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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works ed. by Philip C. Kolin Stefanie A. Jones Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010; pp. 220. Editor Philip Kolin's collection Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works covers a wide range of the playwright's work, investigating topics as various as hip-hop and jazz, the place and power of the writer, and critiques of capitalism, as well as expected "Parksian" (3) themes like the "Great Hole of History" (Parks's dual conception of American history as simultaneously a place and a lack) and stylistic techniques like "Rep & Rev" (repetition and revision) and "Radical Inclusion" (Parks's concept that the playwright should welcome and fully engage every idea that comes to mind). Taken collectively, the essays reveal several unifying threads that knit the broad topical range of Parks's work into a comprehensive oeuvre. The volume's first chapter, Kolin's "Puck's Magic Mojo: The Achievements of Suzan-Lori Parks," provides biographical and critical background on Parks and identifies several key themes in her work. Comparing her to Shakespeare's Puck, Kolin discusses the metatheatricality and showmanship of her work, revealing it to be a realm of spectacle and linguistic experimentation that invites us to explore both its fictional worlds and the social world they model. Rena Fraden's "Everything and Nothing: The Political and Religious Nature of Suzan-Lori Parks's 'Radical Inclusion'" follows with a consideration of politics and religion in Parks's plays, understanding the playwright's strategy of Radical Inclusion [End Page 299] to be directed toward the creation of a politics of world citizenship and a wide embrace of spiritual and religious traditions. Arguing that the writing of 365 Days/365 Plays was a "religious and political act" (23), Fraden's essay resonates with Jennifer Larson's contribution, "Suzan-Lori Parks's 365 Days/365 Plays: A (W)hole New Approach to Theatre," which appears later in the book. In it, Larson compares the concept of the "Great Hole of History" from The America Play to its more inclusive appearances in 365 Plays/365 Days, permitting the (w)hole to function as a "formal metaphor" (138) for history that includes a place for the writer. Jon Dietrick's essay "'A Full Refund Aint Enough': Money in Suzan-Lori Parks's Red Letter Plays" identifies the characters' need for money as a driving force in Fucking A and In the Blood. Dietrick finds that the characters' agency is limited by economic demands, which nonetheless stimulate their desire for stability in an unstable world. Because of this desire, the characters struggle to establish a fixed relationship between the symbolic and the real, allowing economic value to supplant other forms of worth, including the value of human life. In her piece, Nicole Hodges Persley expands jazzbased analyses of Parks's history plays by including the hip-hop techniques of sampling and remixing to reconsider her treatment of repetition. Building on previous scholarship on Rep & Rev, Persley reframes moments of repetition as sampled or borrowed from historical and intertextual referents (or from within each play) and remixed or used differently. She explores how Parks uses this method to expose or emphasize historical injustices and their continuing impact, especially when categories of racial subjugation are reinscribed on the body. Jochen Achilles likewise complicates our understanding of Rep & Rev in "Does Reshuffling the Cards Change the Game? Structures of Play in Parks's Topdog/Underdog." Drawing on game theory, Achilles finds that Parks stages and reframes two major kinds of ludic interaction—determinative play and free play—in order to pose questions about who retains symbolic power. Attending to the performance history of Parks's work, Shawn-Marie Garrett's "'For the Love of the Venus': Suzan-Lori Parks, Richard Foreman, and the Premiere of Venus" argues that Richard Foreman's direction of the 1996 world premiere of Venus should not be considered the definitive interpretation of Parks's play. Documenting differences in Parks's and Foreman's interpretations, Garrett claims that the latter's production, while honoring the playwright's...