talked the more we thought it would be cool to get 52 theatres in seven cities to do the plays simultaneously. Now we’ve got over 14 cities. And it’s growing every day. With ‘The 365 National Festival’, all interested theatres and parties are welcome to join in and share in the world premiere. Big theatres, midsize theatres, small theatres, children’s theatres, university theatres, high-schools, senior centres, dinner theatres, seasonal theatres. Museum groups who are interested in performance, you name it, we’ve pretty much welcomed it on board – international theatre groups too. It’s a love train. It’s definitely a love train. We go out and we meet people. At first they can’t believe that a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright is sitting down at the table saying, ‘Hey, want to do some of my plays?’ And I’m only charging a licensing fee of a dollar a day. It’s experimental theatre. So many groups around the country are participating. TCG is doing the book and they will list every theatre involved in the premiere. KJW: Speaking of the Pulitzer. You’re in that rare club – only 11 women have won the Pulitzer for drama. SLP: Really? Only 11? KJW: Only 11 since the award was established. SLP: When was the award established? KJW: I believe 1918. It’s mind blowing when you think about it, especially in 2006. SLP: But they don’t give it every year. KJW: Well theoretically, they do give it every year, it’s just some years the committee decides that there is no play worthy of the award. SLP: Do they ever not award the prize in other categories? It’s kind of funny, don’t you think? KJW: True. But hasn’t theatre always been the bastard at the family reunion? We have to get invited to the party but not everyone’s happy about it. SLP: True. [laughs]

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KJW: And there is this notion in our culture that writing for performance is ‘cute’. Books and print and text are literature, but writing for performance isn’t really writing. SLP: People say plays aren’t really complete until they are performed. But plays are complete – they just exist in another realm, and we, because we are human beings in a material world, must perform them to make them real for us. Plays written on paper are alive, they’re just not alive for humans because we are in our bodies. Topdog felt alive before anyone else read it, before anyone performed it. Venus felt the same way. Switching gears for a minute to talk about Venus – I lecture and I tour and sometimes people have questions about Venus. They’ve seen a production and they have concerns. They always ask me to clarify my take on her situation. One: saying Venus had a hand in her fate is not the same thing as saying it’s all her fault. It’s very important that people understand that. If you want to see what hand she had in her fate, according to my play, look at the play. Don’t listen to your friend talk about the play – they may have seen a production, but if you want to get a clearer sense of what I said, you could also read the play. At the beginning of the play the Brothers ask Venus if she wants to go away. She’s not aware of the subtleties of what they are asking, or of the trap that exists for her. But she is, like most poor people, willing to exchange her labour in order to get out of a poverty-stricken situation. It is important that people understand that. It’s a difficult play, because I don’t say, ‘Blame it all on the white guy’. We each have a hand in our fate – even if it is just a small hand. And admitting that is part of the process of liberation. Neither is Venus about dumping all the blame on the black girl – and if that’s how you read it, you may have missed some of the deeper points. But hey, I also get lots of fan mail from folks who have read/performed/seen Venus and say it’s their favourite play ever. The play is about love, so I guess it hits people hard. KJW: As you yourself have said, its so difficult to talk about race in America because we want to make it so black and white, pardon the pun. SLP: The main thing folks misunderstand in Venus is not so much the ‘race’ issue, but the ‘blame’ or the ‘responsibility’ issue. But, yeah, talking about race requires, if you will, a discriminating mind (not racial but time and spatial) and we aren’t encouraged to think clearly and deeply in this country. KJW: Venus is your most written about play. SLP: It’s a love play, and it’s difficult. Later in the play, after Venus has spent time in England, the Doctor asks her ‘Do you want to go to France’ and she says ‘yes’. Why? Because the Doctor’s hands are clean. He has clean hands. She wants to go with the man who has clean hands and who is nice, instead of staying with the Mother

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Showman who beats her and steals from her and invites men to rape her. Showing that she has this much agency is not blaming the victim. Neither does it let the victimizer off the hook. But if your hip to this you can be transfixed by her story, wounded, and then healed. Her dream of a better life, is so beautiful and she just misses realizing it. She misses realizing her dream to be someone of means who could send money home and maybe go home and live as a wealthy woman. And there are so many people who love that play. So many people who’ve performed in the play and have told me that it’s made such a positive change in their lives. KJW: In the past, you’ve disavowed the label, ‘African American Playwright’. SLP: Not exactly. But that label is like saying, I write ‘Suzan-Lori Parks plays’. I am an African-American woman and I am a playwright. But our culture too often uses labels as limiting – to denote what is expected of you and what rooms you are allowed to enter. If you’re an African-American and a woman and a playwright, with those labels, too often the thinking stops because the assumptions leap in and folks think they can go on autopilot about you or your work. You SHOULD do this sort of thing; the subjects and topics your work addresses are confined to a particular list. When the label goes on, the thinking mind turns off – so I suggest we turn off or explode the label. When people feel they need to use a label, I’ve sought to hip them to a more accurate, wider-ranging definition. KJW: Your plays really do show ethnic identity in flux. Hester and her multiethnic children. Lincoln played by an African-American man in whiteface. There’s this whole deconstructing the notion of ethnicity in your work which is wonderful. SLP: Black characters, like all characters, ask the fundamental questions of ‘who am I and what am I doing here?’ Those are the questions that the characters in any good play ask. Hamlet is asking them. Lear is asking them. Oedipus is REALLY asking them. KJW: Well, to bring us full circle, that’s what happens in ‘the theatre industry’. My friend Javon Johnson jokes he’s going to legally change his name to ‘African-American Playwright Javon Johnson’, because he never sees his name without that in front of it when a theatre does one of his plays. SLP: [Laughs] Right, right. KJW: You’ll never see ‘the play by Euro-American playwright Arthur Miller’ or ‘the new play by Jewish-American playwright David Mamet’. SLP: Well exactly. Say it again – ‘Jewish-American playwright David Mamet’. Doesn’t it sound like we’re asking him to crawl into a tiny box for us so we don’t have to think about him as a great writer, and I think Mamet is fantabulous. To label him simply in terms of his race

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or ethnicity is to ask him to crawl into a little box. So I say, recognize the whole person and you don’t depend on the label. If you’re awake and you’re hip to the work, you don’t depend on the label. It’s like me saying I had lunch with Kevin, ‘my white friend’. Maybe there are some situations where you have to say that, but I don’t know – sometimes we use labels so we don’t have to think. KJW: But in contemporary America, isn’t race the elephant in the room. It’s either the only thing we talk about or it’s this huge thing that we try to pretend isn’t there. SLP: For some people. But not for everyone. It’s the thing that a lot of people THINK black people should be thinking about. And, not only should we be thinking about it but we should be thinking about it along certain predefined lines. We are encouraged to talk/write about race in ways that may be successful in the marketplace, but not so helpful to the people. And how many interviews with David Mamet discuss the subject of race? Hey, we’re not gonna figure this out today. What we can do is to continue to embrace the work. That’s where the transformation happens. And we can explode the labels. For example: if I call 365 Days/365 Plays a ‘black’ play, my labelling it that way explodes the limited notion of that a ‘black play’ can be. And from here on out, a ‘black play’ can be seen as one that invites everybody to the table. And with this definition, we can more clearly appreciate the works of, say, August Wilson. The Work will make the Change. It’s cool how plays can re-make history. But, my plays are not the History Channel. Like with Venus, and with Topdog. So many people say, ‘Why’d you have the brothers kill each other?’ Topdog is not the 11 o’clock news. It’s a play. It’s a play. And at the end of the play, the actors take their bows. At the end of the 11 o’clock news, the shotdead brother does not get up and take a bow. He’s dead. But woven into the play is an opportunity for two actors to come together, to work together and create a pageant. I did some of my growing up in Germany. There is this town, Oberammergau. Once every 10 years the whole town gets together and puts on a religious pageant. My plays are very much like that – the community gets together and creates this pageant. It’s not just a vomiting up of history or a regurgitation of the 11 o’clock news. So the idea of pageant-making is intrinsic to it. For example, In the Blood. My favourite part of In the Blood is where I get to listen to the actors run around backstage because they have to make quick costume changes. I was thinking while I was writing the play, ‘This is going to be good – Chilli is going to have to change into Jabber! Ha ha! Watch this!’ The pageant is going on. The playing of the play, the inner workings of the pageant, is often very much in my mind as I write. Not so much, ‘how will a director stage this?’ but more – ‘This is a text with a doorway in it, and through that door will come actors, directors, designers, scholars, audience members’.

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KJW: So is that the closest we are going to come to the definition of ‘a Suzan-Lori Parks play’? A new pageant? SLP: For now. And I may change up. But for now, sure, you can say my work is a new kind of community pageant. It’s that Oberammergau thing. Yeah, that works. And the violence sometimes in my work, sure, like in every good religious pageant there’s blood. And passion. And a miracle, maybe. But mostly there is an invitation for the community to come together and put on a show. Sure, it’s very much an Oberammergau thing.

10 Selected Reading

PRIMARY SOURCES

Plays Parks, Suzan-Lori. The America Play. American Theatre 11(3): 25–39; The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1995; New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1995; A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, Annemarie Bean (ed.) 1999, New York: Routledge, pp. 307–48. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) ‘Betting on the dust commander’, The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) ‘The death of the last black man in the whole entire world’, The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) ‘Devotees in the garden of love’, The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2001) Fucking A. The Red Letter Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1994) ‘Imperceptible mutabilities in the Third Kingdom’, in R. Wetzsteon (ed.) The Best of Off-Broadway: Eight Obie Award-Winning Plays, New York: Mentor, 1994; The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communications Group; Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2000) In the Blood. American Theatre 17(3): 31–50; New York: Dramatists Play Service; The Red Letter Plays (2001), New York: Theatre Communications Group; in Sylvan Barnet, William Burton, Lesley Ferris and Gerald Rabkin (eds) Types of Drama, 8th edn., New York: Longman, pp. 1,442–70; in Carl H. Klaus, Miriam Gilbert, and Bradford S. Field, Jr. (eds) Stages of Drama: Classical to Contemporary Theatre, 5th edn. (2003), New York: Bedford/St Martin’s Press; in Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Robert Alexander (eds) The Fire This Time: African-American Plays for the 21st Century (2004), New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1995) ‘Pickling’, The America Play and Other Works, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1992) ‘Snails’, in Howard Stein and Glenn Young (eds) The Best American Short Plays, 1991–1992, New York: Applause. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2001) Topdog/Underdog. New York: Theatre Communications Group; in Lee A. Jacobus (ed.) The Bedford Anthology to Drama, 5th edn. (2005)

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Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s Press, pp. 1,736–63; in W.B. Worthen (ed.) The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 5th edn. (2007) Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, pp. 1,273–98. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1996) ‘Venus’, Callaloo 19(2): 301–8; Theatre Forum 9 (1996): 40–72; New York: Theatre Communications Group (1997); New York: Dramatists Play Service (1998).

Novel Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2003) Getting Mother’s Body, New York: Random House.

Essays Mee, Charles, Suzan-Lori Parks and Jessica Hagedorn (2000) ‘The Play’s the Thing’, PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers 1(1): 130–42. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2000) ‘An equation for black people onstage’, PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers 1(1): 143–6. Parks, Suzan-Lori (2005) ‘The light in August: An Interview’, American Theatre 22(9): 22–25, 74–5. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (2005) ‘New black math’, Theatre Journal 57(4): 576–83. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1996) ‘Playing with indeterminacy: Thalia Field’, Theater 26(3): 9–10. Parks, Suzan-Lori. (1999) ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Theater 29(2): 26–33. Parks, Suzan-Lori, Maria Irene Fornes, Wendy MacLeod, Emily Mann, Wendy Wasserstein, Susan Yankowitz and Mary Zimmerman (1998) ‘Sources of information’, American Theatre 15(7): 32–3; 81–2.

Interviews Drukman, Steven. (1995) ‘Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond: Doo-a-Diddly-DitDit: An Interview’, TDR 39(3): 56–75. Jiggetts, Shelby. (1996) ‘Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks’, Callaloo 19(2): 309–17. Metzgar, Bonnie. (1999) ‘Alien baby: an interview’, Public Access November: 50–8. Pearce, Michele. (1994) ‘Alien nation: an interview with the playwright’, American Theatre March. Savran, David. (1999) ‘Suzan-Lori Parks’, in The Playwright’s Voice. New York: Theatre Communications Group, pp. 139–63. Smith, Wendy. (2003) ‘Suzan-Lori Parks: Words as crossroads’, Publishers Weekly, 250(19): 37–8. Sova, Kathy. (2000) ‘A better mirror: An interview with the playwright’, American Theatre 17(3): 32. ‘Suzan-Lori Parks (2003) ‘Author spotlight: An interview’, Ebony September.

SECONDARY SOURCES Baker-White, Robert. (2000) ‘Questioning the ground of American Identity: George Pierce Baker’s The Pilgrim Spirit and Suzan Lori-Parks’s The America Play’, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 12(2): 71–89.

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Bean, Annemarie, ed. (1999) A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements. New York: Routledge. Includes an essay by Eugene Nesmith (‘Four Bad Sisters’) that contextualizes Parks’s work alongside Adrienne Kennedy, Anna Deavere Smith and Robbie McCauley as ‘rare and defiant’ playwrights; Steven Drukman’s ‘Doo-A-Diddly-Dit-Dit:An Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond’, as well as the full text of The America Play. Bernard, Louise. (1997) ‘The musicality of language: Redefining history in SuzanLori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World’, African American Review 31(4): 687–98. Bly, Mark. (1996) The Production Notebooks: Theatre in Process, New York: Theatre Communication Group. Traces the development of In the Blood at the Public Theatre, among others. Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. (2002) ‘Reconfiguring history: Migration, memory, and (re) membering in Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays’, in Robert L. McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige (eds) Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, pp. 183–97. Bullock, Kurt. (2001) ‘Famous/last words: The disruptive rhetoric of historiconarrative ‘finality’ in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The American Play’, American Drama 10(2): 69–87. Castagno, Paul C. (2001) New Playwriting Strategies: A Language Based Approach to Playwriting, New York: Routledge. Parks, Mac Wellman, Eric Overmeyer, and other ‘language playwrights’ serve as models for new dramaturgy. Cole, Susan Letzler. (2001) Playwrights in Rehearsal: The Seduction of Company, New York: Routledge. Among other playwrights, Parks’s work in rehearsals for the first productions of In the Blood and Topdog/Underdog at the Public Theatre in New York is chronicled and analysed. Craig, Carolyn Casey. (2004) Women Pulitzer Playwrights, Jefferson: McFarland and Company. A survey of the 11 women who have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. ‘Putting Dirt and Deadly Games Onstage’ closes the volume, discussing Topdog/Underdog in the context of Parks’s other work and the legacy of black women playwrights. Diamond, Liz. (1993) ‘Perceptible mutability in the World Kingdom’, Theater 24(3): 86–7. Dixon, Kimberly D. (1999) ‘An I am Sheba me am (she be doo be wah waaah doo wah) o(au)rality, textuality and performativity: African-American literature’s vernacular theory and the work of Suzan-Lori Parks’, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 11(1): 49–66. Dixon, Kimberly D. (2001) ‘Uh tiny land mass just outside of my vocabulary: Expressions of creative nomadism and contemporary African-American playwrights’, in Harry J. Elam Jr. and David Krasner (eds) African-American Performance and Theater History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 212–34. Elam, Jr., Harry J. and Rayner, Alice. (1998) ‘Body parts: Between story and spectacle in Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks’, in Jeanne Colleran and Jenny Spencer (eds) Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 265–82. Elam, Jr., Harry J. and Rayner, Alice. (1999) ‘Echoes from the black (w)hole: An examination of The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks’, in Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (eds) Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 178–92.

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Elam, Jr., Harry J. and Rayner, Alice. (1994) ‘Unfinished business: Reconfiguring history in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World’, Theatre Journal 46(4): 447–61. Frank, Haike. (2002) ‘The instability of meaning in Suzan-Lori Park’s The America Play’, American Drama 11(2): 4–20. Frieze, James. (1998) ‘Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: Suzan-Lori Parks and the shared struggle to perceive’, Modern Drama 41(4): 523–32. Garrett, Shawn-Marie. (2000) ‘The possession of Suzan-Lori Parks’, American Theatre 17(8): 22–6, 132–4. Geis, Deborah R. (2004) ‘Hawthorne’s Hester as a red-lettered black woman? Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood and Fucking A’, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 16(2): 77–87. Greene, Alexis. (2006) Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of the Susan Blackburn Smith. Austin: University of Texas Press. Johung, Jennifer. (2006) ‘Figuring the ‘spells’ / spelling the figures: Suzan-Lori Parks’s ‘Scene of Love(?)’, Theatre Journal 58(1): 39–52. Louis, Yvette. (2001) ‘Body language: The black female body and the word in Suzan Lori-Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World’, in Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson (eds) Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 141–64. Lyman, Elizabeth Dyrud. (2002) ‘The page refigured: The verbal and visual language of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus’, Performance Research 7(1): 90–100. Malkin, Jeanette R. (1999) Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. The plays of Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, Sam Shepard, Thomas Bernhard and Parks (Imperceptible Mutabilities, Death of the Last Black Man ... and The America Play) are considered as dramas which create memory on stage. Marneweck, Aja. (2004) ‘Staging stereotype and performing the exotic erotic: An interrogation of desire in the texts of Parks and Kennedy’, South African Theatre Journal 18: 50–64. Miller, Greg. (2002) ‘The bottom of desire in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus’, Modern Drama 45(1): 125–37. Rayner, Alice. (2006) Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomenon of Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Parks’s plays cited as an example

of theatre as memorial practice, along with Shakespeare, Beckett and selected films. Roach, Joseph. (2001) ‘The great whole of history: Liturgical silence in Beckett, Osofisan, and Parks’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 100(1): 307–17. Rodríguez-Gago, Antonia. (2002) ‘Re-creating her story: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus’, in Barbara Ozieblo and Miriam López-Rodríguez (eds) Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and the Personal in American Drama, Brussels: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes (P.I.E.)-Peter Lang, pp. 257–72. Ryan, Katy. (1999) ‘“No Less Human”: Making history in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 13(2): 81–94. Schmidt, Kerstin. (2005) The Theatre of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama, New York: Rodopi. Work by Jean-Claude van Itallie, Megan Terry, Rochelle Owens and Suzan-Lori Parks (Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third

Selected Reading

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Kingdom and The America Play) come under scrutiny in Schmidt’s exploration of the relationship between post-modernism and contemporary drama. Solomon, Alisa. (1990) ‘“Signifying on the signifyin”: The plays of Suzan-Lori Parks’, Theater 21(3): 73–80. Wilmer, S.E. (2000) ‘Restaging the nation: The work of Suzan-Lori Parks’, Modern Drama 43(3): 442–52. Wood, Jacqueline. (2001) ‘Sambo subjects: Declining the stereotype’, in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World’, Studies in the Humanities 28(1/2): 109–20. Worthen, W.B. (1999) ‘Citing history: Textuality and performativity in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks’, Essays in Theatre/Etudes Théâtrales 18(1): 3–22. Wright, Laura. (2002) ‘“Macerations” French for “Lunch”’: Reading the vampire in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 17(1): 69–86. Young, Jean. (1997) ‘The re-objectification and re-commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus’, African-American Review 31(4): 699–708.

Index

Note: 1. In this Index all references are to Suzan-Lori Parks and her works unless otherwise indicated. 2. Entries in Bold are to main references. Aeschylus 30 African Religions and Philosophy see Mbiti Africans 3 African-Americans 1, 2, 4, 11, 16, 50, 73-4, 104, 106-24 dialects 25 dramas 19 history 4, 14, 15, 21, 29-30, 74 males 103-4 playwrights 18, 19, 28,121, 138 Agambee, Giorgio Remnants of Auschwitz 37 Albee, Edward 61 America and Americans 1, 9, 11, 18, 49, 76, 131-2 America Play see under plays America Play and Other Works see under essays Angels in America see Kushner Aristotle 3, 9 Arnott, Peter Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre 31 Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance see Favor Baraka, Amiri The Motion of History 19 Barry, Sebastian The Steward of Christendom 23 Beckett, Samuel 4, 9, 61 Waiting for Godot 10 Beauvoir, Simone de 49

beliefs and values 29-30, 38, 48-9, 73-4, 76 approach to writing 124-40 self-assessment 8 Spirit and religion 125, 127-8, 129, 132-3 Benjamin, W. 10 Berman, Sabina 23 Black Looks: Race and Representation see DuBois Boyarin, J. 7 Brecht, Bertolt 9, 48, 57 Broadway 19, 129 Brooklyn Arts Council 1 Bullock, Kurt 27 Butler, Judith 49 Calhoun, Kaia 3 Childress, Alice 62 chorus see Greek; plays; writing Churchill, Caryl 23 confessions see writing Cool Pose see Majors Creeley, Robert 126 Curse of the Starving Classes see Shepard Death of Character see Fuchs Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World see under plays Diamond, Elin 8-9, 11 Diamond, Liz 1, 2, 14-15 discrimination 10, 132, 138-9 Dixon, Kimberley 29

148

Index

Don’t you want to be free? see Hughes Du Bois, W.E.B. 6 Black Looks: Race and Representation 106 Edmonds, Randolph 18 Nat Turner 18, 19 Elam Jr., Harry 22, 28, 29, 91 Ellison, R. 6 Emperor Jones see O’Neill Endgame see under plays England 18 Enigma see under Poe essays The America Play and Other Works 10, 15 From Elements of Style 9, 22, 48, 49, Possession 8, 73-4 Red Letter Plays 50, 54, 61 experimental American theatre 1, 2, 4 False Promises/Nos Enganaron see San Francisco Faludi, Susan Stiffed 51 Fanon 6 Favor, Martin Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance 121 Felman, Shoshana 36 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 48 For Coloured Girls Who have Considered Suicide see Shange Foreman, Richard 39 Friel, Brian Translations 22 Fuchs, Elinor 22 Death of Character 15 Funny House of a Negro see Kennedy Fucking A see under plays Greeks see under plays Greek chorus 30-1 Arnott, Peter on 31 Walton, J. Michael on 31 Greek theatre 2, 3 Greek Theatre Practice see Walton Gussow, Mel 1, 29 Hansberry, Lorraine 61 Les Blancs 61 Raisin in the Sun 50, 61 Hawthorne, Nathaniel

The Scarlett Letter 32, 54, 124, 129, 134 history plays 9, 19-28, 29-30, 77, 133-4 Holocaust 37 Hughes, Langston 62 Don’t you want to be free? 19 Little Eva 18 Humana Festival 19 Hurston, Zora Neale 127 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom see under plays Innes, Christopher 107-8 Insurrection: Holding History see O’Hara Joseph Papp Public Theatre 19 Joyce, James 10, 15 Kennedy, Adrienne 1, 4, 8 Funny House of a Negro 5, 8, 62 The Owl Answers 62 Kushner, Tony 29 Angels in America 18, 21, 23 Les Blancs see Hansberry Little Eva see Hughes MacArthur Award 29 Major, Richard Cool Pose 78, 102 Malkin, Jeanette R. 50 Memory-Theatre and Postmodern Drama 119 Mamet, David 29, 138-9 Marisol see Rivera Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy 8 McGuinness, Frank Observe the Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme 23 Memory-Theatre and Postmodern Drama see Malkin Metzgar, Bonnie 133, 136 Miller, May 19 Motion of History see Baraka Morrison, Toni 5 Playing in the Dark 117 Munk, Erica 15 Nat Turner see Edmonds Native Son see Wright

Index New York 2, 3 New York Observer 57 Times 1, 29, 57 novels Getting Mother’s Body 29, 121 Oberammergau 139, 140 Obie Awards 1, 29, 127 Observe the Sons Of Ulster see McGuinness Oedipus 9 O’Hara, Robert 23 Insurrection: Holding History 18 Olson, Charles 126 100,001 Horror Stories of the Plains see Terry Ong, H. 8 Open House see under plays Oscher, Paul 128, 135 Owl Answers see Kennedy Parks, Suzan-Lori see beliefs and values; essays; novels; plays; screenplays; writing and dramatic theory Perkins, Marlon 13 plays America Play, The 1, 10, 15, 19, 20, 21, 125, 128-31, 132 Berkman, Len on 62 Bush, Jason on 74 Goto, Andrea J. on 119-21 Ozieblo, Barbara on 50, 54 Wetmore, Kevin J. on 89-90, 95-6 chorus, use of 30-46 as citizen 30-2 citizens as witnesses 32-9 final 44-6 witnesses as citizens 39-44 Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World 127, 128, 129 Garrett, Shawn-Marie on 1, 15 Goto, Andrea J. on 107, 111-12, 113-14 Holder, Heidi on 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27 Ozieblo, Barbara on 48-51, 55 Devotees in the Garden of Love 135 Wetmore, Kevin J. on 93-5, 98-9 Endgame 3 Fucking A 124, 125, 134

149

Berkman, Len on 61 Bush, Jason on 75 Ozieblo, Barbara on 49, 54, 57-8 history 9, 14, 19-28, 133-4 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom 29, 127 Garrett, Shawn-Marie on 1-16 Greeks (the Slugs) 7, 10, 11 Open House 7, 10, 11 Snails 7, 10, 13-15 Third Kingdom 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 12, 127, 128 Goto, Andrea J, on 108-9, 115-19 Holder, Heidi J. on 22 Wetmore, Kevin J. on 98 In the Blood 125, 129, 133, 134, 139 Berkman, Len on 61-71, 109-10 Bush, Jason on 75 Ozieblo, Barbara on 54-7 Young, Harvey on 32-9, 44-6 Our American Cousins Wetmore, Kevin J. on 100-1 365Days/365Plays 124, 129, 131, 134, 135-6, 139 The Interconnectedness of Things 129 Topdog/Underdog 29, 121, 125, 126, 129-31, 134, 137, 139 Bush, Jason on 73-87 Ozieblo, Barbara on 49-50, 51-4, 55, 57 Wetmore, Kevin J. on 89, 91, 92, 97-8, 99-100, 103 Venus 133-4, 137-8, 139 Berkman, Len on 62 Holder, Heidi J. on 19, 23, 25, 27 Ozieblo, Barbara on 57 Young, Harvey on 30-46 Wetmore, Kevin J. on 89-90, 91, 96-7, 98, 101-2, 104 poetry and language see under writing photography, use of 2, 5, 6, 8,14 Playing in the Dark see Morrison Poe, Edgar Allen 3 Pollock, Sharon 23 Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre see Arnott Pulitzer Prize 29, 121, 136 Raisin in the Sun see Hansberry Rayner, Alice 22, 28, 29, 91 Remelt, Janelle 48 Remnants of Auschwitz see Agamben

150

Index

repetition and revision see writing Restaging the Nation see Wilmer Richardson, Willis 18 Rivera, Jose Marisol 21 Roach, Joseph 5 Rokem, Freddie 19 San Francisco Mime Troupe False Promises/Nos Enganaron 19 Savran, David 109, 115 Scarlett Letter see Hawthorne screenplays and teleplays 126 Girl 6 29, 135 The Great Debators 29 Their Eyes were Watching God 29, 127 secrets in language see writing Shakespeare, William 3, 5, 18, 22, 102 Shange, Ntozake 1, 6 For Coloured Girls who have Considered Suicide 3-4, 5 Shepard, Sam 49, 61, 115 Curse of the Starving Classes 53 Shewey, Don 48 slavery and slave trade 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 auctions 20, 25, 27 Slugs see under plays Snails see under plays Solomon, Alisa 3, 13, 14, 22, 109 Theatre 29 spells see writing 10 Spillers, Hortense J. 5 Stein, Gertude 4, 50, 62 Stiffed see Faludi teaching 134-5 Terry, Megan 100,001 Horror Stories of the Plains 19 The Motion of History see Baraka The Steward of Christendom see Barry Third Kingdom see under plays Tony Awards 29 Tragedy in Athens see Wiles Translations see Friel Tubman, Harriet 18

Valdez, Luis Little Eva 19 Venus see under plays Village Voice 1 Waiting for Godot see Beckett Walton, J. Michael Greek Theatre Practice 31 Wellman, Mac 1 Wild Kingdom 13 Wiles, David Tragedy in Athens 32 Williams, Tennessee 61 Wilmer, S.I. Restaging the Nation 119 Woolf, Virginia 10 Wright, Richard Native Son 113-14 writing and dramatic theory 8, 10, 13, 14, 124-40 confessions 33-7 content and form 22, 29, 126 counting and numbers 23-8, 129 death in 19, 21-2 gender stereotypes 49, 54 history 76, 133-4 see also history; history under plays language and spelling 4-5, 29, 61-71, 109-10 meaning in plays 48-9, 128-9 pageantry, plays as 139-40 photography in plays, use of 14 see also photography poetry and language 2, 8, 13, 74 realism 73 ‘rep’ and ‘rev’ 19, 23, 29, 49, 74, 89, 129, 130 secrets in 5, 16 spells 10, 29 Spirit and religion 127-8, 129, 132-3 Worthen, W.B. 25, 29 Yale Repertory Theatre 19, 39 School of Drama 3 Young, Jean 29 Zola, Emile 2

United States see America