ABSTRACT
[The following is an edited version of the originally published interview.] Suzan-Lori Parks’s apartment, Brooklyn, New YorkDavid Savran
What got you interested in writing?
Suzan-Lori ParksI used to write as a kid. I thought all kids were writers. That’s kind of how my mind works, I guess. And the more I read, the more I loved to write. When I was in high school my English teacher said, “Whatever you do, don’t major in English in college,” because I was a poor speller, a phonetic speller. I still am but I’m getting better because I figured out that spelling is more visual than aural. It’s pictures. You just take pictures with your head. So, I was a chemistry major at Mount Holyoke College for the first year. I always like science. But then I took a class in which we read Virginia Woolf and I loved To the Lighthouse. And I thought, “I really want to write.” So it was that book and other books that got me back into writing.
DSWhen you started writing in the eighties, what theatrical work particularly interested you? Or other kinds of writing?
SLPWhen I was in college it was more that I loved literature. Virginia Woolf. I didn’t read Faulkner, Joyce or Proust until long after I graduated from college. Or much of Baldwin’s work. Or the Greeks. It was more writing itself, not necessarily a specific book I’d read or a play I’d seen. Theatre made me very nervous. When I was in college, it was populated by students who wore funny clothes and had a lot of attitude. Men and women alike. And that put me off. I didn’t feel comfortable around them. Not that I felt more comfortable around English majors because they had another kind of thing going on. I used to say that theatre’s full of people with funny hats. So I didn’t really go to plays at all. The first real time I spent in the theatre at Mount Holyoke was when I went up there in March [1997] to direct Devotees in the Garden of Love [1991]. I studied some theatre at Hampshire College because you could take courses there. I remember I read for colored girls and directed it in college – but not in the theatre. We just brought some people together and put on a show. I remember I liked Edward Albee and thought, that’s cool, funny, weird. I had a real thing for Faulkner.
DSI find it interesting that many of the writers you name, like Faulkner and Joyce, are in part writing about writing.
SLPRight.
DSWriters for whom the materiality of the text itself is so important. Because that’s so important for your work, too.
SLPIt is because those writers, like Toni Morrison, trace the human mind. There are things going on in the world, like in To the Lighthouse the war happens and people die and in Beloved the war happens and people die. And slavery happens. But you’re tracing the fine lines of the human mind. It’s that kind of writing I love. It’s not less concerned with things going on outside but I use them to understand what’s going on inside. And it is a lot about the text. With Faulkner, the text and the story are equal. For writers I’m not interested in, the text is just a way to tell the story. And even in some plays, the story is the most important thing and the ways it’s communicated, the text of it, the form, is secondary. But the thing I like about Faulkner is that they’re equal.
DSWhat about Adrienne Kennedy?
SLPI’m a fan of hers. I remember a teacher of mine in the English Department at Mount Holyoke. I was walking down the hall one day and she saw me coming and ran in her office and came back out with a book and kind of held it out like I was a train and she had the mailbag and I just took it and kept walking, and I got to the end of the hall and it was Funnyhouse of a Negro. So I read it and reread it and reread it and reread it. It also had a hand in shaping what I do. I thought anything is possible. I could do what I wanted to do instead of what I felt I had to do. I was having some problems because the first play I wrote was for my senior thesis and it wasn’t well received. My first bad review. But I had a problem with the set. I wanted lots of dirt and digging and stuff like that. And one of the guys on the committee said, “We don’t have dirt on stage.” And knowing nothing about theatre – because I didn’t go to theatre – I said, “Oh, okay, guess not.” And then I found all these plays, like Happy Days and Bury the Dead, with dirt on the stage but I didn’t know enough to defend myself. So I said, “I just wrote it, I don’t know. You guys don’t like it, that’s alright.” I think she gave me Adrienne Kennedy to encourage me to do what I thought I had to do instead of what people expected.
DSWhen did you come to New York?
SLPIn ’86. I graduated in ’85 and went to London for a year and studied acting because I thought I was going to be a writer. I had the confidence but not the ambition. That’s why I look at kids – I call them kids, but college students, younger people whom I teach – it’s like they have amazing amounts of ambition and less confidence. But I had a lot of confidence for someone who had just been thrown on the trash pile by the English department. James Baldwin had been very kind and I had great private moments as a writer, times when you really feel, Wow, I’m in that other world, writing, and this is great. So I had a lot of confidence. So I said if I’m going to do this playwriting thing which I enjoy, I should study acting. I didn’t want to study writing because I didn’t think it was going to help me – I’d already gotten burned. So I went to London. Then, because my parents live in Syracuse, New York, I moved back there and within a month or two I moved to New York. I didn’t know where else to go. I knew one person, Laurie Carlos, whom I met in Texas at summer theatre. She let me stay in part of her huge apartment on Riverside Drive as one of her several roommates. That was in ’86. So I’ve been here eleven years which is longer than I’ve lived anyplace because my dad was in the army and we moved around.
DSWhen I saw Imperceptible Mutabilities, I was really struck by its relationship to a lot of New York experimental work: Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, Lee Breuer. When you were here in the late eighties, did you see much of that work?
SLPI think at that time, to be honest, I was ignorant of it. I moved to New York and got a job as a paralegal because I had to make money. I’m very good at typing and office work and shuffling papers around. So I got a job and I hung out around the Poetry Project because Laurie taught there and she invited me to take part in her class. And she helped me get started. But I was really ignorant. I didn’t know what an OBIE was until I’d won one. I wasn’t one of those people who read the Village Voice or went to see Richard Foreman. I worked from nine to five every day and would show up at the Poetry Project in these little kilts and tights because I’d come from the office, and try to mix in, and people would make all these comments that I wasn’t cool, that I was just this goofy kid. And I still had this funny feeling about theatre people. It’s just a different vibe that makes me uncomfortable.
DSStill?
SLPSometimes, yeah. I don’t go out very much. I haven’t seen ninetynine percent of the shows in a given season. So I hadn’t seen all these fabulous people. I forget what was the first Wooster Group or Foreman show I saw. I was decidedly uncool. I just didn’t know. Didn’t see anything on Broadway, of course. I went to poetry readings.
DSWhich is perhaps one reason why language is always foregrounded in your plays. I’ve noticed the lack of stage directions and I know that that’s frustrating sometimes for my students. I don’t find it so, but I’ve seen several of your plays performed. Why do you use so few stage directions?
SLPThere are two answers. The first is that the Greek guys and Shakespeare didn’t use many stage directions. In Medea, Creon, I think, says something like, because she’s begging him, “Get off your knees and let go of my robe.” And there’s no parenthetical thing, there’s only Creon’s line, which I always thought was really weird and interesting. Suddenly the actions were coming from the guts of the people. I was taught that anything in parentheses you could do without. So if you put the action in the guts, in the stomach, in the bodies of the characters instead of in the parenthetical thing hanging on the side, it’s more integral. That seemed to make sense to me. It seemed to make sense to them. It seemed to make the language more exciting. Too many plays are full of lines like, “So it must be very hard for you. (She picks up her glass and holds it to her lips.)” And he says, “You know it is.” That bores me, I sit there and think, “Live! Do something!” Not that what I write is more realistic but most of the action is in the lines. The Foundling Father, for example, will say, “A nod to the president’s bust.” And that’s exactly what he does. Sometimes it’s in parentheses because he doesn’t always say it. For a long time people thought I didn’t know what I wanted. Someone told me about an article in the Times last year that came out after reviews of Venus that said, “Obviously she’s too wishy-washy to have told Mr. Foreman what she wanted.” People always assume that I don’t know what I want. The reality is that I do know and I put it in the line. When I can’t get it in the line, I put it in a stage direction. And when I truly don’t care or want to see what the director comes up with I won’t put in anything. Because it could be anything. I’ll put in something like, “He’s in the big hole which is an exact replica of the Great Hole of History.” I want to see what the director says. And the director’s going to say, “It’s a museum, it’s a black hole, it’s a fishbowl.” That is a magical to me, when people think for themselves. It’s not when I have to write down every single little thing.
DSSo your plays demand that actors, directors, readers take a more active role, unlike contemporary naturalism where everything tends to be spelled out. There, it’s just a matter of illustrating the text. But to read your work, to understand it, you have to take possession of it. Most people are not used to playing such an active role.
SLPRight.
DSBut that’s also related to the content of your work. In the essays in your book of plays, you write about your concept of repetition and revision which makes me think of Henry Louis Gates’s theorization of Signifyin(g): repeating, transforming, displacing. In your work I see people, through repetition and revision, taking possession and changing their relationship to the past, to each other. Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Beth Schachter, Muhlenberg College, 2008. Scene 12, the Chorus of Anatomists (from the left, Daniel Ryan, Robert Grimm, Wilma Cespedes Rivera, Kate Franklin, Teddy Lytle) practice measuring on the Venus. The Negro Resurrectionist (Anthony Franqui) explains to the audience how anatomists dissolve the flesh of a corpse to better measure the skeleton. Costumes by Liz Covey. Scenery by Robin Vest and lights by Sarah Jakaubasz. Photo by Joe Edelman. Courtesy of the photographer.https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203103845/185f9083-7d03-4391-87f6-02968185eb89/content/fig_4_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
SLPI spend years writing a play but I never think it out like that. So when someone says something like that to me, my mind scrambles to understand the play in those terms. For example, I got The Signifying Monkey years ago when it came out and though I’ve read snatches of it, I still haven’t finished it. And after I wrote The America Play I was flipping through it – because every once in a while I like to flip through that book – and I read something about a gap: in the identity there is a gap, a hole, or a chasm, something like that. And I thought, “Ah, interesting.” Because I wasn’t thinking about the chasm of identity when I wrote The America Play. I know what you’re talking about but I can’t say that.
DSSo you don’t sit down consciously to use or to write about these things.
SLPSome people do. I’ve heard some people talk about their plays, or some visual artists say, “I’m going to do X, Y, and Z,” and you see it and it’s pretty much what they said.
DSAnd the figure of the chasm is repeated and revised in many of your plays. Isn’t The Third Kingdom section of Imperceptible Mutabilities – middle passage, being torn away from Africa – also about a chasm?
SLPRight. That’s a wet chasm. In The America Play, it’s a very dry chasm. In Venus there’s a chasm that is filled with a speech: the intermission. And we put something there, right between the butt crack. In Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, there was no Third Kingdom. And Liz [Diamond], who would always tell me about people I didn’t know like Robert Wilson, told me about his Knee Plays. And she asked for something in the middle that would connect the parts. Or you can look at it as something that goes on while we change the scenery. Anyway, that was the chasm.
After I wrote the plays, I was trying to help people find their way into them so I wrote the essays. If someone in the play repeats something, they repeat it because they have to but I don’t necessarily know why they say it so many times. Because it sounds right, they have to say it. In The America Play, there are lots of echoes: the bust, the cut-out, the Foundling Father, the memory, the son who comes and follows in his father’s footsteps.
DSBut as lines and actions are repeated, the meaning changes. I’m thinking, for example, of the multiple assassinations of the Foundling Father.
SLPRight. I took that from the jazz thing of repetition/revision. Jazz musicians were the first people I knew who did that, but then later on I found Bach. The Goldberg Variations is one of my favorite examples. Pop music does it. Everything does it. First, I heard someone talking about it in terms of jazz and how you can repeat a phrase and then change it. A piece that has a beginning, middle and end structured by repetition makes more sense to me than on structure by a lead-up, climax and resolution. Because for me plays are more like religious experiences than secular ones. The excitement in a play doesn’t come from wanting to find out who did it? Who killed him? Or will they stay together? Or will they get divorced? The excitement comes from watching happen what I already know is going to happen. Like the Greek plays. They knew all the stories. They knew Oedipus. The thrill is to see him crumble. So it’s more like a religious pageant. That’s much more exciting to me.
DSThat’s why there’s so much in your plays that can be understood as ritual. Ritual repetition. And you also write about spells and possession – both of which are also connected to ritual.
SLPTheatre makes more sense to me like that, and not because of any historical link to Greek plays or anything. I was thinking about that even before I’d read a Greek play. My family is Roman Catholic. And there’s a lot of drama – holding things up, and bells are ringing, and holding something else up, and the bells go off again. It makes much more sense to me that that’s what theatre really is, rather than a whole bunch of people pretending to be people they aren’t. The audience and the players are involved in this recreation of something that could have happened, didn’t happen, will happen, is happening right as they’re creating it. That’s why repetition makes sense to me, why I keep employing it. I just finished the first draft of my first novel and it’s the same thing. It’s a circle book. Not that they start where they end, but it’s like The Goldberg Variations. Or like Ornette Coleman. You play the beginning and then you don’t know where he is and you’re getting nervous and just when you think you’re lost in the wilderness, there’s the reprise, there’s the aria, or there’s Coleman playing the end of the song which is sort of like the beginning. And you go, “Wow, I was there all the time, just for a moment it looked mysterious.” The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Liz Diamond, Yale Repertory Theatre, 1994. Reg Montgomery (The Foundling Father) and Gail Grate (Lucy). Photo by T. Charles Erikson. Courtesy of the photographer.https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203103845/185f9083-7d03-4391-87f6-02968185eb89/content/fig_5_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
DSWas Gertrude Stein and her use of repetition an influence? Or the way that some of her works take apart the distinction between narrative and dramatic forms?
SLPI’m a big fan of Gertrude Stein. I’ve read her work and I used to teach Ida in one of my classes. But I haven’t read her or Faulkner in a long time. I never read critical analysis of her work, so I don’t really understand it except that it sounds good. It feels right. Maybe I don’t read her so much anymore because I’m more interested in character. It’s not an idea or concept or message or place. They might start with any of those elements but what they really start with is character. With The America Play, there were two people looking for another person. With Imperceptible Mutabilities, it was the three women together in the apartment with the roach problem. Who were they? Venus – of course she’s the center of that play. I’m really much more interested in characters than I am in language. Language is just something that comes out of the people. I say certain things in certain ways. Like if I vomited right now all of a sudden, the vomit, I think, would be a lot less interesting than me, who I am and why I threw up. So, too, it’s who these people are. In Last Black Man [The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, 1990], who are they? They talk funny because they’re in a really funny place. They’re walking a line between the living and the dead, or he is anyway. Most of the people in the play are dead. They really don’t make sense a lot of the time because they’re dead. It’s not anything more than that. And the woman, his wife, just wants him to eat, because she’s alive: “Eat, just eat, that’s what we do when we’re alive. And we try to figure things out. We sit here wondering, where were you? Why are you dressed like that? What’s your problem?”
When you came in today I was talking to a film person. The first thing I said was, “I figured out who these people are. We can’t go forward until you hear who these people are.” The story, who cares? The message – concerns about the race issue, the women issue, all these issues – I don’t care. Once I figure out who these people are, then I can figure out what happens. Because the characters talk to you. I don’t, like, decide it’s going to be about something. Once you lock in on a character then the character, or that part of your psyche, or that character who is part of you, will dictate what it is about. And you just have to listen.
DSSo then you, as a playwright, become possessed when you’re writing?
SLPWhen the going is good. As I wrote in the essay, it’s not a voodoo priestess kind of thing – I wish it were that exciting, but it’s not. It’s more like a Zen thing where you just have to remove yourself from the path. I’m in the way of the play, I have to remove my Self so that the play can be what it wants to be. It’s like that, which is very hard, because you have all these things that you want it to be about, or that it should be about. You have to just let it do its thing. And it’s always interesting, a nice little story.
DSDo you write many drafts?
SLPI did lots of drafts of Venus over five years or something. They were all just really bad. And then I got a fellowship to Bellagio – it’s very beautiful, very inspiring, magical. But it wasn’t magical when I was there, it was horrible. I was trying to finish this play there and it took me two weeks of flipping out and then finally the stone just rolled away from the tomb and I wrote a whole draft in less than a week. And the language was totally different. The same thing with The America Play. What was going on in the second act is exactly what I was doing. Two people were looking for this man while I was looking for him. Who is he? Where is he? We don’t know. We have these pieces of things. And then suddenly, there he was. Then the first part of it was easy: he’s in a sideshow. Clean up the edges and there it is. Sometimes I wish I could talk about my work more theoretically. I listen to Richard Foreman talking about his work and he uses all these impressive words and I think, “Dang, I might think about doing that.” Then I think about my characters and think, ”No, they don’t need me to talk like that about them.” That’s not who they are.
DSWhat makes a good production of one of your plays?
SLPIf it’s imaginative. There are good productions that I have been involved with and others when I haven’t. I once saw a very good reading of my work at the University of Chicago. The Onyx Theatre did a reading of The America Play. Great job, totally different from what Liz [Diamond] and I had done. It was the gut bucket version. It was funny. It was like black funny. And I thought, “Dang, this is real like, sideslappin’ play.” Marcus Stern did a really great job with The America Play at A.R.T. that I wasn’t involved in which was bizarre, very imaginative. The productions I’ve done with Liz have been great and incredibly imaginative because the director works with the play. She doesn’t do a number on the play. That means like a bowel movement on the play. Because you’re looking at the bowel movement and not the play. I guess that’s fine if the play is well known like Hamlet. Then you do it in a bizarre way and that’s fine. But newer plays should be seen in an imaginative way, in a way that makes them pop, but not in a way that obscures them. Because then you’re just watching the window dressing, which I don’t think is a good idea. Because then the audience is not enjoying the play. They’re just watching things that obscure the play. And I think that life is difficult enough. And challenging theatre is challenging enough without having it made more challenging by some stuff that a director or a playwright wants to put in the play to make it more interesting. Playwrights do that, too, and I am getting to be a very good editor of my own work. I always cut so much it scares people. I’ll go in to production and say, “Let’s cut that scene, it’s not necessary. It’s a lovely scene but it makes five layers instead of three.” The people who have trouble are the people who think it’s got to be weird and avant-garde and abstract. When I directed Devotees in the Garden of Love up at Mount Holyoke, people up there were just beside themselves. They kept saying, “I can’t believe it’s just this straightforward.” I said, “Look, two women on a hilltop, what do you want? We’re gonna put them on a hill.” “Are you sure you want to put them on a hill? Shouldn’t we put something up there?” “Why put something up there? They’re on a hill. In wedding dresses. Watching a war. Just like it says. And every once in a while that third woman runs her mouth.” They couldn’t believe it. They were just beside themselves. It was a great experience and I couldn’t get over it. I thought, this is telling me something. We had a beautiful green hill, kind of flat on the top, enough room for the wheelchair. It went around and around.
DSAnd it was peaceful?
SLPExcept that we had an underlying soundtrack of war which would come up and go down at certain times. I’m sure Last Black Man is hard because you’re thinking, “What am I doing with all of those people? Where do they go? Where do they move?” if all else fails, let them stand still. Why do you need stage business? I think whoever invented it is just goofy. Because I think that ruins lots of or really great plays. You can have people standing there, just talking. If it gets a little bit like a chorus or a concert, so? They can stand and be still for a minute and just speak. They don’t have to be lifting up glasses and adjusting their bifocals.
A lot of people I’ve never met have done wonderful productions because I don’t go around the country and see my plays. People get mad at me or they think I have an attitude. If I write a play, say, in 1986, like Imperceptible Mutabilities and some wonderful person does it in ’96, great, I’m so happy they’re doing the play. But I’m in the middle of writing my novel.
DSI ask this not to be voyeuristic but in part because I understand that your work, like Girl 6 (1996), is a critique of voyeurism. I know that all writers’ works are autobiographical in some ways. They use elements from their own lives. I know, for example, that you grew up in a military family….
SLPMy dad was in the military. A military family: we all packed guns and did drills.
DSSo I think of that when I read “Greeks” [part four of Imperceptible Mutabilities]. But can you talk more generally about the autobiographical element in your work?
SLPLooking back, there are a couple of different things I’m interested in. One is the question, Who am I? And that has a lot of answers. I was talking to a friend of Liz Diamond, this East German guy and I’d ask, “How can you be sure of that simple thing, who the hell am I?” And he’d say, “You’re you, you’re Suzan-Lori Parks, you’re a writer.” So that’s the jumping off point for all these plays. That’s why I gravitate most to character and why I don’t write poetry. Because I often think, “I could be anybody.” I really believe that. But after “Greeks” people would say, “Gee, your dad got his legs shot off in the war?” and I’d laugh. Even The America Play. Someone was interviewing me and really kept pressing, “So, this is really the story of your family?” Every time I would try to answer, she would come back to it as if I were avoiding the subject. I finally said, “My dad abandoned our family when I was very young and went off to play Lincoln.” And she said, “Really?!?”
But the question in these plays is, “Who am I?” I could be anybody. I’m reading all these books on yoga or Zen or Jung, and I’m carrying around the Portable Jung and he talks about the collective unconscious (and I’m paraphrasing), that primitive consciousness, that under consciousness, that bedrock. That’s the territory I explore. The story of the Foundling Father, Abraham Lincoln, that’s me. I feel like I’m as much him as I am Brazil or I am the Black Man with Watermelon. A lot of people will ask, “Why do you write all these men in your plays?” Well, I don’t know. Or they’d think Venus is more autobiographical. You have to talk about love. People kept saying, “I see so much of you in that play.” I would laugh. I mean, I’m everywhere, we all are. And that is what’s so difficult to believe. We are everybody. Everybody is us. We are all one person. I don’t think I’ll ever write a play about the years I went to a German school. But who knows? I’m growing, I’m changing. I might.
DSAnd it may be that your experience in German schools has filtered into your writing in terms of your use of English.
SLPExactly. I think the problem I have with the question about autobiography is that some people assume that the line between the writers and the material is a straight line. Sometimes it is, especially these days when everybody seems to be writing a memoir. I heard it called a me-moir – me, me, me. If I were a housewife who had a drunk husband and lived in Iowa for ten years, maybe I’d write about it. But unfortunately fiction writers and people who concoct stories are getting pushed aside in favor of real stories. You see the ad for COURT TV: no scripts, no actors, it’s all real. Or Rescue 911 or Cops or any of those shows that focus on real people doing real things. The space left for imagination and fiction is getting smaller and smaller and the imagination is being de-emphasized in favor of real life, which I think is not good because what’s under the surface?… I mean reality is very fleeting and, I don’t know, I can’t describe it. The spirit and the soul of people reside in the imagination, not in the stories that fill up the six o’clock news. “One man Shot in Harlem.” “Two Boys Mutilated Downtown.” What is that? That’s just like fuzz, it’s interference.
DSAs I was reading your plays, I was thinking about how frequently TVs appear, as a sign perhaps of realness and banality, and how important it is for you keep them if not in the foreground, at least in the background.
SLPThere are a lot of TVs, aren’t there? Even in this novel, lots of different characters are referring to the television a lot and how, “He was just like on TV” – how we’re beginning to imitate this constructed thing. In Imperceptible Mutabilities, a horrible thing is happening on television, as opposed to the horrible thing that’s happening in the women’s own living room. Or in The America Play, dad is suddenly on TV. And in Devotees too: “The modern-day bride ought to be adequately accoutrementalized for the modern age” by watching the war on TV! It’s not an evil thing. I enjoy television. There’s lots of great shows, lots of great shows, lots of movies I wasn’t old enough to see when they came out, and an overwhelming amount of garbage.
DSWhat do you see as the main differences between theatre and film or television? Theatre, of course, caters to a very small, selective audience.
SLPI think theatre’s best when it’s like church. And I think it’s the worst when it’s like TV, or like a movie. I saw that ER, one of the hot shows, wants to film it live like they used to. Some sitcoms are live now. TV used to be live – I think it probably was much more interesting. It had that life in it that film doesn’t have. And I like movies, and not just arty ones. There are plenty of popular movies that I just love, but movies are dead, I think. That’s the difference. Theatre’s alive. People are living, they’re right there doing what they’re doing in front of you. The people in movies could be dead, might be dead, are often dead. It’s a different kind of experience. I think theatre’s much more interesting when it’s a religious kind of thing.
DSDo you think that has to do with the nature of spectatorship and the fact that the theatre audience is more of a real community, they’re more participants, more active than a film audience?
SLPI talk to the television. A friend still remembers when George Bush was giving a speech about something or other and I was over at her house watching. And she keeps reminding me that I just kept talking to George Bush: “I think you’re so stupid!” I was yelling at this man as if he were in my living room. And I’ve been in movie theatres where people talk to the screen. Mostly black people for movies that have lots of black characters. Or anybody can be on the screen and they’ll talk, “Watch it!” or “He’s stupid!” They’ll yell things out. So movies and TV can be active in that way. There’s call and response there too.
Theatre’s the only place where the people on stage know that you’re watching them and that’s the difference. When you’re on stage and you look out there, you know that somebody’s looking at you and that, to me, is weird. In Mutabilities, when they realize they’re being watched, they-begin-to-talk-like-this-because-he’s-watch-ing-us-it-all-be-comes-ver-ycon-trolled. It’s a strange moment. Venus is being looked at. The guy in The America Play is there for you to look at and interact with and kill. That’s what it is in theatre, it’s not so much that the audience is shouting or watching but that the people on stage are parading themselves and enjoying being involved in this kind of thing – look at me, look at me, look at me – which is kind of creepy.
DSSo then one of the most important moves in your plays, as in the first scene in Mutabilities, is the change from subject to object, to being looked at.
SLPRight.
DSBut I also get a clear sense in your plays of the violence that accompanies that process. “Marlin Perkinssgot uh gun.” Looking can be a kind of violence.
SLPIt’s sort of like the jungle, stalking – you know how cats do it, they watch, they look, they get you in their sights. But it’s not something that’s conscious. It’s just what happens with these people. The women on the hill in Devotees are watching. Their stuff gets taken, or they’re encouraged to give things away, and they’re watching something that’s very violent. But that’s very much a cultural thing. I love to sit and watch people watch violent things. There’s a fight going on and people are standing around. I love to watch the people watching the fight. I don’t know what that’s about. Bad things happen in my plays because unfortunately that’s what happens to the characters. But they’re also independent of each other. In Last Black Man, there’s no one really watching but there’s such a difference between the living and the dead. The watching thing is independent. People are being watched because it’s theatre. And that’s what theatre’s all about – watching. In the novel nobody’s really watching anybody. People are just talking, they’re telling a story.
DSYou also use that in Girl 6, to show what happens when she’s auditioning, the violence of the look of the director.
SLPIn plays I have more or less total control but in that screenplay, Spike [Lee] added stuff. I didn’t like that part where she takes off her clothes and exposes her breasts. I didn’t want it in there, I didn’t write it, and I told him. He wanted that because it said some things he wanted to say. It was his baby so you just let it go and don’t worry about it. That movie to me had more to do with the question of identity. She’s everybody. “Who am I? Who do you want me to be? You want me to be blond, I’m blonde. I’m brunette, I’m Asian too.” So that is really how it lines up with the rest of my work, how the self is malleable.
DSShe’s constantly changing, with all the wigs….
SLPAll the costume changes. That’s what I love about that. The same with The America Play. Who is he? The Last Black Man. Where is he, who is he, what is he? Is he alive or dead? He doesn’t know. He’s both, he’s neither. All those people, they could be anybody. All those Third Kingdom people.
DSAre these questions specifically linked to your ideas of African-American identity?
SLPMaybe. I don’t know. I’ll make it a funny answer: it could be, but because I believe in the universal consciousness, no. I think that everybody, if they’re able to let go, just for a moment, of the person they assume themselves to be, will realize that they are anybody. On the surface, it’s tied into the African-American experience because that’s who I am. But one step back, it’s part of that big, primordial soup.
DSI don’t know whether this is related to your answer, but I’ve noticed that in addition to the lack of stage directions, you don’t often specify the race of your characters. And Liz Diamond’s production of Imperceptible Mutabilities used a white actor to play a black character in part four. Alisa Solomon wrote about the confusion that choice engendered for at least one spectator at a post-play discussion.
SLPBecause the boy was white, they thought the mother had cheated. That was the first and last time I yelled at someone in the audience. I said, “How stupid are you?” for a while, I didn’t do post-play discussions. But I have learned to turn any question from the audience into a good question. It’s a real feeling of power, that you can take something incredibly ridiculous and say, “That’s a really good question.” And then you talk about whatever you want. And the person in the audience says, “Thanks.” Yeah, the race of the characters. I guess I don’t specify. Maybe I should so that everyone will know they’re black. But in other people’s plays, they don’t say they’re white. Sam Shepard [she picks up Seven Plays]…let’s see, he’s a damn good writer. “Dodge, in his sixties. Hallie, his wife, mid-sixties. Tilden, their oldest son.” The problem is that the years go by, people will continue to assume that these people are white and assume that my people are whatever they want them to be – a lot of lightening up as the time passes, or whitening out. Just one more thing I haven’t thought about. Some people say, “Anybody could play the Foundling Father as Abraham Lincoln.” And I say, “Anybody can play it but I don’t necessarily have to watch every production of this play.” Or Devotees in the Garden of Love. They could be three white women. There’s nothing especially in that play, or in The America Play that requires the characters to be black. Not like Death of the Last Black Man. Black Man with Watermelon. Black Woman with Fried Drumstick. The rest of the people, who knows? In those plays, the characters could be anybody. And that’s fine. But I guess I want to see…I have my preference, everybody else doesn’t have to share that preference. People can do whatever they want, but I don’t necessarily have to go to opening night of their production.
DSOn the other hand, your use of black vernacular makes it pretty unmistakable for an attentive reader.
SLPSometimes. But again, with Devotees or The America Play, not necessarily. And I think of my use of black vernacular as a sort of borrowing, like I borrow from everybody. Black slang is changing so rapidly and I really am not up on it. I work with kids in Harlem during the school year, young kids, and we get together and play on computers. And every once in a while I pick up some words from them that I’ve never heard before and don’t even understand. Black vernacular is like a place where you can go and borrow from. Some people read Mac Wellman’s work and think he’s black. I don’t know what he’s borrowing from. I know he doesn’t’ speak the way his characters do, but I don’t know if he’s borrowing from black vernacular or Midwestern-speak. There’s a kind of joy with language shared by a lot of black people I know and a lot of words and the sound of words. It’s not black or white, it just a love of saying things and saying something twice if it sounds really good. But I started by talking about the Self, and if that’s an African-American thing. I think it’s more of a human thing.
DSWhen, in “An Equation for Black People Onstage” you write, “Within the subject is its other,” it leads me to think that the different identities that characters take on are in part fantasies – a racial identity, a gendered identity. Do you think of them as fantasies? Although I realize that just because they’re fantasies doesn’t mean they don’t produce real effects.
SLPI don’t know if it’s fantasy. I think it’s more that that’s the way it works on this planet. That’s how we live. To play a part in a play and be on stage is a fantasy because you know as you are doing it that it has its limits. The phone sex thing, that’s a fantasy. You know when you’re engaging in it that it’s a fantasy. You know that you’re not really there. But I don’t think race or gender is a fantasy. Gender is a reality but I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all reality. There are other things beneath the surface that are also important, that are also present.
DSAnd you point out that identities are not homogeneous. There’s not only one kind of blackness or femininity.
SLPRight. I think it’s different now but there are what I call the black police, which are not black police officers but the people who are making sure that you’re black enough. I guess other groups have these police, too. People who are making sure that your writing is black enough, who you’re dating is black enough, and what comes out of your mouth is black enough, and what you wear is black enough. There are some people in the community and it’s their job to monitor others, making sure you’re up to snuff. That essay was more talking to those people who would ask, “Why don’t your plays deal with real issues?” And on the other side, there are the people who are not part of the community, white people and other folks, who think that black plays should only deal with certain issues. Like every black play should be another Raisin in the Sun or another Fences. They should deal with the struggle, uplift the race, in a kind of basic, twelve-step way. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel and we are walking toward it. I don’t know about that. I haven’t really looked too hard but I haven’t seen that kind of policing going on in other groups as much. It seems to me that others have more flexibility or allow their members to do lots of various things.
DSWhy do you think the black police are so stringent?
SLPI think there’s more at stake in keeping black people contained. It’s a question of international security. Because once the whole group realizes that they’re actually free, wonderful things could happen. And I think that things would change in a way that a lot of people don’t want them to. Because the accepted roles of black people are so entertaining and stimulating. The fascination with basketball players, the way that people on the golf course bow and scrape before Tiger Woods. I watch that and go, “This is a weird country.” Other people in other groups have a little more room. Everybody knows about the policing of black people by white people, but the other side of it is equal and strange. ‘Cause once anybody jumps out of their skin, of their identity, and swims in the underground sea of the unconscious where everybody is and it doesn’t really matter who you are and everything is mythic and strange and large – I don’t know, I’m not sure what would happen. That would be the end of the world.
DSHow do you see your relationship to feminism? Because all of your plays have what I would call feminist content. Devotees, for example, seems so clearly a critique of a kind of masculine aggression.
SLPPerhaps to a theatre scholar. But it isn’t necessarily for me. I get funny when I hear that language. I don’t think that way. To me it’s not a critique; it’s a show. In my plays most of the time everybody’s bad. And everybody’s good. Venus is bad and good. The women in Devotees are just as bad as they are good. And the men you don’t see are just as stupid as they are interesting and brave and doing what society says they should do. People say I wrote Venus because I’m really interested in colonialism and the objectification of the female body. And it was none of those things. I wrote it because I wanted to give this great character two hours of a play with her name on it. And I wanted to give a black actress a chance to play a really cool part and be the star of the show.
So, feminism – I don’t really have any language to talk about it. I like to see strong women characters because stupid women characters bore me. I like to see strong male characters – stupid men, on stage and off, bore me. I like to see characters who are complex, black or white, Asian or Native American, or whatever. Well drawn and multifaceted. Clichés are dumb. And I don’t think that’s feminism, that’s just intelligence. I don’t like being Afrocentric, it’s being smart. I also don’t like to see female or black characters more intelligent than they should be because the playwright is using the character as a mouthpiece. They have faults. It’s Venus who says yes to going to England. Granted, she’s in a tough place. But she wants to make a mint. She thinks she can win. She is no more intelligent than she needs to be. I wanted to see a black woman on stage with a really cool part. Or three black women in Devotees. Or sure, they could be white women. White women need good parts, too, where they don’t have to take off their clothes. Boy, if I see another woman take off her clothes, I’ll scream – or fall asleep. My boyfriend Dave and I have a game that we play with movies. When the movie starts we ask, “So who’s going to be the titty girl? Who’s going to show her breasts?” We’ll guess and invariably it’s one of the ones we expect. I think people deserve better than that – audiences, writers, actresses, actors alike. More than just violent black men on TV or in the movies. Or sympathetic black women.
DSYour talking about stereotypical representations of African-Americans leads me to think about your use of history. All your plays are really history plays. But your idea of history is very different from what we see on TV, for example, with its fixation on celebrity, on the clash of personalities, all told with strings of depthless images. You’re so attentive to historical struggle and the violence in history, whether it’s the offstage war in Devotees or the murder of Lincoln or lynching in The Last Black Man. Your work is so steeped in the violence of history.
SLPViolence is what happens in plays. If I model my plays after anything, it’s Greek plays, where he’s stabbing his eyes out, she’s put the poisoned dress on and the horses jump off the cliff. Sure, it’s linked to African-American history but it’s also borrowed from the Greeks. All these Wild Kingdom-type activities would be the center of the play rather than psychological dramas. I can watch them but I don’t understand them in a way that allows me to write them. I don’t get it. The America Play was so much about Lincoln having been shot while watching a play so you have to put it on stage because that’s just fun. And the Devotees thing is so Greek. The action is off stage. And The Last Black Man is Stations of the Cross. There’s Jesus going through his changes. That’s where the interest in violence comes from.
DSSo history functions for you the way that myth did for the Greeks.
SLPRight.
DSYou know that your audience knows it, so you can present it in a different way. It’s repetition and revision again.
SLPAnd if they don’t know, I’ll tell them. When I was a kid I used to love to read Greek myths. That was my favorite thing. My parents got me all these illustrated books – I love books that are illustrated. And then biblical stories – Jesus doing things and Moses doing something else. Larger-than-life people doing very basic things, but almost childlike in their simplicity. Or fantastic – there’s Persephone minding her own business and the world opens up and this guy comes out and drags her down to hell. That’s a good story.
Why do I like history? It sounds sappy: to give voice to people who are voiceless. I don’t know about that because all these characters are parts of me. I think we’re all one person. History, I don’t know. Why is Devotees what it is? David Hwang wanted me to write a play about interracial relationships to be a companion piece to a play he was writing for the Humana Festival. I said, “Okay, let me go home and think about it.” And we hung out for a little while and he asked, “So what have you got?” And I said, “I’ve got three black women in white wedding dresses. And that’s interracial, right?” And he said, “Sort of …” So we went ahead. But I wrote that play because I wanted to give black actresses a chance to wear pretty dresses, wedding dresses. When I did it at Mount Holyoke – and this is a women’s college, with women scholars very serious about their work – I had forgotten why I wrote this play. We went costume shopping and the designer took us to a bridal salon with racks and racks of bridal dresses. You should have seen those three actresses! They were ecstatic! I remember seeing them try on those dresses and seeing their faces light up. I want dresses with trains going down the block! So the plays have all these weird reasons. It’s not so much that I have an agenda as I want to see women in pretty dresses. I want to see a black guy dress up like Abraham Lincoln because I think that would be really funny. There he is walking around having a good time. I’m not thinking so much about history. He is though, about the past and how the past is behind you. How you follow in someone’s footsteps and how that doesn’t make any sense because they’re actually behind you. So you’re walking the wrong way. But that’s really the drama of being alive. It’s passing through time. That’s what we do. That’s what people do when they’re watching a play. They pass through a certain amount of time together.
DSI see your plays as rituals of remembrance, bearing in mind, of course, that re-membering is always a function of dis-membering. You must dismember in order to re-member. As in Imperceptible Mutabilities: “A mine is a thing that dismembers/remembers.”
SLPThat’s what it is. You put things back together. People say, what’s The Death of the Last Black Man about? It’s about these people who come together and remember him. They gather together and put on a play and every night they remember the last black man. That’s like church: “This is my body, this is my blood. Do this in memory of me.” And Venus is very much a re-membering and dis-membering. The dismemberment happens right in the middle. The intermission speech is called “The Dis(-re-)memberment of the Venus Hottentot. And he does her autopsy. That’s the lecture that he gives, right in the crack of the play. So he cuts it. Basically, re-membering is putting things together that don’t always perfectly fit. For example, the re-membering of Lincoln and his story by The Foundling Father who embodies him and puts him back together, and also by the son and mother who look for both of them and re-member them. And at the end, when everything is together, there’s a huge (w)hole inside a huge hole. There’s the hole in the guy’s head while he’s sitting in a replica of The Great Hole of History. So it’s not neat and tidy.
DSBecause history is not a seamless narrative, it’s a hole, an abyss – and a whole.
SLPRight.
DSIn The America Play, The Foundling Father talks about history “as it used to be,” in which everything is “by the book” and nothing is “excessive.” Yet all of your plays tell a different kind of history: history as excess, the history we don’t know what to do with. There’s either a vacancy, a hole – or there’s too much of it.
SLPThat’s funny. I forgot about that line. It’s history that you don’t know what to do with or history that’s hiding in the shadows or is being pushed to the edges, or it’s in the margins, the gaps, the crevices. It’s not the big story, it’s the fringe stuff. Particles of things. Writing for me is so much like archaeology. That’s why I like The America Play so much. The whole action of the play is exactly like what writing it was. Brazil is digging because I was digging. They put things together as I was putting things together.
DSSo the play is also about the act of writing.
SLPYes. History is not just the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Neuschwanstein Castle, Stonehenge. It’s all the little bits and scraps. That’s how narrative seems to be working for me. With my novel, there’s a narrative but it’s not just someone telling you a story. It’s all this little garbage and little pieces of dirt and dust that just kind of fall on the page. It tells a story but it’s just remnants, and the little things that people throw away if they could. Or that you did throw away. Or saved too long. As you can tell, I have all kinds of weird stuff, like pieces of my hair when I had red dreadlocks. I love characters from the big History, like Lincoln. What a costume! I’m working on something I’ll probably never finish because it’s one of nine million things I’m writing, but it has Napoleon in it. Why? Another great outfit. I don’t know anything about Napoleon except he was French – which is another obsession of mine. Venus speaks French, and the ladies do in Devotees. So I love building a play. You start with a character, then you hollow him out, then you fill him with all the knick-knacks that surround him, all this stuff, and make him walk and talk, make him black. They don’t start as history plays but history kind of creeps in and lies there and takes over. But writing movies is different because most of the stuff I’ve written thus far has been assignment, which I actually prefer because then I’m just doing a job and can write my own thing on my own time.
DSSo they give you a story?
SLPI’ll give you an example. Someone hired me to do an adaptation of this book called Gal by Ruthie Bolton which came out three or four years ago. You read and reread the book and then you do something with it. People call me up when they want good characters. So I figure out what the characters are doing. At least they don’t call me up for car chases.
DSAnd you’re working on your novel.
SLPI am. And I have a couple of commissions, one from the Wilma Theater of Philadelphia and one from the Public. I don’t know what they’re about yet. But I’m most excited about the novel now because I’ve always loved novels more. That’s what I read most. And while I know I’m going to write several of them, I’m not going to stop writing plays.
DSHow long does it take you to write a play?
SLPIt depends. I started Venus in 1990 and I finished it in ’95. Then we did it in ’96. It takes about five years. A screenplay takes less time because the form is not up for grabs. But plays take so much longer because I have no idea what it’s going to look like. Not what it would look like on stage but what the shape of the play is, which means what it is about – the two are connected. Venus will have more stage directions than the other plays. I like writing stage directions like, “She’s pregnant.” “She’s pregnant again.” Things like that are really fun to put in the margin because they’re not simply telling you what’s going on on stage. The writing is very clean so I put things off to the side. And some things I want to happen and I don’t want them talking while they happen. So I just wrote them down. Someone saw Imperceptible Mutabilities and then The Last Black Man and said, “You’re writing is changing.” And I think that’s a good thing. I keep retracing the same steps or the same themes or the same interests but I do it in different shoes. The tracks look completely different from one play to another. It’s all about, “Who am I?”
DSAs you know the American Theatre is not in very good shape right now, despite the fact that there are many different theatres in this country. How do you feel about that? Do you feel that you’re writing for a dying art? You’re lucky in that you’re getting your work produced.
SLPI guess if I didn’t get produced I would still write. But when did it start dying? I guess it’s been dying since I started writing plays so I haven’t really noticed. Although they take funding away here, there and everywhere, which I think accelerates the dying.
DSOne thing that I find so interesting about your theatre is that it’s almost as though it’s about the state of theatre itself. Yours is a haunted stage. You have all these characters who have come back from the dead. That’s an important way of remembering.
SLPAnd if theatre’s dead, it won’t be possible to remember in this way anymore.
DSAll the playwrights I’ve interviewed thus far have written plays about haunting.
SLPWhat does that say about you?
DSI’m really fascinated with thinking about theatre as a site for remembering, for bringing back the dead, for staging the past, for coming to terms with loss.
SLPI think it’s because theatre is so close to religion. I don’t know all religions but I have a feeling they are bridges between the Self and the people you’re not, or the people in your past. It’s natural to have plays that are haunted. It’s part of the hard wiring of theatre and that’s what theatre’s for. Hamlet’s about a ghost. And the more we can do to capitalize on what theatre’s for, the more theatre has a chance of surviving. The more we put on plays that look like movies or TV shows –
DSWhy not just watch TV then?
SLPIt’s a lot cheaper. People are writing plays that should be movies or TV to try to get a leap into Hollywood. That’s not helping either. I’m most concerned with the death of the imagination. Because if that goes, I’ll really be sunk.
