The America Play Suzan Lori Parks Play Reviews
Suzan-Lori Parks has long been my favorite playwright and one of my favorite authors of anything. I used to teach "The America Play," which students sometimes plant confounding to read—possibly due at to the lowest degree as much to my own disability to teach it properly as to its difficulty as a text. I think, if 1 were to meet it on phase, perhaps information technology would exist easier for some folks to grasp. (I know this was true for me of some other Parks play, "Father Comes Abode from the State of war," i function of which I saw in a modest off-Broadway theater and loved—it was, like many of Parks' plays, a layered affair. In this 1, meaning came not just from the actors' words and actions and the mis-en-scene, but from text broadcast to a higher place the phase (given as stage directions and footnotes in the written play).)
Still, I've pulled The America Play and other Works off my bookshelf to write near today because it is a drove to which I've returned and returned, recommended infinitely, and loved and then much my copy is just a series of loose pages held together by a rubber band wrapped effectually the cover. Information technology's a drove of Parks' plays and essays which feels ever more relevant in the moment (though, to be clear, information technology never stopped beingness relevant, similar a river running underground is still running even if you don't see it, is still nourishing what grows in the soil above, still filling the wells from which we drink. But, knowing all this, I'd say the words feel as though they're speaking to this current time.
The essays are mortiferous brilliant. "Possession," "Elements of Mode" and "An Equation for Blackness People on Stage" all are more than worth several readings. The ideas accept guided me every bit a writer and equally an audience/reader ever since I read them. "Equation," for instance, begins with this assertion:
"The Bulk of relationships Blackness people are engaged in onstage is the relationship between Blackness and the White other. This is the stuff of high drama. I wonder if a drama involving Black people tin can exist without the presence of the White—no, not the presence—the presence is not the problem [.…] The interest in the other is. The use of the White in the dramatic equation is, I think, too often seen as the only way of exploring our Blackness; this equation reduces Blackness to merely a sate of 'non-Whiteness.' Black in this equation is a people whose lives consist of a serial of reactions and responses to the White ruling class."
Boom. Suzan-Lori Parks hits the nail on the caput, simply it'southward a boom of which so many of us (including me) were ignorant until she striking it.
Perhaps my 2 favorite plays in the collection are "The America Play" and "The Death of the Terminal Black Man in the Whole Unabridged World." I won't go into neat specifics about each of these, simply considering I'm hoping the titles lone volition provoke your interest and lead you lot to read them for yourself. "Last Black Man" features some historical Blackness figures (like 'Queen-then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut') mixed in with some stereotypes of American Blackness (characters like 'Blackness Man with Watermelon,' or 'Adult female with Fried Drumstick,' or 'Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork') speaking. They are reminders, they are mourners, they are echoes speaking dorsum to us—equally much as they also feel similar merely people. The whole scene is set in something called "the Bully Hole of History" for which Parks gives no phase directions: how to set this scene? what does the Great Hole look like? In this Great (W)Pigsty of History (oh, golly, I love that pun, by the by) are all the narratives and people left out of Official Western History. The characters speak in near-verse, unnatural and beautiful. It feels similar a play, like a self-conscious display of something, and that is, I'd venture, pretty intentional. Though tempted, y'all're never permitted to get lost entirely, to suspend disbelief. The work does not follow the conventional Western plotline, nor the conventional Western 3-act play structure. If you come up to "Last Black Homo" expecting the simple satisfactions of such a structure, you'll be disappointed, and it will be your own error. You're always reminded: THIS IS A WORK OF ART. THIS BEARS THE Attention OF INTERPRETATION. For this, I truly dear it.
"The America Play" centers on The Foundling Father (oh, Parks, your puns! I just adore!), a Black homo who is a grave digger and an Abraham Lincoln impersonator. He becomes particularly popular among white people who want to re-enact Booth shooting Lincoln—fifty-fifty ameliorate if they tin shoot a Blackness Lincoln to kicking! The Foundling Begetter soon disappears from the stage, and becomes a primal figure in absentia, like the Slap-up Pigsty of History he'due south tried to replicate: what has been removed is what makes the thing (like a hole is not a hole unless things have been removed to brand a hole). Lucy, his wife, and Brazil, his son, spend the last act alone. They are professional mourners, hired to gnash and moan at funerals to make others experience the dead had been important. Their lives are total of death and mourning. Their business, all, is absence, is the pigsty, is acting equally if rather than simply getting to exist.
I could write forever about these plays, having taught them and thought nigh them for so long. (And just so we're clear, teaching the text does not mean I know anything almost it—educational activity was a mode of figuring things out, thinking about things, so I mention it only to advise I've spent many years thinking nearly these beautiful plays. Even then, they exceed my ability to think through them—I never "go" the whole affair, because if I remember more, I detect more in them.) I won't dissertate. Instead, I'll simply urge you to read them—or any of Parks' writing, for that matter. They plays and essays are genius postmodern works, rife with wordplay and exactly-needed difficulty. They are passionate and deeply felt strikes at the earth'southward stoicism.
More than people should know, read and (inevitably) honey Parks' work.
Find Suzan-Lori Parks at http://suzanloriparks.com/
Notice her books everywhere. Hither, attempt Alibris: https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?author=suzan-lori+parks&mtype=B
Source: https://alysiaconstantine.com/2020/06/09/why-you-should-read-the-america-play-and-other-works-by-suzan-lori-parks/
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