Suzan-Lori Parks Research Articles

Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) by Suzan-Lori Parks (review)

Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) by Suzan-Lori Parks (review)

Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries ed. by Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young (review)

Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young, eds. Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries. London: Routledge, 2014. Pp. xii + 228. $130.00. Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young introduce their book of interviews and commentaries on playwright Suzan-Lori Parks with an essay titled Watch Me Work, which takes its name from one of Parks's more recent performance projects in which she sits on an elevated platform in the lobby of a theatre and performs the act of playwriting for anyone to watch. This title also moves to the central objective of Suzan-Lori Parks in Person, which is to provide primary insight into the methods, techniques, and inspirations for Parks's prolific and award-winning body of work. As they set the stage for her thoughts, confessions, and revelations in the collected interviews, Kolin and Young bring focus to Parks's literary influences (which include Baldwin, Kennedy, Joyce, and Faulkner), the stylistic innovations of her new ... stage and her sustained mission to fill the great (w)hole of through radical inclusion across her work from 1985 to 2013(1,5). The book is divided into two sections. Part 1 includes eighteen interviews with Parks and her collaborators, and part 2 consists of commentaries from the directors who have worked most closely with her or critics and scholars who have distinguished themselves through their work on Parks's drama (151). The interviews in part 1 are organized chronologically, from a 1992 piece that considers the groundbreaking linguistic work she creates in The Death of the Last Negro in the Whole Entire World at Yale Repertory Theatre to a 2011 conversation with Parks the director/playwright as she prepares The Book of Grace for the ZACH Theatre premiere. The book also moves beyond newspaper interviews that surround specific productions to include pieces from magazines, collected essays, academic journals, and even a one-on-one piece where Parks interviews Adrienne Kennedy, a playwright who had a profound effect on her own writing. A large portion of the commentaries in part 2 are transcribed from a Hunter College symposium on Parks's work in 2004. One of the panels at the symposium featured critics and scholars including Robert Brustein and Alisa Solomon, and the other panel focused on the directors who have staged the premieres of Parks s major works, including Richard Foreman and Liz Diamond. In total, Suzan-Lori Parks in Person is an engaging work that offers insights into the playwright's mind and work, from her undergraduate thesis to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog and her international project 365 Days/365 Plays. Kolin and Young provide texts that explore not only how she works but also how she develops seeds of ideas into fully realized productions. The one mildly frustrating aspect of the book is that, by the nature of the art of interviewing, the questions and the answers in the eighteen interviews often repeat and overlap. This happens most often when there are multiple interviews from the same period or surrounding the same play, with Parks offering anecdotes about the writing process or illuminating some aspect of history that inspired the work. However, the repetitions that develop throughout Parks's own narrative across the book actually become the threads that weave together the major themes and effects of her writing. In particular, three threads become prominent in the discussion of her writing: her use of language, her stylistic choices, and the way she makes and mines history (9). From the beginning of Parks's interactions with critics, scholars, and audiences, the way she uses language to delineate a character's race, class, and emotional trajectory has been a marker of her innovative genius. Not only does Parks strive to explore African American linguistic sound, rhythm, and pattern, but she imbues the language with specificity, emotion, and meaning, creating poetic dialogue that ranges from heartfelt plaintive yearnings to blistering condemnations (35,69). …

Learning from the Dramaturg: Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play in the Literature Classroom

abstract: This essay offers the strategy of “dramaturgical arousal” as a pedagogical model for engaging with drama in the literature classroom. Using Mark Bly’s ground-breaking dramaturgical work on Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, including the theatre program he produced for its Yale Repertory premiere, as well as the play’s co-collaborative mobilization of text and performance, “Learning from the Dramaturg” offers a new way of rethinking the often fraught divide between text and theatre. Just as Parks’s jazz poetics performatively riff on the historical record, so too does Bly’s work co-performatively riff on the play, producing collaborative engagements that are more generative than evaluative. Fostering greater critical awareness of the ways in which the differing codes of textuality and performance produce their audiences, these collaborations model fresh encounters that fruitfully blur the distinctions between drama/literature and performance/theatre.

Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature by Brian Norman (review)

Reviewed by: Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature by Brian Norman Éva Tettenborn Brian Norman. Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. viii + 223 pp. In Dead Women Talking, Brian Norman focuses on the “evolution of dead women talking into a full-fledged American literary tradition by the later twentieth century” (20). Norman investigates how the talking dead woman can claim the status of citizen, albeit dead, and to what extend her peculiar speech act occurs at moments “when [women characters’] experiences of death can address an issue of injustice that their communities might prematurely consign to the past” (1). To this end, Norman examines eleven works of American literature frequently taught in college courses: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, selected stories from Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman.” Following an introduction that traces initial manifestations of the tradition of the talking dead woman to authors such as Emily Dickinson, he dedicates one chapter to each work, discussing Kingston’s work in the chapter that serves as conclusion. The book’s breadth of works surveyed invites readers to consider the trope of the talking dead woman across a variety of literary periods and genres. Norman succeeds in establishing his argument that the figure of the talking dead woman has been employed consistently to address social concerns of the respective time periods when the works were published. Thus, for example, he examines Walker’s use of Zora Neale Hurston during a period of reclaiming African American culture and literature or Castillo’s portrayal of the detrimental impact of greed on both contemporary society and the environment. Norman concedes that the works he examines meet his criteria of linking dead women’s speech to the pursuit of social justice to varying degrees. Particularly engaging is Norman’s choice of Faulkner’s work compared to its rewriting, Parks’s novel. In his comparative analysis of both works in the Parks chapter, Norman illustrates how Parks reimagines the literary tradition of the talking dead woman as a revision of Faulkner’s modernist aesthetic. This comparison is perhaps Norman’s strongest illustration of the existence of a coherent literary tradition that consciously employs the figure of the talking dead woman. About his critical and theoretical approach to the topic Norman admits that his “method throughout the book is primarily text [End Page 568] driven” and that the discussion’s “apparatus varies by chapter,” but he points out that “the argument remains consistent: these dead women seek posthumous citizenship” (17). While many readers will welcome the literary discussion’s focus on a larger number of works, some might also wish for a more defined, overarching thesis grounded in a theoretical apparatus that applies to all of the readings (for example, through a more sustained engagement with feminist criticism or theories of trauma, grief, and mourning). Many scholars will no doubt find useful points of departure in Norman’s work for their own research, and the book functions as an invitation and a road map for those who wish to embark on their own exploration of the topic in literary criticism. In his exploration of dead women characters, Norman carefully distinguishes the object of his study from the related figure of the ghost. As he clarifies, venturing beyond the role of the haunting figure, talking dead women “seek a place within their communities and often the legal apparatus itself” (8) while rejecting “familiar tropes of gothic, horror, and mythic modes” (9). Ultimately, Norman’s discussion suggests that the talking dead woman advances a transgressive political agenda, while the ghost as a presence may seem more enigmatic and incidental, allowing haunted communities to essentially dismiss the phenomenon rather than engage it. For example, he sums up...

The Radical Formalism of Suzan-Lori Parks and Sarah Kane

When Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, about the displays of Saartjie Baartman in early nineteenth-century Europe, opened in 1996, the outrage it provoked by suggesting that its central, black character may have been complicit in her plight raised yet again one of the most inspiring and frustrating questions in modern US theatre history: how to stage the racial Other. Even the most sympathetic responses to the play revealed the difficulty of assuming a critical stance toward the racially marked body (especially the black female body) that is affectively fixed as a symbol of martyrdom and victimization. In fact, Shannon Jackson has proposed that the racially marked body's resistance to being reduced to a critical sign, free from affect, may be definitive of race as a social phenomenon. As US theatre history demonstrates, onstage this resistance is highly productive of controversy, much of which has focused on the question of which representational contracts may most accurately convey the experiences of racially marked people. In this sense, art critic Abiola Sinclair's reading of Parks's experimental aesthetic as a traitorous concession to a white theatrical tradition was unexceptional; it was a reminder of the historical efforts of African American artists to create distinctly black art.

Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries. Edited by Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young. London and New York: Routledge, 2014; pp. xii + 227, 9 figures. $130 cloth, $41.95 paper, $41.95 e-book.

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Freedom time: the poetics and politics of black experimental writing

Standard literary criticism tends to either ignore or downplay the unorthodox tradition of experimental that emerged in the wake of protests against colonization and Jim Crow-era segregation. Histories of African American literature likewise have a hard time accounting for the distinctiveness of experimental writing, which is part of a general shift in emphasis among writers away from appeals for social recognition or raising consciousness. In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed offers a theoretical reading of black experimental writing that presents the term both as a profound literary development and as a concept for analyzing how challenges us to rethink the relationships between race and literary techniques. Through extended analyses of works by African American and Afro-Caribbean writers-including N. H. Pritchard, Suzan-Lori Parks, NourbeSe Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, and Nathaniel Mackey-Reed develops a new sense of the literary politics of formally innovative and the connections between literature and politics since the 1960s. Freedom Time reclaims the power of experimental voices by arguing that readers and critics must see them as more than a mere reflection of the politics of social protest and identity formation. With an approach informed by literary, cultural, African American, and feminist studies, Reed shows how reworking literary materials and conventions liberates writers to push the limits of representation and expression.

A Toast to Mr. Smiles: Chiasmus and Comitragedy in Suzan-Lori Parks's Signified Faulkner

A Toast to Mr. Smiles: Chiasmus and Comitragedy in Suzan-Lori Parks's Signified Faulkner

Sleep, Death's Twin Brother

In this essay, I approach Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World from the perspective of postmodern drama so as to explore a number of key preoccupations of postmodern aesthetics in this play. I argue how the creation of indeterminacy enables Parks to develop an indeterminate representation of history and exercise the African Americans' resistance against the hierarchies of power. In addition, I argue that the use of postmodern aesthetics helps the playwright to create a postmortem state so as to proffer alternative perspectives, which can resist and eventually break the monophony and monopoly of the dominant discourse. I finally show how the employment of the theories of postmodern drama helps Parks to represent a typical image of a media-saturated society and to direct and throw her energies into undermining a number of dominant metanarratives, ill-propaganda, and negative stereotypes, which have been created by media and have afflicted African Americans in their personal and social lives. It is worth noting that the focus of my analysis is on the terrains that reflect the playwright's quest for identities for African Americans.1

Reorienting scarlet letters: Suzan-Lori Parks’ and Marina Carr’s Hester plays

Abstract This article considers the figure of Hester from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and its adaptation to contemporary African American and Irish dramatic writing. It focuses on In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2001) by African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, as well as Irish dramatist Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats … (1998). These theatre-makers consciously manipulate The Scarlet Letter in that each Hester figure is a racially different and already marginalized woman who goes on to murder her child. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, I argue that Parks and Carr combine complex and overlapping processes of adaptation to expose the slippery relationship between signification and affect, and to reveal how affective economies shape and control racial and gendered bodies as well as their movements in space. In doing so, these dramatists call into question accepted conventions of judgement, justice and morality. Through processes of domestication, recontextualization and actualization, Parks and Carr engage complexly with hotly debated issues within their individual national contexts and in the wider, western milieu that they share.

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

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...

Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment by Rebecca Schneider (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment by Rebecca Schneider Julia Fawcett Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. By Rebecca Schneider. London: Routledge, 2011. pp. 260. $34.95 paper. As an epigraph to the first chapter of her dazzling—and sometimes dizzying— book, Rebecca Schneider takes the motto of the Association of Lincoln Presenters: “Now he belongs to the stages” (32). It’s the kind of pun that Schneider delights in, not only because it collapses into a clever quip on one of the book’s [End Page 115] main claims—that the goal of history, like the goal of performance, should not be to recover some pure past but rather to understand an event through reen-acting it as part of a continuous present—but also because it plays on the coincidental and yet uncannily appropriate conjunctions between ideas that seem worlds apart in space and time. This is a book that makes much of seemingly impossible juxtapositions: medieval tableaux vivants with Abu Ghraib, John Wilkes Booth with Gertrude Stein, Civil War reenactment with feminist performance art. As disparate as these subjects seem, Schneider’s wide-ranging analyses and perceptive close-readings expose their striking similarities. Yet the real point of Schneider’s book is to dismantle the binaries on which performance studies has come to depend: live versus archive, authentic versus mimetic, present versus past. Performing Remains promises not only to rewrite where performance studies is going but also to rethink what it’s been. But this book is not for the faint of heart, and readers hoping to peruse a chapter or two will balk at its theoretical density and deliberately circular prose. Illustrating her nonlinear approach to history, Schneider often drops names only to loop back, pages later, making her point less through articulation than through accretion. Characteristic is a foreword “which is not one” (1), in that it does less to explain than to touch upon the pairings that the book will develop and dissolve. Focusing on Marina Abramović’s 2010 installation The Artist Is Present, queer artist-activist Allison Smith’s 2005 performance The Muster, and interviews with Civil War reenactors, Schneider argues that “elite” artists and Civil War hobbyists share the assumption that history gains more in the reen-acting—that the errors and revisions that reenactment entails have as much to teach us about the past as an exacting examination of its archive. Chapter 1 develops this assertion by pairing Civil War reenactments with the queer performance art of Miranda July. These performances share the assumption that all present events or performances are citations of the past. Thus the idea of the theater as mimesis—the imitation of an action—is both false (because it depends on an impossible distinction between imitation and action, citation and original) and antitheatrical (because it regards the imitation as an always-imperfect attempt to recover the original). If there is no such thing as an original act—no such thing as an unsullied present—perhaps the best way to practice history is to reenact it. Reenactment therefore becomes a critical act and its errors productive differences that prevent history from repeating itself uncritically, an assertion Schneider takes up in chapter 2. She focuses on Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, in which an African American character impersonates Lincoln in a theme [End Page 116] park, and Linda Mussman’s Cross Way Cross, in which a blond woman impersonates Lincoln on a solo road trip. Parks’s commentary on race and Mussman’s on gender, Schneider observes, depend on their characters’ deviation from the exact replication of a past event or person. In this way, it is the error of historical reenactment that “does things” (69). Conversely, it is the reenactment that makes us aware of the error: “If the ‘familiar’ was not in some way induced, it could not be essentially disturbed” (78). Chapter 3 is the heart of Performing Remains, and the moment (which we’ve all been waiting for) when Schneider wrestles most articulately with the ghosts of performance theorists past. In addition to continuing the dismantling of “liveness” that she began in chapter...

Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists ed. by Barbara Ozieblo Noelia, Hernando-Real (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists ed. by Barbara Ozieblo Noelia, Hernando-Real Jerry Dickey Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists. By Barbara Ozieblo and Noelia Hernando-Real, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. pp. 204. $80.00 cloth. The Research Group on American women writers, coordinated by Barbara Ozieblo at the University of Málaga, continues to foster impressive scholarship on American drama and theatre. The group has been the driving force behind four international conferences in Andalusia, as well as resulting publications of expanded conference essays. Scholars in the group also have published widely on American women dramatists, most notably on Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell. Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists—a collection of nine essays and an introduction—proves yet another valuable contribution by this research team to the latest theoretical discourse on women and American theatre. The book’s subject, sadly, remains insistently current. As the editors, Ozieblo and Noelia Hernando-Real, note in their introduction, “Violence against women, in the home or outside the home, in peace as in war, a result of fanaticism or of structural inequality in society—in every part of the world—continues to confound our civilization” (1). By embracing the inclusive concept of “gender violence,” the authors of these essays emphasize the interconnectedness of various forms of aggression toward women, uniting in a continuum such diverse acts as “rape, psychological violence, battering, female mutilation and others” (20). The volume focuses on plays written during the last forty years and includes close analyses of plays by both well- and lesser-known dramatists: Julia Cho, Pearl Cleage, Maria Irene Fornes, Rebecca Gilman, Carson Kreitzer, Heather McDonald, Emily Mann, Susan Miller, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, [End Page 113] Linda Park-Fuller, Suzan-Lori Parks, Heather Raffe, Cheryl L. West, Paula Vogel, and Stefanie Zadravec. The editors’ goals in this volume are not only to situate recent plays by these women within the evolving theory and practice of feminist theatre, especially since the 1960s, but also to interrogate the potential effect of these plays specifically on audiences and more generally on American society at large. Most of the essays posit a belief in the efficacy of theatre to initiate reform of a patriarchal society that subdues women into passive roles and whose legal system fails to offer sufficient protection to women as targets of gender violence. As stated in the introduction, “The theater, particularly women’s theater, has been a useful tool in awakening awareness of violence” (2). The various essays draw upon multidisciplinary research to demonstrate how ground-breaking women dramatists have helped bring taboo or silenced subcategories of gender violence, such as breast cancer treatment and family abuse, into a wider public arena. This optimistic celebration of the act of performance as a tool to ignite social reform proves one of the book’s greatest strengths. Another strength is the overall unity of the structure and tone of the essays. Most chapters follow a similar pattern, which includes an overview of the sub-category, clear definitions of key concepts, theoretical antecedents, social statistics and behaviors, and detailed interpretations of select plays. After the introduction, which lays out the scope of the book, each chapter builds upon the next, with the authors cross-referencing concepts and conclusions presented elsewhere in the volume. The two opening essays provide an overview of forms and responses to violence against women in critical theory and society, as well as the emergence and evolution of violence as a key theme in women’s drama. The essays then progress to discussions of violence in the family (authored by Hernando-Real), the role of female bonding (María Dolores Narbona-Carrión), psychological abuse (Miriam López-Rodríguez), biomedical violence (Marta Fernández-Morales), survival strategies in African American plays (Inmaculada Pineda-Hernández), and war violence (Ilka Saal). Although the book does not contain a concluding chapter per se, Ozieblo’s essay on the effect of stage violence on the audience’s “pleasure” provides a suitable coda to the book’s argument. Although seven authors contribute, the book often reads as though written by one voice...

(Di)Visible layers: Bodies, genders and costumes in the works of Suzan-Lori Parks

Abstract This article examines the destabilizing efficacy of costuming in contemporary theatre in relation to naturalized genders. It focuses on selected portions of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus, In the Blood and Topdog/Underdog that are noteworthy within the context of costuming, illuminated by Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity. The article places at the centre of its investigation subversive images that Parks’ dramaturgy promotes for the stage, and argues for the important role that directors and designers play in executing the dramatist’s interrogation of abiding genders. I argue that, in the work of this playwright, intersecting gendered, racial and social categorizations can all be shown to encompass layers of cultural meaning that fossilize over time to give the appearance of fixity. Parks’ plays have the potential, through costuming opportunities, to make these layers visible, revealing their cultural and historical materialization and showing that they are, in fact, divisible.

Mouthing Off: The Negativity of Monologue in Mac Wellman’s A Murder of Crows

ABSTRACT: This article examines how monologue functions in the work of American playwright Mac Wellman, focusing on his 1992 play, A Murder of Crows. Many of the features that mark Wellman’s work as “experimental” are already familiar to readers of canonical modernist and postmodern dramatists, like Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Nevertheless, attending to Wellman’s language can challenge a pervasive tendency in theatre studies: the consensus that monologue, particularly in contemporary or postdramatic theatre, is fundamentally a form of heightened communication with the audience. Engaging arguments by Hans-Thies Lehmann and other scholars, the article argues that A Murder of Crows uses monologue to withdraw from the co-presence of the theatrical audience. Defiantly solitary, this kind of monologue resists communication in the present, turning theatre into the site of a utopian protest.

Witnessing and Wounding in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus

Witnessing and Wounding in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus

The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre ed. by Harvey Young (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre ed. by Harvey Young Jennifer DeVere Brody The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre. Edited by Harvey Young . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2013 . Cloth $94.00 , Paper $30.99 , eBook $25.00 . 291 pages. This book serves as an innovative companion to African American Theater. It collates thirteen scholars in the field, each of whom provides, to quote the introduction, “an in-depth engagement with the history of African American Theatre” (13). The contributors are a mix of the best newly minted scholars, including Soyica Diggs Colbert and Douglas A. Jones, Jr., and established scholars such as Harry Elam and Sandra Richards. Together, the essays and their respective authors build a strong, if necessarily partial, vision of the field: one that begins with slavery on American shores and concludes with the unstable, but “fertile ground [that is supporting] the emergence of new plays and new debates around the notion of how, where, and what, as Suzan Lori-Parks says, Black theatre ‘IZ’” (276). In the concise introduction, Harvey Young, the volume’s wonderful editor, explains, “The book opens with August Wilson’s address in 1996 to demonstrate that the work of building African American theatre remains both incomplete and controversial. These themes—an ongoing desire to build and create spaces to stage African American experiences, and the challenges that attended these efforts—recur throughout” (original italics, 2). Thus, ideas of construction and reconstruction serve as a through-line for the book. The individual chapters are organized chronologically by historical period such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Black Arts Movement, and the Age of Obama. Young’s prose is clear and his arguments persuasive if not necessarily innovative. Attention to the construction of identity markers such as race, gender, sexuality, region, ethnicity, religion, and class do not appear in the index, but rather receive attention to varying degrees in the essays themselves (there are two essays on black women playwrights in different historical periods). One could, for example, take issue with the decision to include “mostly artists who worked to revise the stereotypes and negative images of blackness and to bring a more accurate and recognizable representation of African American experiences to the stage” (9). Such concepts that are wedded to ideas of experience and fidelity (not to mention reparation) might have been explicated with greater care, even though the editor suggests that, in addition to the chronological ordering, “exploring the book from the first page to the last . . . reveals a gradual shift from archive-based historical criticism to theoretically informed critical analysis” (13). DuBois figures prominently throughout the volume as do key playwrights such as the aforementioned August Wilson, as well as Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Alice Childress, and Amiri Baraka. The volume also contains a helpful, if highly abbreviated, chronology that begins in 1529 when the first African slaves arrived in North America and concludes with Audra McDonald’s winning of a Tony Award for Best Actress for [End Page 87] her performance in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 2012. So, too, the suggestions for further reading significantly help to round out the volume and give a sense of field. Such aids are presented without any belabored discussions of historiography and this kind of straightforward style actually appears in all the essays. This is another way of saying that the volume is well suited for undergraduate classroom use and, despite the range of themes covered and the varying areas mentioned, there is indeed an aesthetics (and also a politics) to the volume that can be characterized as solid, substantive, and sober. Readers can learn much about selected milieu (although less so about specific plays) and a number of articles in the volume provide open-ended contexts that would be useful for teaching different eras. For example, Soyica Diggs Colbert has a sweeping essay on “Drama in the Harlem Renaissance,” Aimee Zygmonski focuses on the Black Arts Movement, and Douglas A. Jones discusses “Slavery and the Design of African American Theater.” Jones’s ground-breaking essay draws on Saidiya Hartman’s work to flesh out the paradoxes of slave performance, and Harry Elam’s superb piece, “Black Theater in...

The Only Way Out Is In: Girl 6, Sex Work, and the Color Line

This article situates Spike Lee's neglected collaboration with Suzan-Lori Parks, Girl 6 (US, 1996), as part of a broader shift in Lee's understandings of race in the neoliberal era. Its main character, simply called Girl 6 (Theresa Randle), aspires to be an actress, but after a director humiliates her at an audition by demanding the right to inspect her body, she begins disembodied phone sex work. Most critics of the film either emphasize the main character's growth or observe that her interiority remains unavailable to viewers despite the film's extensive use of close-ups. Taking those close-ups alongside Girl 6's interpolation of 1970s blaxploitation film and television, this article argues that the film is as concerned with the elision of public and private spaces for racially marked figures as it is with the reduction of positive black representation to commodified style. The article concludes by briefly tracing Girl 6's representational logics through Lee's controversial She Hate Me (US, 2004), which again uses the spectacle of sexual availability to underscore the creation of the private sphere as affective labor. Ultimately, this article argues that, in drawing on an intertextual network of allusions and on the spectacle of sex, Lee's recent films move beyond representation to the production and value of race in order to imagine new political and aesthetic strategies adequate to a new regime of black visuality.

Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010; 219 pp. $39.95 paper, e-book available

<i>Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works.</i> Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010; 219 pp. $39.95 paper, e-book available

Emmett Till’s Brothers

Emmett Till’s Brothers Philip C. Kolin (bio) Graveless faces, bodiless corpsesobscured by spades of black mudthese silent limestone ledgesbecome our tombstone. Long before your fancy Chicagotalk we were defiled for inhalingthe air white folks said they’d croppedand weren’t in no mood for sharing. No help from the Delta flats,whether from the Mississippi sideor the Arkansas, water moccasinsand giant-jawed gar eating our names. Old Aunt Tessie spent the waryears searching vainly forher first born, last seen coughingblood, a rope around his neck, pleading with those hoodedshadows for a reprieve—our sole obituaryetched there in your photo. [End Page 758] Philip C. Kolin Philip C. Kolin, University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the editor of Southern Quarterly. He has published extensively on Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, and Suzan-Lori Parks. His most recent book of poems is Reading God’s Handwriting: Poems (Kaufmann, 2012). Copyright © 2014 Philip C. Kolin