Modern Drama

Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays are known for their explorations of history and identity, which, as types of myth, emerge through a process of repetition and revision, or, as the playwright herself calls it, “rep & rev.” The histories and identities represented in Parks’s plays – individual, familial, cultural, national, ethnic, racial – are flagrantly performative and mutually constitutive. As Parks puts it, “I’m interested in how history spews out biography” (61). Not static truths pre-existing representation, history and identity are [End Page 536] dynamic creations, representational to the core. Throughout Parks’s many plays, stories emerge, return, and spin into history, while figures appear, perform, and accrue fledgling identities. At the same time, the plays deconstruct myths of history and of identity, performing genealogies and archaeologies – even autopsies – on them and fracturing them into their constituent stories, phrases, figures, words, and absences. Marc Robinson notes that we see this “erosion of character” in almost every Parks play, in which “[b]odies turn to maimed bodies, turn to body parts, turn to facsimiles of body parts, turn, finally to mere words for those parts” (163).

Reading Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries is like reading a Parks play, with Suzan-Lori Parks as the central character. Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young’s collection begins with the editors’ useful overview and summary of her oeuvre (including her novel and screenplays, along with stage plays) and ends with commentaries by key critics and collaborators (most notably, director Liz Diamond and producer Bonnie Metzgar). But the lead feature of the collection is Suzan-Lori Parks “in person,” which, as in a Parks play, means Suzan-Lori Parks in the process of verbal self-representation and re-presentation. As we read interview after interview, we watch recurrent motifs and images circulate, as they do in a Parks play, and we observe Parks riffing on, repeating, and revising these figures.

In this way, Parks the playwright, in her interviews, becomes a mythological figure, as subject to “rep & rev” as any of her other figures. We hear, for example, of her thesis play at Mt. Holyoke’s being denied performance because “[y]ou can’t have dirt on stage. That’s not a play” (67). As Parks’s career progresses and she does put more and more dirt on stage, both literally and figuratively, the quotation is revised to “[w]e don’t have dirt on stage” (79). This foundational interdiction is regularly repeated and revised into myth and becomes part of the larger “digger motif,” accumulating the imagery of archaeology, burial, resurrection, and (w)holes. Alongside this motif, we witness the emergence of the digestive motif, which includes observations about the physical parallels between laughter and vomiting and the idea of writing from the gut. (Parks says of words, “I ingest them and digest them, and they move me literally in my bowels” [43].) In another cluster of theatrical self-representations, we watch her try on the idea of her theatre as a kind of ritual, then as a kind of church mass, and later as a kind of Passion Play, or “Oberammergau thing” (120), as she quotes and builds on her own metaphors from previous interviews to “spew out” an ever-revolving artistic biography. While comments from interview to interview replicate and reference one another, there’s no final version, no set formula or endpoint. It shouldn’t surprise us that the approach Parks takes to other identities –Abraham Lincoln and the Founding Fathers in The America Play, Saartjie Baartman (the “Hottentot Venus”) in Venus, “American” identity in so many plays – is replicated and performed in Suzan-Lori Parks in Person. [End Page 537]

More complementary than supplementary, this collection will serve as a very helpful co-text for readers of Parks’s notoriously “difficult” plays, as it gives background and context, as well as possible readings of some of...