A Better Mirror

Always considered an eclectic and youthful voice of the American theatre, Suzan-Lori Parks has now moved into the role of mentor and teacher as she prepares to head the new A.S.K. Theater Project’s Writing for Performance Program at CalArts. She also has three new plays under her belt: Fucking A, which debuted last month under her direction at Houston’s DiverseWorks, in conjunction with Infernal Bridegroom Productions; Topdog/Underdog, scheduled in the fall at New York’s Public Theater; and In the Blood, published here for the first time, following its critically acclaimed production at the Public. Kathy Sova

You have said that, unlike writers who hold a mirror up to society, you write about what’s not there, what we don’t see. How do you go about that?

Suzan-Lori Parks

Some people think I am an issue-oriented writer, but I’ve never said to myself, “I’m going to write about such-and-such an issue”—that would make for incredibly boring writing, at least to my taste. Creating someone I don’t know and her made-up world shows us more about who we are—is actually a better mirror—than if I were to parade in front of you an instantly recognizable person in an instantly recognizable situation. I’m not saying, “Let’s make it all abstract and weird and difficult and thereby you will know more about yourself.” My process is much more organic than that. In Fucking A, Hester Smith and her world are foreign to us, but when we meet her, she draws us like a magnet, and we learn a lot about our own world. The same for Hester La Negrita in In the Blood. If there is a great psychic distance to travel between an audience member’s seat and the character on stage—and if the character is very rich when you meet her—then the trip is incredibly intense, very visceral.

The Greeks understood distance and the journey; their plays often include events that happen offstage and are retold to us later. In Blood, I use the confessions, the characters’ interior monologues, to describe events that happened offstage. As we hear confession after confession, it occurs to us that so much is happening offstage that we must ask, “What is going to happen in front of us?”

KS

What is the connection between Hester La Negrita in In the Blood and Hester Smith in Fucking A?

SLP

In the middle of writing Fucking A, a riff on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, I started another play, In the Blood. Though Blood, a more chamberlike play, grew out of Fucking A, the two are completely different. Hester La Negrita and Hester Smith are two separate characters, each in completely different worlds—they just share a name and a connection to the letter “A.”

KS

The onstage murder in In the Blood is painful to watch. It seems that violence has become more overt in your later plays—why is that?

SLP

The first “real” piece I wrote in college [Mt. Holyoke] was a short story called “The Wedding Pig,” about a school teacher in a small Texas town who attends a violent harvest ritual that goes dramatically awry. It was while writing this piece that I first knew I was going to be a writer, when I felt that whole big nonpersonal wave of psychic energy coursing through my veins. The story had elements of sex, love, violence, history and ritual, all connected—and all five of those elements have been around a long time in my work.

KS

In The America Play we see Abraham Lincoln get shot over and over again by Booth. In Topdog you’ve written a character who is an Abe Lincoln impersonator. You’re not done with Lincoln, are you?

SLP

No, I’m not—or I should say, he’s not done with me. Do you know that John Wilkes Booth was born on my birthday?

KS

What makes a perfect play?

SLP

I’m not interested in perfection, maybe because I don’t know what that is. But I do know what a good ride is. So “perfect plays” could be plays that give me a really good ride. Oedipus is a really good ride. There are plays that I love—The Glass Menagerie is a great play. A lot of Shakespeare’s plays are great, but none of them are perfect. A playwright friend refers to a good play as “actor proof,” meaning that the playwright has done everything he or she can to ensure that the play doesn’t fall apart from production to production, that the play’s integrity remains intact.

KS

Your relationship to George C. Wolfe and the Public Theater is quite special in its length and depth of commitment.

SLP

Before he even had a theatre, George said he wanted to do my plays. He saw a production of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at BACA Downtown in Brooklyn, and said, “I’m going to do your work.” And he has. In the Blood was the third play produced by George (the Public also did The America Play and Venus). They have committed to my two-character Topdog, and they’ve commissioned me to write another play. Each time I have a production lined up with them, I’m as excited as if it were my first production ever. It’s wonderful to be so supported.

KS

You have taught playwriting at Yale, and beginning this fall you will be heading the new A.S.K./CalArts writing program. If there is one lesson you’d like your students to take away from your courses, what would it be?

SLP

Discipline. The courage to think for themselves. And the passion to imagine what’s not there.