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

Philip C. Kolin's edited volume Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works ($39.95, paperback) spans the playwright's increasingly heterogeneous career and testifies to the variety of not only Parks's artistic production but also of the response it evokes. The diversity of the criticism rivals that of her corpus. This multivalent criticism is only fitting—if, perhaps, a bit overdue. The first two essays in this volume—by Kolin and Rena Fraden, respectively—struggle to describe, encapsulate, and distill a writer's body of work that willfully resists categorization. Motivating each of these ambitious essays is the question that opens Fraden's: "How to define the political and religious worldview that will delimit Suzan-Lori Parks, frame her work, her life, her projects, her moment in time?"(20) While Fraden asserts that "we know [Parks] and her style, at least so far, pretty well," she qualifies that confidence by centering her account of Parks's worldview in her doctrine of "radical inclusion," an aesthetic and spiritual posture that welcomes inspiration from any quarter and submits to whatever changes or experimentation it might require. Parks's career embraces avant-garde and naturalistic aesthetics. It spans theater, film, and fiction and derives inspiration from Greek mythology, African American history, the American Renaissance, high modernism, and black playwrights from James Baldwin to Ntozake Shange. One might expect critics of her work to approach their task from as many angles, but that has not been the case. If Parks's criticism has principally focused on her concerns with history, memory, violence, identity, and aesthetic form, Kolin's volume widens the critical aperture to include money (John Dietrick), game theory (Jochen Achilles), childhood (Christine Woodworth), classical literature (Glenda Dicker/sun), and love (Shawn-Marie Garrett), at the same time deepening the study of the themes long considered central to Parks's project.

Dietrick's and Achilles's essays unite the canonical and the experimental in Parks's criticism. Each pairs a familiar critical problem with a less common subject matter and critical apparatus. Dietrick addresses two enduring problems in Parks's scholarship when he locates money at the center of her Red Letter plays and links problems of economic value to Parks's rejection of simplistic accounts of identity and aesthetic form:

Both plays wrestle with and ultimately try to transcend what Walter Benn Michaels calls the "logic of naturalism," a logic that represses money and one that would divide life into neat categories such as words and action, the mimetic and the real. Parks's own mélange of Brechtian and naturalistic theatrical practice attempts to arrive at a synthesis of these two ideas, one that would reject the logic of naturalism by acknowledging a dialectical relation between the symbolic and the real, that returns the body to language and language to the body.

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Achilles engages Parks's concerns with history, social injustice, and agency by reading Topdog/Underdog (2001) through the lens of contemporary game theory. Assuming game theory's claim that "play negotiates not only the conflict between virtuality and reality, earnestness and fun, but also between order and disorder" or "total control and total contingency," Achilles interprets Parks's conspicuous uses of play in Venus (1995), The America Play (1995), and Topdog/Underdog as explorations of the tension between necessity and freedom. While he concludes that Topdog/Underdog privileges the former, he argues that Parks's "Rep & Rev," a jazz-based compositional technique, "pays tribute to both tendencies of ubiquitous postmodern play: to its determinative tendencies by repetition and to the potential for free development by revision" (122). Overall, Achilles's and Dietrick's criticisms draw on the overwhelming variety of Parks's subject matter and distill from it her core concerns.

To date, Parks's dynamic energies find their fullest expression in her year-long play-a-day writing project, 365 Days/365 Plays (2006). Jennifer Larson's essay "Suzan-Lori Parks's 365 Days/365 Plays: A Whole New...