In November 2002, Suzan-Lori Parks embarked on an ambitious goal as a playwright – to write a short play each day for a year. The result was 365 Days/365 Plays, whose staging involved the collaboration of 700 theaters in 30 cities, and represented as much an exploration of the creative process as a testament to the ambition and innovation of a gifted young dramatist. Of all the young African Americans hailed as the next great playwright, Parks is unique in her ability to produce work time and again that examines race and myth-making in groundbreaking ways.
Suzan-Lori Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, to a military family, the middle of three children. Her father, Donald Parks, was a Lieutenant Colonel, and much of her childhood was spent in Germany. This background meant that, as a student at a German high school (rather than the English-speaking school for military children), her outsider consciousness was informed more by her status as a foreigner than by being an African American. After graduating from the John Carroll School in Bel Air, Maryland, in 1981, Parks attended Mount Holyoke College, where her English professor, Mary McHenry, introduced her to Five Colleges faculty member James Baldwin. Parks had stopped writing after a high school teacher told her she could not be a writer since she could not spell. But Baldwin encouraged her creative efforts, and suggested that she write plays rather than short stories. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1985 with a BA in English and German, she enrolled at Drama Studio London to continue learning the world of theater.
Living in New York City and working as a temp, Parks’s breakthrough came when the Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association Downtown produced Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989). Favorable reviews compared Parks to Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange, and the play soon won an Obie Award in 1990 for Best New American Play. The following year Parks became an associate artist at the Yale School of Drama. Parks’s subsequent dramas explore issues of race and gender construction. Although these issues appear in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), The America Play (1994), and Venus (1996), she is adamant that oppression is not the dramatic focal point of her work. “The Klan does not always have to be outside the door for Black people to have lives worthy of dramatic literature,” she wrote in “An Equation for Black People Onstage” (1995). Indeed, two of her plays, In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2000), are reinterpretations of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. In the Blood was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2000. Although she did not win, she did two years later for Topdog/Underdog. Like The America Play, Topdog/Underdog sets two brothers in tension with each other in roles recalling Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
Accolades and accomplishments have only snowballed for Parks in the twenty-first century. In 2000, Parks received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2001 a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Two years later she published her first novel, Getting Mother’s Body, “a novel in voices,” as she puts it, whose creativity owes a large debt to William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying. Parks’s playwriting has also led to work on various screenplays: Spike Lee’s Girl 6 (1996); a 2007 adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; and The Great Debaters (2007), starring Denzel Washington in the role of poet Melvin B. Tolson. Parks teaches playwriting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, tours extensively giving dramatic lectures, and has received an honorary doctorate from Brown University. With Diane Paulus and Diedre Murray she adapted, in 2011, Porgy and Bess, which won a Tony Award a year later for Best Musical Revival. Her Ray Charles musical, Unchain My Heart, premiered on Broadway in 2012.
Anderson, Lisa M. Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Ch. 4.
Black. Cheryl. “‘A’ is for Abject: The Red Letter Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26.2 (2012): 31–56.
Carpio, Glenda R. “Humor in African American Literature.” A Companion to African American Literature. Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 315–331.
Colbert, Soyica Diggs. The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Ch. 7.
Elam, Harry J., Jr. “The High Stakes of Identity: Lorraine Hansberry’s Follow the Drinking Gourd and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus.” Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography. Eds. Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 282–302.
Foster, Verna. “Suzan-Lori Parks’s Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17.3 (2005): 24–35.
Geis, Deborah R. Suzan-Lori Parks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Kolin, Philip C. Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010.
Miller, Greg. “The Bottom of Desire in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus.” Modern Drama 45.1 (2002): 125–137.
Mustamäki, Piia. “Reading Representations of Race with Masochism: The 1990s and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26.1 (2011): 27–44.
Norman, Brian. “The Historical Uncanny: Segregation Signs in Getting Mother’s Body, a Post-Civil Rights American Novel.” African American Review 43. 2–3 (2009): 443–456.
Rugg, Rebecca. “Radical Inclusion ’Til It Hurts: Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays.” Theater 38.1 (2008): 52–75.
Saal, Ilka. “The Politics of Mimicry: The Minor Theater of Suzan-Lori Parks.” South Atlantic Review 70.2 (2005): 57–71.
Schafer, Carol. “Staging a New Literary History: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, In the Blood and Fucking A.” Comparative Drama 42.2 (2008): 181–203.
Tucker-Abramson, Myka. “The Money Shot: Economies of Sex, Guns, and Language in Topdog/Underdog.” Modern Drama 50.1 (2007): 77–97.
Warner, Sara L. “Suzan-Lori Parks’s Drama of Disinterment: A Transnational Exploration of Venus.” Theatre Journal 60.2 (2008): 181–199.
Simply this:
The bulk of relationships Black people are engaged in onstage is the relationship between the Black and the White other. This is the stuff of high drama. I wonder if a drama involving Black people can exist without the presence of the White – no, not the presence – the presence is not the problem. As Toni Morrison writes in her essay “Black Matters,” the presence of the White often signifies the presence of the Black. Within the subject is its other. So the mere presence of the other 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 state of “non-Whiteness.” Blackness in this equation is a people whose lives consist of a series of reactions and responses to the White ruling class. We have for so long been an “oppressed” people, but are Black people only blue? As African-Americans we have a history, a future and a daily reality in which a confrontation with a White ruling class is a central feature. This reality makes life difficult. This reality often traps us in a singular mode of expression. There are many ways of defining Blackness and there are many ways of presenting Blackness onstage. The Klan does not always have to be outside the door for Black people to have lives worthy of dramatic literature. Saying that “Whitey” has to be present in Black drama because Whitey is an inextricable aspect of Black reality is like saying that every play has to have a murder in it, is like saying that every drama involving Jews must reference Treblinka. And what happens when we choose a concern other than the race problem to focus on? What kind of drama do we get?
Let’s look at the math:
BLACK PEOPLE + “WHITEY” =
STANDARD DRAMATIC CONFLICT
(STANDARD TERRITORY)
i.e.
“BLACK DRAMA” = the presentation of the Black as oppressed
so that
WHATEVER the dramatic dynamics, they are most often READ to EQUAL
an explanation or relation of Black oppression. This is not only a false equation,
this is bullshit.
so that
BLACK PEOPLE + x = NEW DRAMATIC CONFLICT
(NEW TERRITORY)
where x is the realm of situations showing African-Americans in states other than
the Oppressed by/Obsessed with “Whitey” state; where the White when present
is not the oppressor, and where audiences are encouraged to see and understand and
discuss these dramas in terms other than that same old shit.
An old acquaintance of mine, a somewhat revered theatre scholar, once suggested that a fabulous production of The Importance of Being Earnest would feature Black principals with Whites as the servants. This is NOT an interesting use of Black people. This is the thinnest sort of dramaturgy. Ideas like these – equations featuring this lack of complexity – are again and again held up to us as exemplar, as the ultimate possibilities for Black people onstage. Black presence on stage is more than a sign or messenger of some political point.
4 Questions
Can a White person be present onstage and not be an oppressor? 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?
And gee, there’s another thing: There is no such thing as THE Black Experience; that is, there are many experiences of being Black which are included under the rubric. Just think of all the different kinds of African peoples.
I’m continually encouraging myself to explore The-Drama-of-the-Black-Person-as-an-Integral-Facet-of-the-Universe. This exploration takes me, in a very organic way, into new territory; because, in encouraging myself to listen to the stories beyond my default stories – because the story determines the shape of the play – the play assumes a new structure.
So. As a Black person writing for theatre, what is theatre good for? What can theatre do for us? We can “tell it like it is”; “tell it as it was”; “tell it as it could be.” In my plays I do all 3; and the writing is rich because we are not an impoverished people, but a wealthy people fallen on hard times.
I write plays because I love Black people. As there is no single “Black Experience,” there is no single “Black Aesthetic” and there is no one way to write or think or feel or dream or interpret or be interpreted. As African-Americans we should recognize this insidious essentialism for what it is: a fucked-up trap to reduce us to only one way of being. We should endeavor to show the world and ourselves our beautiful and powerfully infinite variety.
1994
A black man from Nigeria asked me once “What is this interest with watermelon you Black Americans have? I do not understand.” His not understanding does not make him non-Black/White/an inauthentic Black man. His not understanding simply means that he grew up Black yes! but Black somewhere else.
Suzan-Lori Parks, “An Equation for Black People Onstage,” from The America Play and Other Works. Ann Arbor: Theater Communications Group, 1995. Copyright © 1992, 1994 by Suzan-Lori Parks. Used by permission of Theatre Communications Group.