Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works ed. by Philip C. Kolin (review)

Suzan-Lori Parks just keeps on giving. Since her first play premiered as a student production in 1984, she’s penned more than 20 works for stage, screen, and print. Her solo show, Watch Me Work, a meditation on the creative process, periodically has been attracting audiences to the lobby of the Public Theater since 2011. Her family-reunion play, The Book of Grace, premiered in 2010 and continues to be produced around the US. Her 2011 controversial adaptation of Porgy and Bess for Broadway was acclaimed by Time magazine as the “#1 musical of the year” (and blasted by Stephen Sondheim). And she is currently at work on a musical about Ray Charles as well as on a second novel. Perhaps the biggest challenge of scholars, critics, and fans of Suzan-Lori Parks, then, is simply keeping up with her terrific output.

In response to that need, Philip C. Kolin has put together a new collection of essays and interviews that will be useful to undergraduate students of American drama as well as to anyone encountering Parks’s diverse range of works for the first time. Unlike Kevin J. Wetmore and Alycia Smith-Howard’s Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook (2007), a strong collection of essays that covers only Parks’s major plays through Topdog/Underdog (2001), and Deborah R. Geis’s Suzan-Lori Parks (2008), a smart critical monograph on Parks’s plays addressing especially their formal experimentalism, this new collection offers readers a gloss on virtually every one of Parks’s works through 2010 — plays, screenplays, and prose — through an eclectic mix of critical approaches. It also includes a production chronology as well as two new interviews that shed light on this mature stage of Parks’s career.

Given the diversity of Parks’s work, no single theme, formal approach, or generic category can serve as an overarching initiation, so instead this collection offers two introductory essays. The first, by Kolin, discusses Parks’s biography, major themes and dramatic strategies, and her dramatic inheritances. The second, by Rena Fraden, explores Parks’s own statements about her work, especially her notion of “radical inclusion” as opposed to essentialism. While both of these introductions perhaps suffer from a bit too much reverence for Parks herself, together they offer both biographical and theoretical context for an effective entrée into Parks’s oeuvre. Fraden’s introduction is especially useful in taking up Parks’s somewhat vague notion of radical inclusion and tightening it into an ethics of form, writing practice, and thematics that can be traced from the formal experimentalism of her earliest work to her very disciplined approach to writing in the 365 Days/365 Plays (2006) project.

The remaining essays move forward chronologically through Parks’s career, but three stand out in particular — Christine Woodworth’s discussion of children in Parks’s plays, Shawn Marie Garrett’s examination of Venus (1996), and Jon Dietrick’s reading of Parks’s “red letter plays” through economic theory. Woodworth’s elegant essay explores the representation of children across a considerable range of dramatic works. Arguing that “the presence of children in Parks’s canon underscores the cyclical, and traumatic, life of families and, by extension, history” (154), Woodworth reflects on the genealogical inheritances and legacies of Parks’s characters. Garrett’s essay yields a fresh perspective on Venus through a discussion of its premiere production, directed by Richard Foreman in the 1990s. Garrett argues that in bringing his signature style to Venus, Foreman obscured the intentions of Parks’s play — and especially the dynamic of love that the play centers on. In an equally strong but very different contribution, Dietrick examines American attitudes toward economic relations, especially the relation of the symbolic to the real in In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2000). Dietrick finds in both plays “a powerful American anxiety regarding the gulf between appearance and reality” (89...