8/25/2016 American Theatre - Archives October 2000 HOME ABOUT SUPPORT CONTACT LOG IN Search The Possession of Suzan­Lori Parks By listening to "the figures that take up residence inside me," the playwright resurrects a lost and dangerous history­­and dares audiences to venture with her into its depths By Shawn­Marie Garrett Suzan­Lori Parks began writing novels at the age of five. But it wasn't until she first heard voices that she realized she might be cursed and blessed with a case of possession­­in both senses of that word. Parks knew that she possessed something, but she also knew that it possessed her. It was 1983. She was working on a short story called "The Wedding Pig" for a writing class she was taking with James Baldwin at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. Suddenly she had the sense that the people she was writing about were in the room with her, "standing right behind me, talking. Not telling the story, but acting it out­­doing it. It was not me," she says, "not the voice of confidence or the voice of doubt. It was outside of me. And all the stories I wrote for this class were like that." Parks intended from the beginning that her writing should be read aloud. So in Baldwin's workshops she would speak her stories, playing all the characters, recreating her creative process, moving naturally from writing to (or back to) performance. Observing her, Baldwin soon posed the obvious question: "Why don't you try writing plays?" Parks had never done theatre in high school or in college because, well, she thought it was "dumb," and most theatre people turned her off. But this was James Baldwin talking. "Someone I respected was telling me what to do­­in a good way," she says. "It wasn't some Whosey­Whatsit who runs La Fuddy Duddy Playhouse in Whosey­Whatsitville." (Experience has instilled in Parks a healthy contempt for dim­witted dramaturgy, workshops and readings that go nowhere, and the cookie­cutter mentality of conventional "play development.") Baldwin's suggestion inspired her to complete her first play, The Sinners' Place, during her senior year, and a small­college territorial battle ensued. The play earned Parks honors in her English major even as it was rejected for production by the theatre department on the grounds that "You can't put dirt onstage! That's not a play!" Dirt Onstage would turn out to be something of a theme for Parks, who has gone on since her Mount Holyoke days to become one of the most intriguing and challenging young playwrights of the contemporary American stage. Even The Sinners' Place, though "only a first try at writing," she said in a 1996 interview, "had all of the things in it that I'm obsessed with now. Like memory and family and history and the past." And, of course, "a lot of dirt on stage which was being dug at." In her subsequent history plays, Parks's process, as she describes it, was one of digging and listening­­for action, characters and words­­rather than of trying to shape them from the outside according to the more familiar dramaturgical model that "cleanly ARCS," as she wrote in a later essay. But then, a play that "arcs" moves, whether with dread or anticipation, towards an inevitable future. Parks's history plays, by contrast, try to make contact with an unknown past, and so require a different process, a different structure­­and, yes, occasionally, dirt. "I'm obsessed with resurrecting," she said in an interview published around the time of the appearance of perhaps her most provocative play, Venus, "with bringing up the dead...and hearing their stories as they come into my head." The blow of Parks's early rejection at Mount Holyoke was softened somewhat when Mary McHenry of the college's English department slipped Parks a copy of Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro. Along with Ntozake Shange, who devised the "choreopoem" as theatre text, the adventurous Kennedy showed Parks that she could do anything she wanted on stage. Parks had already learned from her favorite fiction writers, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, that she could do anything she wanted with language, and that character and feeling needn't be sacrificed at the high altar of formal experimentation. "Surface difficulty, daring, order, inventiveness and passion­­ writing should have all of these," Parks says. But mostly (and characteristically) Parks approved of these great modernist writers' chutzpah: "I'm fascinated with what they were allowed to do, I guess," she told an interviewer in 1995. "What Joyce allowed himself to do, what Beckett allowed himself to do, and Woolf...what they got away with." From the beginning, Parks wanted to dare as much, to offer as much to her audiences as these writers offered to their readers­­and to get away with it. Unlike many young writers, she was also up to the challenge. In his evaluation of her performance in his class, Baldwin described Parks as "an utterly astounding and beautiful creature who may become one of the most valuable artists of our time"­­and this was before she'd had a single play staged or an essay published. Given her ambition and her admiration for "difficult" writing, only one question remained: Were American theatres and their audiences ready to dare as much for her? 2. Politics Sometimes courageous, sometimes cowardly, always embattled, the American theatre, at the moment Parks emerged, found itself smack in the middle of the so­called "culture wars" and the battle over the reconfiguraton of the National Endowment for the Arts. Within the theatre, debates raged (and still rage) about how multiculturalism should work, not just in theory but in practice. By 1989, the year Parks had her first professional production, black playwrights and actors and "nontraditional" casting practices were mostly "in"; black directors, designers and administrators were, and still are, mostly "out." Despite the increasing diversification of the American repertoire in the decade since then, there persists in many quarters a mentality, however well­meaning, that ghettoizes African­American drama, and in so doing oversimplifies its formal variety and implies that white and black theatre (and by extension white and black history) have nothing to do with each other: they remain separate but unequal. Separatism has frequently cropped up as both a white and a black utopian dream. Parks, more than any other recent writer­­more than August Wilson or other polemicists "fired," as Wilson has written, in the "kiln" of the '60s­­shows, mostly through her sense of humor, exactly how and why trying to make black history a minor subplot of a white story is laughable. Or laughable and painful, to be more precise: a stinging joke with real­world consequences, like the joke of "scientific" racial classification itself, a perverse fiction made fact in the 19th century by misinterpreters of Darwin, "proved" through phrenology and other invented sciences, written as history, and then denounced in the early part of the century by African­American intellectuals. More recently, though, race, as well as gender and ethnicity, have been reworked into the more individualistic politics of "identity"­­a word to conjure with at the time Parks was building her reputation. https://www.tcg.org/publications/at/2000/parks.cfm 1/5 8/25/2016 American Theatre - Archives October 2000 Parks's appearance on the theatrical scene seemed to jibe perfectly with the American theatre's changing policies in the '90s: its 11th­hour grant proposals emphasizing its dedication to multiculturalism, its suddenly overriding priority to rescue its ever­sinking bottom line by reaching out to "new" audiences. Yet this seemingly perfect timing turned out to be a mixed blessing. Indubitably, Parks's career took off fast. Her second play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, written in 1989 when Parks was 28, received ecstatic reviews when it debuted at the Brooklyn experimental outpost BACA Downtown. It won her an Obie, and Mel Gussow of the New York Times left Brooklyn so impressed he called Parks "the year's most promising playwright." Since then, Parks has benefited from numerous grants and has become an artistic associate of the Yale Repertory Theatre, which has produced three of her plays, including two premieres. She now has an artistic home at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, which has housed three of her plays so far and will produce another, Topdog/Underdog, this season. All richly deserved. Yet the love affair between Parks and the American theatre has, like most love affairs, been complicated. Words like "diversity" and "multiculturalism" sound good in publications, but the truth is, many theatres are still afraid to take what they consider to be financial risks and often assume, a priori, that audiences will bristle at unfamiliar or marginal work. "Marginal": a code word for formally experimental or "culturally specific" plays. According to marketing departments, Parks's are both. The "surface difficulty" and "daring" of Parks's first two history plays, Imperceptible Mutabilities and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, did appeal strongly to a small yet unpredictable assortment of theatre artists, audiences and critics who could see how Parks was inventing new ways of shaping dramatic character and structure, and could hear the originality and feel the physical impact of what she was doing with words. "Her voice has already made a difference on our stage," dramaturg Laurence Maslon of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., told a reporter in 1993. "If we can't hear her, there's nothing wrong with her voice, just something wrong with our ears." "She sits all alone amongst her generation, peerless," Parks's fellow playwright Han Ong maintained the next year, at the time of the premiere of Parks's third history play, The America Play.