Suzan-Lori Parks

A Casebook

Kevin J. Wetmore Jr, Alycia Smith-Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135871093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre américain

Suzan-Lori Parks confirmed herself as one of the most exciting and successful playwrights of her generation when her work Topdog/Underdog was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, making her the only African American woman to win the award.

Despite the cultural weight of this achievement, Parks remains difficult both to pigeonhole and to summarize.

This volume seeks to provide a context for her work, with essays from major and emerging scholars addressing the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, language and history in plays from her first major work, Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom to the 365 Days / 365 Plays project. Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook represents the first major study of this unique voice in contemporary drama.

Contributors: Leonard Berkman, Jason Bush, Shawn Marie-Garrett, Andrea Goto, Heidi Holder, Barbara Ozieblo, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr and Harvey Young.

Kevin J. Wetmore Jr is Professor of Theatre at Loyola Marymount University, as well as being a professional actor and director of the Comparative Drama Conference. He is the author of The Athenian Sun in an African Sky and Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre.

Alycia Smith-Howard an Assistant Professor at New York University in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she is the Artistic Director of the Gallatin Arts Festival and the Book Reviews Editor at the New England Theatre Journal. A Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library, her areas of specialization include Shakespeare, performance history, feminist theatre aesthetics and literature and drama of the south.

1
Figures, Speech and Form in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom

Shawn-Marie Garrett

Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom premiered in September 1989 under the direction of Liz Diamond at the Brooklyn Arts Council (BACA) Downtown Theatre in front of approximately 75 people. Diamond also later collaborated with Parks on The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1992) and The America Play (1994). She was introduced to Parks’s work by the New York experimental theatre’s designated mentor, the playwright Mac Wellman. Parks and Diamond met in 1988 at the Lincoln Centre café, hit it off, and agreed that they should work together on the premiere of Imperceptible Mutabilities.

Audiences and critics would soon share Wellman and Diamond’s excitement about Parks. The New York Times’s Mel Gussow lauded the play, the premiere, and Parks’s ‘historical perspective and theatrical versatility’ as well as her ‘ingenuity and humanity’ (C24). The Village Voice awarded Imperceptible Mutabilities its 1990 Obie Award for ‘Best New American Play’. To many people, Imperceptible Mutabilities signalled the long awaited arrival in the American experimental theatre of a politically minded new playwright of originality and substance, physically possessed by words, mindful of their many shapes and powers, and heedful of their long half-lives. The arrival was even more exciting because this new experimental dramatist was an African-American woman. Apart from work by Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange, American theatre in the 1980s was dominated by white playwrights.

Time has not diminished Imperceptible Mutabilities’ power. In dense, allusive theatrical poetry, it exposes hidden connections among African-American literary and historical figures who span several hundred years, two continents and the Middle Passage. Its obsessively precise language shows, paradoxically, the impossibility of pinning language down: Utterance, identity and space all imperceptibly mutate as they regenerate over the course of the performance. Like the plays it precedes, Imperceptible Mutabilities is fundamentally concerned with the problem of history, especially the problem of the self in relation to history, i.e. the problem of identity.

(Un)seeing place

Slide show: Images of Molly and Charlene. Molly and Charlene speak as the stage remains semi-dark and the slides continue to flash overhead.

CHARLENE: How dja get through it?

MOLLY: Mm not through it.

CHARLENE: Yer leg. Thuh guard. Lose weight?

MOLLY: Hhh. What should I do Chona should I jump should I jump or what? (25)

In its 1989 premiere, Imperceptible Mutabilities started in a near-blackout, which remained throughout the first scene. It started, therefore, with a fundamental formal reversal of the traditional Greek meaning and purpose of theatre as a seeing-place. From the beginning, the production unsettled the traditional grounds of theatrical truth (i.e. collective witness, recognition, identification, etc.). The actors play it lento, parlando, as if speaking privately. Though disembodied, Parks language was familiar, without a trace of the archness or self-consciousness so often heard in New York experimental theatre at the time (and since). The sounds were concentrated, clear, and unadorned by stylization. In this way, Diamond immediately established the kind of theatrical clarity that can sustain multiple paradoxes. Affectless, contextless, Parks words were freed to perform as poetry: ironic, vernacular free verse in the form of dialogue.

Parks and Diamond had exiled ‘physiological man’ (Zola 54), usually at the centre of naturalistic drama, from their stage. In his place, two women appeared (though only in darkness), the subjects of a slide show that flashed overhead. The women were attractive, contemporary, 20-something and black. The slide show was a series of innocuous, flattering colour portraits: First, the portrait of a serene woman [flash]; then the portrait of a melancholy woman [flash]; then the first woman again, laughing [flash] and so on. As it unfolded, the slide show began to collaborate naturally with Parks’ language to form, in the audience’s mind, a dramatic situation. The dark stage gradually took shape in the audience’s imagination as a familiar form: a naked little apartment that poetry built. The audience saw the kitchen of a fly-infested urban apartment (‘Flies are casin yer food Mona’) and two African-American women, roommates or sisters maybe, who called each other Mona and Chona. Mona, perhaps the younger of the two, was in despair, having failed an English test (of basic skills), lost her job, and given up looking for another job (‘Only thing worse n working sslookin for work’) (26). Chona offered eggs and sympathy and used a parable about a robber without speech to obliquely encourage Mona to keep up the fight. Finally, Mona concurred, ‘Once there was uh me named Mona who wanted tuh jump ship but didn’t … Ya got the help wanteds?’ (26). The comic, sentimental scene (vaguely familiar somehow, as if from television) quickly drew to a close. In a production of Imperceptible Mutabilities staged several years later (directed by Kaia Calhoun at the Yale School of Drama), the lights came down at the end of the first scene with a burst from a laugh track that underscored the televisual feeling of the scene.

With light, the audience might have seen a black girl considering suicide, perched at a window, her leg wedged through a window guard. On the page, Parks (cued by Shakespeare and the Greeks) does not spell out (‘in a pissy set of parentheses’ [Parks 15]) what Mona has or has not ‘got through’. In this early play, Parks makes most matters imperceptible, or rather, she retrains her audiences and readers’ habits of perception until they, too, can see the metonymic mutabilities she wants them to see, which are changes quieter and more radical than Aristotelian reversals. In Parks theatre, sight tends to be less instrumental than hearing for discovering these mutabilities, not only in the play’s first scene, but throughout the play. (In Diamond’s New York premiere production, Part 2 of the play, ‘Third Kingdom’, was also performed in darkness.) ‘Splat. Splat. Splatsplatsplat’ (27): Parks riffs on this syllable over and over in Parts 1 and 2, and depending on the imaginary context, a roach is squashed, an egg cracks, a suicide hits the pavement, or a captive African is jettisoned from a slave ship. Yet the stage picture remains little changed; the sound-images become ‘notes’, as Alisa Solomon writes, played ‘again and again in ever-changing chords’ (75).

Writing, too, is unreliable in this play, and a name is a mere enigma: ‘All by dint’, as Poe writes in his Enigma, ‘Of the dear names … concealed within’t’ (761). Never mind what the two women onstage call each other. On the page, the speakers’ names are written not as Mona and Chona, but as Molly and Charlene. Meanwhile, Molly/Mona frequently speaks of herself in the third person. She speaks of herself, as Shange’s lady in brown says, in ‘dark phrases of womanhood/of never havin been a girl’ (3). ‘Once there was uh me named Mona who wanted tuh jump ship but didn’t’, Molly/Mona says. This is third-person Mona, the same one who later appears in the bowels of a slave ship in ‘Third Kingdom’ (Part 2) as a figure called Kin-Seer who always-already wonders, ‘Shouldijumporwhut?’ (40). The vertiginous logic of Parksian stage-time and psychological exposition dictates that Molly/Mona’s 300-year-old back story comes later in the play, and this is another way in which Parks opens up history’s Cartesian time-space and its protagonist, physiological man.

In whatever guise she haunts the stage, in whatever era, Molly/Mona is a survivor. She resigns herself again and again to life, even though, again like lady in brown,

‘she’s been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice’. (Shange 3)

‘Once there was uh me’: Mona, Molly, Kin-Seer and the lady in brown. Who, where, when is that me now? Imperceptible Mutabilities offers a possible answer: As a consequence of history, the African-American me is three-personed: ‘uh third Self made by thuh space in between’, Africa and America, that is, a ‘third Self’ created by and still stuck in the Middle Passage (39). In the ‘Third Kingdom’ section of the play, Kin-Seer sings of this sorrow:

‘Last night I dreamed of where I comed from. But where I comed from diduhnt look like nowhere I been ….I was standin with my toes stuckted in thuh dirt. Nothin in front of me but water. And I was wavin. Wavin. Wavin at my uther me who I could barely see. Over thuh water on thuh uther cliff I could see my uther me but my uther me could not see me’. (38)

Dreamlike, yet inescapably political, Imperceptible Mutabilities works through 300 years of history in 3 hours or so. Its aim is not to present a totalizing vision of African-American history, but rather to dramatize the impossibility of such a vision. The play is dizzying and hallucinogenic, frequently threatening to careen out of control, touching on horrors beyond words, horrors signified on the page by blank spaces, dashes and guttural spellings (i.e. ‘gaw’, ‘eeeee-uh’ and ‘thup’). It enacts the hunger and obligation as well as the heartrending difficulty of seeing (the central action in this play) the truth, whether past or present, to say nothing of capturing it in literary or expressive form. The play’s events only affirm that one must keep peering into the darkness. In the Middle Passage, Kin-Seer reminds Over-Seer, another figure on stage, about the importance of continuing to look for her lost selves: ‘You said I could wave as long as I see um. I still see um’. ‘Wave then’, Over-Seer commands (40).

Uh speech in uh language of codes

Like all of Parks’s plays, Imperceptible Mutabilities on the page is merely, as Parks writes, a ‘blueprint of an event’ (4) with an audience. If the play is a blueprint, then it is not a mirror. It does not seek to reflect or even distort the surface of everyday reality; rather, in the manner of experimental drama by Stein, Beckett, Shange and Kennedy, it creates its own hermetic, repetitive world, consciously unmaking dramatic conventions to remake the theatre. In this kind of drama, words and letters work like chromosomes. Any missing or extra words or letters may signal a profound transformation, and they may leap generations. Language and timespace are porous, relative and perspectival. Forbidding on the page at first glance, Imperceptible Mutabilities insists on being heard aloud. At the same time, Parks writing holds secrets that can only be deciphered by studying the coded page. For example, the laughs in Molly’s basic skills recitations (i.e. “S-K’ is /sk/ as in ‘ask’’, and ‘The-little-lamb-follows-closely-behind-at-Mary’s-heels-as-Mary-boards-the-train’ [25]) are a matter of punctuation. Then there are the still deeper mysteries the writing holds: for example, the secrets of the characters’ double names and the slide show that Parks specifies should ‘flash overhead’ throughout the first scene.

‘How dja get through it?’ is the first line of the play. This is a question one might ask a survivor. ‘Mm not through it’, which is a likely response. Like Endgame’s first lines, Imperceptible Mutabilities’ first lines quickly shrug off teleology; as they continue, they look like non-sequiturs. Like Hamlet’s first lines, they questioningly begin a problem to which the play will return again and again. In Imperceptible Mutabilities, it is getting through. Imperceptible Mutabilities is Parks’s first history play and her most radical experiment with indeterminacy. These lines about getting through it, which rise from a crisis of language and a failed performance (i.e. the botched English test), have an additional resonance: They echo with the struggle to begin a life as a writer. As Molly/Mona says, the ‘whole idea uh talkin right now aint right no way. Aint natural’ (25). What about writing? Toni Morrison (x) describes it as a process of ‘struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people and language’. Hortense J. Spillers argues that the ‘Great Long National Shame’ of slavery and its aftermath have ‘marked’ black women as stereotypes, even as they have erased their true names: ‘Sticks and bricks might break our bones’, Spillers writes, ‘but words will most certainly kill us’ (60). At the start of Parks’s first major drama, Molly/Mona is in danger of words and hesitates even to claim her name.

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Table of contents

• Casebooks on Modern Dramatists
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Chronology
• Introduction Perceptible Mutabilities – The Many Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks/The Many Suzan-Lori Parks of Plays
• 1 Figures, Speech and Form in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom
• 2 Strange Legacy: The history plays of Suzan-Lori Parks
• 3 Choral Compassion: In the Blood and Venus
• 4 The ‘fun that I had’: The theatrical gendering of Suzan-Lori Parks’s ‘figures’
• 5 Language as Protagonist in In the Blood
• 6 Who’s Thuh Man?! Historical melodrama and the performance of masculinity in Topdog/Underdog
• 7 Re-enacting: metatheatre in thuh plays of Suzan-Lori Parks
• 8 Digging Out of the Pigeonhole: African-American representation in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks
• 9 It’s an Oberammergau Thing: An interview with Suzan-Lori Parks
• 10 Selected Reading
• Index