The first time I read a Suzan-Lori Parks play I flashed to Wittgenstein, not Gertrude Stein. There seemed to me to be a utilitarian focus to Parks' wordsa surgical intensity-that belied her play's surface impression of hypnotic languor. Surely this is what Wittgenstein meant when he spoke of language games, I thought, and the contingencies of various meanings in languages' various contexts, words having uses and not mere dictionary definitions (see Hallett 1967), family resemblances of certain words, etc. Wittgenstein believed that the philosopher's task was to bring words back from their metaphysical usage to their everyday usage, and Parks' drama seems to play between the boundaries of both. There is a momentum in Parks' musicality, an aim in mind, a propulsion. But unlike surgical instruments, Parks' words do not seem sharp somehow, but blunt and easy: meaning, it seemed, would come to the reader after the fourth downbeat, or maybe the fifth, head nodding, foot tapping. I couldn't conceive of actually seeing these dramas staged in the theatre; when, I wondered, would I get to close my eyes and listen? Language does have an unearthing function--i la Wittgenstein-in Parks' dramas, most explicitly in The America Play (I994). He digged the hole and the hole held him, Parks writes in a footnote to the play, as History itself is excavated from the hole of history. If it's taken for granted in our so-called postmodern condition that history is a narrative about the events of the past, then The America Play is, on one level, an example of a staging of that idea. But the play goes further: aware of the uses made of language, Parks suggests that-even if objective truth and knowledge is impossible--there are some discourses that are more powerful than others. This notion shows up in the detritus scattered throughout the great hole of history: the Lincoln-head pennies, the false beards, the stovepipe hats. All these historical fetishes (or tshatschkes, as Parks likes to call them)' are themselves put to use in what