Suzan-Lori Parks essays on the plays and other works

221 Pages·2010·14.527 MB·English

by  Kolin, Philip C.;Parks, Suzan-Lori

Suzan-Lori Parks
ALSO EDITED BY PHILIP C. KOLIN
The Influence of Tennessee Williams:
Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights
(McFarland, 2008)
Suzan-Lori Parks
Essays on the Plays
and Other Works
Edited by PHILIP C. KOLIN
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Suzan-Lori Parks : essays on the plays and other works /
edited by Philip C. Kolin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-4167-9
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
1. Parks, Suzan-Lori—Criticism and interpretation.
2. African Americans in literature. I. Kolin, Philip C.
PS3566.A736Z89 2010 812'.54—dc22 2010024881
British Library cataloguing data are available
©2010 Philip C. Kolin. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover: Suzan-Lori Parks “smiling photo in front of diner on
Great Jones Street, New York City,” ©peter sumner walton bellamy 2010
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Table of Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Puck’s Magic Mojo: The Achievements of Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . 7
PHILIP C. KOLIN
Everything and Nothing: The Political and Religious Nature of
Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Radical Inclusion” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
RENA FRADEN
“Jazzing” Time, Love, and the Female Self in Three Early Plays
by Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
JACQUELINE WOOD
“You one of uh mines?” Dis(re)membering in Suzan-Lori Parks’s
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
PHILIP C. KOLIN
Sampling and Remixing: Hip Hop and Parks’s History Plays . . . . . . 65
NICOLE HODGES PERSLEY
“For the Love of the Venus”: Suzan-Lori Parks, Richard Foreman,
and the Premiere of Venus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
SHAWN-MARIE GARRETT
“A Full Refund Aint Enough”: Money in Suzan-Lori Parks’s
Red Letter Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
JON DIETRICK
Does Reshuffling the Cards Change the Game? Structures of
Play in Parks’s Topdog/Underdog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
JOCHEN ACHILLES
Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays: A (W)hole New
Approach to Theatre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
JENNIFER LARSON
Parks and the Traumas of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
CHRISTINE WOODWORTH
v
vi TABLEOFCONTENTS
Demeter, Persephone and Willa Mae Beede: Suzan-Lori Parks
Gets Mother’s Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
GLENDA DICKER/SUN
The Unconscious and Metaphors in Suzan-Lori Parks’s
Screenplays of Girl 6 and Their Eyes Were Watching God . . . . . . . 169
CHARLENE REGESTER
An Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
SHAWN-MARIE GARRETT
A Parks Remix: An Interview with Liz Diamond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
FAEDRA CHATARD CARPENTER
A Production History of the Works of Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . 203
RICHARD E. KRAMER
About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Preface
Suzan-Lori Parks has transformed the American theatre with her mythic plays about
black history and identity in contemporary America. The acclaimed heir of Adrienne
Kennedy and Ntosake Shange, Parks has produced provocative dramas that capture the
nightmares of African Americans endangered by a white establishment determined to
erase their history and eradicate their dreams. Inspired by these earlier dramatists’ works,
Parks has created haunting characters whose identities change rapidly and who use a new
stage language based on the poetry of spoken black English. Her disarming sets and dis-
locating narratives deconstruct a linear, ordered sense of history. Parks’s plays exist in a
world where time, space, and consequence slip and slide away from the strict obligations
of logic. Her characters are displaced versions of themselves, trying to find their iden-
tity—in a family, a city, a nation, a continent, the universe.
Since the 1980s, Parks’s plays have won the acclaim of dramatists, critics, and audi-
ences worldwide. Frequently anthologized and performed at large professional and regional
theatres alike, her works have won her recognition as a provocative and influential play-
wright. She rivals almost every other American dramatist in terms of the “firsts” that she
has pioneered. She was the first African American woman playwright to win the Pulitzer
Prize for Topdog/Underdog in 2002. She was the first to receive the Master Writer Chair
at New York’s prestigious Public Theatre. With 365 Plays/365 Days (in 2006–2007) she
became the first dramatist to have her works staged/premiered at 700 theatres across the
nation and the globe. Her innovative scripts have created a new black theatre/stage, break-
ing conventions and establishing a provocative epistemology of performance. Excluding
Tennessee Williams, Parks may also be the most prolific and diverse playwright America
has ever produced. Her genius has led her into many other genres as well—she is a
novelist, a screenwriter, a poet, a musician, an actor, a lecturer, and so on. The 12 original
scholarly essays plus two new interviews—with Parks and with her longtime friend and
director Liz Diamond—included in Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works
explore almost all of her multi-layered and provocative plays up to 2010, in addition to
assessing her other achievements in the arts.
The first two essays in this collection supply necessary background information and
theory for understanding and appreciating Parks’s evolutionary works. In “Puck’s Magic
Mojo,” I discuss Parks’s biography, her themes, her characters, her dramatic strategies,
and her role as both a performer and a creator of performances. Like Shakespeare’s Puck,
she has transformed the stage as she recreates and recasts African American history.
Throughout her canon she works through spells, magic, and spirits. Whether her plays
1
2 PREFACE
are set in an indeterminate location or in a ghetto, whether they take place in the present
or in a murky past, the element of postmodern performativity is common to them all, as
it is to her own life. In the next essay, Rena Fraden explores the religious and political
ideas that undergird Parks’s creative principle of “radical inclusion.” Arguing that Parks
rejects philosophical essentialism as “insidious,” Fraden argues instead for a religious uni-
versalism that accounts for and illuminates Parks’s experimentation. In reading Parks’s
major works, Fraden finds that her politics refuse to be narrowly nationalistic while her
religion seems to be a blend of eastern New Age mysticism. She concludes that Parks’s
creative identity overflows not only national borders but racial and gender ones as well.
Not surprisingly, race and gender also play a major role in the following two essays
that turn to Parks’s early works. Concentrating on three neglected Parks scripts—Betting
on the Dust Commander, Pickling, and Devotees in the Garden of Love—Jacqueline Wood
acknowledges the power of her frequently used “Rep & Rev” techniques. But Wood finds
that jazz also allows readers to interrogate the constructions of African American female
selfhood in relation to time and money, black men, and social traditions in these three
plays. Labeling them black women’s plays, since they center on the black female experience,
Wood examines how these dramas unpack romantic views of love and marriage to reveal
the detrimental impact of traditional expectations on the black woman’s mental health
and identity. In “jazzing” the black (1989) female subject, Parks began her career as she
has continued it—with provocative experimentation. Turning to another early play, Parks’s
first work, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, I trace the evolution and exe-
cution of her psychic/anatomical pun on “(dis)membering,” symbolizing the attacks on
black memory and black bodies. Mutabilities problematizes memory of a black past that
has been lost in the “Third Kingdom,” a terrifying place where Africans find themselves
dislocated after a harrowing journey through the Middle Passage. Black bodies, whether
they belong to young contemporary black women or to the ghosts of slaves, are repeatedly
being “dis-membered,” disfigured, extracted, and amputated, a physicalization of the men-
tal tortures blacks have suffered. Tragically marked for dismemberment, Parks’s characters
in Mutabilities share a horrific plight over the centuries.
Looking at Parks’s history plays (Death of the Last Black Man in America; the America
Play), Nicole Hodges Persley continues this collection’s investigation of Parks’s use of music
to structure her work. While “Rep & Rev” jazz techniques form a major part of Parks’s
dramaturgy, Persley believes that Hip Hop may provide a more useful lens through which
we examine Parks’s dramatic processes. She argues that the Hip Hop DJ’s strategies of sam-
pling and remixing are reflected in Parks’s remixing representations of blackness in American
history. Connecting Hip Hop to the writing of history, Persely identifies the sampled figures
and themes Parks has selected from various sources in constructing her narratives.
Examining one of Parks’s most celebrated plays, Shawn-Marie Garrett explores the
premiere of Venus, directed by Richard Foreman, in one of the seminal theatrical pro-
ductions of the 1990s. Drawing a distinction between the director’s aims and aesthetics
and those of Parks, Garrett argues that Foreman’s production, which influenced many
prominent interpretations of Venus, elided crucial aspects of Parks’s play, namely, the
dynamics of empathy and love. While scholarship has ably parsed the play in terms of
its politics, Garrett maintains that very little has been said regarding the dynamics of
Preface 3
emotion in Venus, and what Parks means when she says, as she has repeatedly done, that
the play is about love. Garrett’s essay, firmly grounded in the performance culture of the
decade, invites critical consideration of the neglected topic of emotion in Venus and, by
extension, in all of Parks’s work.
Among the narratives that Parks has remixed are sanctified white canonical literary
texts, which Jon Dietrick looks at in Parks’s Red Letter Plays (In the Blood and Fucking
A) as he illuminates how Parks recreates African American history by deconstructing Haw -
thorne’s Scarlet Letter. Ironically, Hawthorne, like Parks, expresses the same desperate need
for fixed signs and self-evident identities. Dietrick claims that in both Scarlet Letter and
the Red Letter Plays, money and economic thinking are bound inextricably together. In
studying the centrality of money in contemporary American life, with a concomitant con-
cern—the slipperiness of verbal and visual signs—Dietrick reads Parks’s works in the
context of an American realist/naturalist tradition deeply rooted in economic thinking.
But, he contends, Parks transforms this tradition by conceiving identities that transcend
naturalism’s rigid distinction between language and action, “hard” and “soft” currency,
the essential and the mimetic.
In his essay on Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, her Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Jochen
Achilles analyzes this signature work in light of contemporary game theory. He argues that
the play is dominated by two exploitative performative scenarios, or commodified forms
of play—the simulated arcade shootings of a Lincoln impersonator and the performance
of the three-card monte con game. In the interaction between the two black brothers,
named Booth and Lincoln by their father for fun, these two scenarios partially overlap
and transform each other before they tragically converge in the lethal restructuring of the
brothers’ family history. Looking at Parks’s play in terms of these performative scenarios
in Topdog, Achilles finds that postmodern realities belong to a universe of the playful where
the distinction between virtuality and reality collapses.
Unwaveringly anti-mimetic, Parks’s theatre is postmodern, self reflexive, and unsta-
ble, a theatre full of black holes. Viewing her 365 Plays/365 Days as a meditation on the
evolving significance of the “Great Hole of History,” Jennifer Larson’s essay studies the
365 Plays as a text about writing and taking audiences on a daily journey that is simul-
taneously circular, temporal, spatial, personal, and communal. Seen as many texts made
into one, 365stands as a fitting metaphor for its revisioning Parks’s “Great Hole of His-
tory” at the center of her America Play. For Larson, the diverse 365plays not only describe
the convergence of art and text, but they enact and embody it. These 365 plays do not
exist in a bitter dichotomous battle for Larson, but in symbiotic harmony, since the written
text provides the “whole.” The pun on “hole”/“whole” extends the Parksian concept of
radical inclusion beyond the stage to the page and to the writer as well. While the “Great
Hole of History” in Parks’s earlier plays was characterized by its inability to represent
identity, Larson claims that Parks supplies “holes” in 365 designed to create rather than
destroy, to include rather than to exclude. On these grounds, 365 Plays/365 Daysembodies
a Parksian creation mythos.
But as the inheritors of such a mythology, children are almost always at risk in Parks’s
plays, and since they play such a powerful role in the dismemberment and dislocation of
her other characters, they deserve a separate essay. Accordingly, Christine Woodworth