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 Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010. pp. vi + 213. $39.95 paper. Suzan-Lori Parks’s work has dominated American theatre for the last decade. From being the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama to her massive, multiple, simultaneous premiere of 365 Days/365 Plays, which resulted in a year long production all over the world, Parks has changed the world of theatre, and the recent spate of scholarship about her now expands with this excellent body of scholarship. Kolin’s dynamic anthology offers twelve essays, two interviews, and a production chronology that scholars will find invaluable. On the whole, the essays are eclectic and insightful and many point the way toward new and further directions in the study and understanding of Parks’s work. Readers will find a great breadth of analysis here, but the brief length of each piece allows for only some depth, making it this reviewer’s hope that many of the authors here will expand and develop their ideas. The book opens, after a brief preface summarizing each piece, with an essay by editor Kolin, who writes on biography and performativity. The essay is a synthesis of interviews and statements by Parks that, once one moves past the occasional hyperbole about her genius, sets the tone and resonates with the rest of the volume. Kolin sees Parks as publicly performing “Parks,” a conclusion that Parks refutes in the interview near the end of the book, in which she argues she does not act when she is onstage in a play: “I don’t think I was acting. I was just being. I was just up there being me” (187). The tension between these two [End Page 165] observations perfectly captures the challenge of analyzing Parks, as both statements are true, yet they display the paradoxes of Parks that are beautifully illuminated throughout this volume. Rena Fraden analyzes the political and religious nature of Parks’s “radical inclusion,” locating her spirituality in a vague new age mysticism rather than in the Catholicism of her youth. Fraden also presents Parks’s approach to American history as “radically inclusive,” cannily observing that the playwright rejects all essentialisms and deconstructs both history and ethnicity. Jacqueline Wood employs Jazz as a metaphor to understand the female self in three early works: Betting on the Dust Commander, Pickling, and Devotees in the Garden of Love. Referring to what Parks does as “Beckettian Jazz” (a poetic and apt description), Wood sees these three plays as “examples of such interrogations of African-American female selfhood in relation to time and memory, blackness and social tradition” (34, 35). Philip C. Kolin’s second offering is an essay on memory in Parks’s Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, finding “the production of memory is at the heart” of the play (46). He also considers the linguistic play between mind, mine, and mines in the play’s dialogue and the specific role black bodies play on stage. In one of the more cutting-edge essays in the book, Nicole Hodges Persley employs hip hop theory to probe Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and The America Play. Viewing Parks’s work as employing the techniques of sampling and remixing, as well as tropes of emulation and reference, Persley makes a compelling argument for understanding Parks through hip hop culture. This essay is a perfect example of a study that could easily have been a book-length investigation on its own. Shawn Marie Garrett, one of the most prolific Parks scholars working today, contributes an investigation into the premiere production of Venus and, later in the volume, an interview with Parks herself. The essay argues for a reevaluation of the understanding of the premiere of Venus at the Yale Repertory Theatre and subsequently at the Public Theatre in New York, directed by Richard Foreman, “a story more of fruitful collusion than collaboration” (77). What makes the essay interesting is that...