Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works (review)

A significant body of academic criticism has addressed the work of Suzan- Lori Parks, one of the most provocatively complex writers in contemporary American theatre. In a new volume, Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works, Philip C. Kolin has collected an eclectic group of original essays that revisit some familiar critical territory while encompassing innovative approaches from which to explore not only Parks’s plays but also her novel and screenplays. In addition to the essays, Kolin includes two new interviews: the first with the playwright herself, and the second with Liz Diamond, director and collaborator on several productions of Parks’s plays.

The collection opens with two essays that provide an overview of Parks’s stylistic traits and the themes and ideas that are associated with many of her plays. Kolin’s laudatory introductory essay likens Parks to Shakespeare’s Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a role Parks once played in a studio production in London. Kolin asserts that, like Puck, “she speaks a magical, incantatory language unheard on the American stage before” (7). Kolin reflects on Parks’s creation of a metatheatre, “a theatre in search of itself, but one that invites the disruptions out of which it springs” (13). Rena Fraden, in the next essay, explores Parks’s writing as both a political and religious act that culminates in a philosophy of “radical inclusion” (20).

The essays that follow examine Parks’s plays in chronological sequence. Jacqueline Wood discusses ideas about love, time, and the female self in Parks’s lesser known early plays: Betting on the Dust Command, Pickling, and Devotees in the Garden of Love. In his second contribution to the volume, Kolin delves into Imperceptible Mutablities in the Third Kingdom by expounding on topics of black racial memory and “forced cultural schizophrenia” (45). He illuminates these issues by exploring dismemberment and the loss of body parts as compared with the loss of memory and history; he uncovers “confusion and forgetfulness in the mine-fields (or mindfields) of America” (49). Nicole Hodges Persley examines hip hop techniques of sampling and remixing in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, which Parks uses to reference works by Richard Wright and James Joyce as well as slave culture and African history. Persley extends her hip hop analysis to consider The America Play as well.

The next group of essays offers new perspectives on Parks’s later plays. In a bit of a departure from the volume’s focus on dramatic criticism, Shawn-Marie Garrett discusses the problematic premier production of Parks’s Venus as directed by Richard Foreman. Garrett contends that Foreman’s production, “though spectacular, was largely devoid of empathy and feeling,” while Parks, in contrast, insists that the play is about love (85). Jon Dietrick provides an insightful perspective on the Red Letter plays (In the Blood and Fucking A) by drawing attention to the correlation of economics and power as evidenced in the “fates” of the two Hesters. Jochen Achilles applies concepts of game theory and the structure of play in an enlightening exploration of the brothers’ dynamics in Topdog/Underdog.

The two essays that conclude the examination of Parks’s dramatic works investigate the trajectory of some of Parks’s early ideas as they have been repeated and revised (“Rep & Rev”) in her most recent plays. Jennifer Larson selects a few of the plays from 365 Plays / 365 Days to re-explore ideas of radical inclusion and “The Great Hole of History” as they have surfaced throughout Parks’s works. Christine Woodworth’s contribution to the volume is an examination of the children in Parks’s plays.

The final two essays in the collection concern Parks’s works that were not written for the stage: her novel and two screenplays. Glenda Dicker/ sun examines Parks’s novel, Getting Mother’s Body, through the lens of ancient mythology...