It's an Oberammergau Thing

This interview took place in Venice, California. Parks was preparing for the world premiere of 365 Days/365 Plays as well as working on a new screenplay and the book for a Ray Charles musical. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr

Well, let’s start with your writing; specifically, the process. How do you start writing a play?

Suzan-Lori Parks

I think it varies [pause while she thinks].

KJW

I find it interesting that when I asked you about writing, you picked up a pen.

SLP

[Laughs] I picked up the pen because I wanted to try it out, and then I could give you an accurate answer. Because it’s different with every play – with 365, and those are the plays that are most on my mind because we are going to perform them, God willing, starting on the 13th November and continuing for a whole year. When I wrote them, I would just wake up in the morning every day, wiggle my fingers around in the air and say, ‘God, what is the play?’ and some notion of some play would descend, and I would write it down. That’s how I wrote those. With Fucking A, I was in a canoe with a friend. We were paddling along a river or lake – this was years ago. I was in the back of the canoe and I said to her, ‘I’m going to write a play called Fucking A, and its going to be a riff on The Scarlet Letter. Ha, Ha, Ha’, and I started laughing really hard. I hadn’t actually read The Scarlet Letter, of course. It was one of those books that was assigned in high school but I hadn’t read it. I hadn’t wanted to. So we paddled around in the canoe, laughing, and we got back to land and dragged the canoe up onto the shore and the idea was still with me – I had been hooked. That was the beginning of that play. So then I had to read The Scarlet Letter. Then figure out what about The Scarlet Letter had so sneakily hooked me.

KJW

So what started out as a joke became a serious play.

SLP

Exactly. It started as a stupid joke in a canoe…

KJW

Wonderful!

SLP

Or maddening. It’s maddening.

KJW

Is writing a kind of madness?

SLP

I think so. We think writing cures the madness but it actually further exacerbates the cause. So you’re never done – you’re always chasing your tail. Or digging the hole. Or scratching. The itch that’s never fully scratched, and the scratching just makes you want to continue – scratching, right? And, as you know, Fucking A started off as Fucking A and then split into two plays: Fucking A and In the Blood….

KJW

Has that happened in your other writing? Where a play leads to another, different play? Did it happen with 365?

SLP

The America Play led to Topdog but there was more than a 5-year gap between those two. FA and Blood came out as almost-twins. And with 365? My intention to write a play a day led me from one play to the next. The plays are strung tighter like beads with grace as the string – but they’re not plot – or story-connected.

KJW

So there was no writing the play, and while you were writing, thinking, ‘Oh, there’s tomorrow’s idea’?

SLP

Not really. It was such a crazy and wacky thing that I was doing all on my own. A newspaper interviewer a few weeks ago said, ‘We should do this every year; commission a writer and get them to write a play a day and then produce it all over the country’. And I said, ‘Yeah, but this project is writer initiated’. This was done all alone. I wish I could thoroughly describe the feeling of writing the 365. It’s like running a marathon without the crowd cheering you on. You know? Like the first guy who ran the marathon [in Greece]. There was no crowd cheering, ‘Go! Go!’ He was just running on his own, with a mission. But to return to your original question, every play starts differently.

Topdog/Underdog was kind of the same thing, in that it was a joke: ‘I got an idea for a play: two brothers named Lincoln and Booth. Ha ha ha!’ Same maniacal laughter and my friend, Emily Morse, who is now working at New Dramatists (and has just had a baby that she and her hubby have named Lincoln) – Emily said, ‘You better go home and write that play’. And I was like, ‘Yeah, I know’. So I went home and wrote it and 3 days later I was done. It was wild. But the writing of other plays sometimes feels like working the rockpile. Hard labour, baby. You know it. But yeah – so my plays start in different ways – but often with laughter. That’s the thing. Laughter is interesting. I was reading the Bible the other day. I know that sounds like a joke, but I really was. I was reading the Bible and Sarah, you know, the wife of Abraham, is there, and God says, ‘You’re going to have a baby’. And she’s like ‘Ha! You’ve got to be kidding!’ And God says, ‘You laughed!’ And she’s like, ‘No, I didn’t’. And he says, ‘Yes, you did’. And she says ‘OK, I laughed’. And the laughter is a kind of handmaid to her conception. The birth comes from the laugh. OK, maybe biblical scholars would differ, but it seemed like that to me.

KJW

Moving from beginnings, once you start writing, how do you settle on a form for the play?

SLP

There’s a quote from Charles Olson, the poet – at least I think it’s him, or it may be Robert Creeley – they used to write letters back and forth. And in one of their letters, one of them said, ‘Form is nothing more than an extension of content’. So form and content are arm in arm. Sometimes my students would ask me, ‘How do I write more poetically?’ And I would ask them, ‘What does that mean – to write “poetically”?’ And then I would encourage them to listen more and think less about writing poetically. I don’t really decide on a form. Form is the shape the thing takes in order to live, you know? It’s not a decision, like, ‘I’m going to buy the green car’.

KJW

So it’s organic?

SLP

Yeah – the play takes the shape that fits it.

KJW

Do you revise or re-write a lot?

SLP

Oh sure, I’m a good re-writer. I think that’s my talent – re-writing.

KJW

How do you know you’re done?

SLP

I can hear it. You know Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? He’s a drunk. He says he drinks until he hears the click. That’s the same thing – I listen for the click. Not in drinking [laughs] but in writing – I listen for the click. And I can hear the click. And then the play’s done.

KJW

So there was a click after three days for Topdog?

SLP

Uh-huh. I didn’t even have to think about that play. It came to me like – zoom! Playwriting like that can totally ruin you because it’s like being struck by lightning. And you have to be strong to be able to take the next step and after you write a play in that way you can’t go tripping on yourself if you ever want to write again. Not when you write a play like that, but when you write a play in that way – when it just comes to you like lightning. There’s no struggle, no effort. I’ve never been struck by lightning, but writing Topdog – was like being struck by lightning. I mean it was very much like – I tell people that it was like silver liquid was being poured from a silver gravy boat, poured down through the air and into the back of my head. I swear if I turned around I would have seen silver liquid being poured in to the back of my head. In fact, it wasn’t like that – that’s what it was.

KJW

Is the process any different when you’re writing for film?

SLP

Yes and no. There’s the writing, the re-writing, the listening to the voices, the organic thing – all that – it’s the same even with film, because I find that I can write the story only if it really comes from my guts. Lots of people think screenwriting is like paint-by-numbers writing, and some might write that way. But I think most screenwriters would agree that, even with a set structure, there should be a passionate from-the-guts writing brought into the structure. And I have to write from the guts.

KJW

Given the way Hollywood devalues writers, does that make a difference for you? I mean there is a respect for the writer in the theatre – the playwright is sacrosanct and, in theory, we aim to put what the writer intended on the stage. There are numerous discussions in rehearsal about what the playwright meant. In Hollywood, it’s, ‘Here’s your cheque, now get the hell out and we’ll do what we want with it’.

SLP

It’s a shame. It’s a shame. It’s like devaluing a person. It’s like having a factory and not valuing the folks on the assembly line. What it is, is short-sighted and stupid. And it’s not true for everybody in the business. There are producers who value writers. There are directors, especially if they write themselves, who value the writer they’re working with [laughs]. Actors – I went to the set of Their Eyes Were Watching God and it was incredible. The actors were so appreciative. The costume designers, the lighting designers, everybody who was part of that project was valued. Even though all I did was an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s book, and I felt so privileged to have a chance to work on the project and adapt the novel, they all said, ‘If you hadn’t come on board, we wouldn’t be here today’. So there are Hollywood folks who value writers. But too often, there are the industry people who don’t see the connection between what the writer does and the final product. Just like there are people who don’t respect their parents, or don’t respect the earth. We all come from the earth, and, in a movie, the writer is the person who first creates the thing we all play with. There are people who disrespect the writer’s creative process – but, like whatever to them, right?

KJW

You’re a couple of decades into your writing career, but you’ve said there is no such thing as a Suzan-Lori Parks play.

SLP

Yep.

KJW

It makes me think again of Hollywood, where an actor friend of mine says he knew he had made it when he saw his name as a ‘type’ – ‘We’re looking for a so-and-so type actor for this role’. One can become a type out here, regardless of what you do.

SLP

In the late 80s, when we were doing Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, a lot of people loved it. And some people didn’t know what the hell we were doing. They said, ‘What?’ And then we won the Obie for it. That was really great. Then I write Last Black Man and so many people said, ‘Why didn’t you just write a sequel to Third Kingdom?’ Because they’d caught up to what I was doing by then and so they expected me to repeat myself. But I had written Last Black Man. I was already doing something else. And not because I wanted to do something else, but because I had to be true to the Spirit. The Spirit says ‘Write the next thing’. And I write it. If it means I’ve got to go into uncharted waters to write it, well, there I go. But people were like, ‘Do the Suzan-Lori Parks thing’, which in 1988 to them was Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. That was what they thought was my thing. But, actually, my thing is to listen. And there are plenty of people who get to tripping on one swell and just ride the same wave forever. Maybe that one swell is their thing. Not me.

I listen to the Spirit. The Spirit speaks through a channel and the channel has to be kept relatively clean. I say relatively because we all have our gunky habits. Like, I like cake – I eat too much cake, and I am sure cake gunks the channel. So if you stop doing your thing, and start doing only what the world dictates – then the channel becomes gunked up and it becomes more and more difficult to hear what you should be doing.

KJW

So it’s not just a refusal to conform to expectation…

SLP

It’s not a refusal; it’s an awareness. An awareness that there is a greater knowledge and a higher power. That there is a higher source that is much smarter than me. The me that was born in 1963 and grew up in Germany – you know what I’m saying – there is a source that is much more knowledgeable than I am. There is a Self that is a lot bigger than my self. I’m very aware of the source that makes my plays and I want to stay in tune with that source and so I keep listening. It’s an active, not a passive listening. So I keep listening and I write Last Black Man. I keep listening and I write The America Play. And just like Black Man isn’t Their Kingdom, America Play is not Black Man. America Play isn’t 12 figures with strange names all telling this jazz poetic story about a man who died and doesn’t know where he’s going to go now that he’s dead. American Play is not Black Man. It’s something else. It’s this Lincoln thing. Why Lincoln? I don’t know why exactly. But I am staying true to voices.

KJW

Do you listen to music while you write?

SLP

I used to.

KJW

Not so much anymore?

SLP

I find it distracting. Because, these days I actually listen to the music. My husband, Paul Oscher, is a musician and music is a big thing in our lives. It’s hard to write and actively listen because I get distracted. These days music totally pulls my head.

KJW

So is writing actually an act of listening for you?

SLP

Oh yeah. It is for me. It’s not thinking. It’s not imparting a message. It’s not having something to say to the people. For me, it’s just listening. I tell people I don’t have things to tell, but I have things to show. People say, ‘What does your play mean? What should I think about? What are you trying to tell me?’ Watch the play. Tell me what you think.

KJW

One of my teachers used to say, ‘Plays don’t mean – they generate meaning’.

SLP

That’s a great line. That’s true. That’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s the role of the audience. When you go to see a play you shouldn’t just sit there like you’re being fed tapioca pudding with your mouth open. You’re actively divining meaning. You’re there in the theatre with a divining rod, going, ‘Where’s the water at? Where’s the meaning? What is the meaning?’ That’s your job as the audience member. But to get back to your question what is a Suzan-Lori Parks play. Fast-forward to after The America Play. These days, there are so many people who don’t know my early work when they meet me they say, ‘Oh, you’re just a Broadway playwright’. And I just crack up laughing. And then there are people in the downtown art scene, you know, New York City below 14^th Street, folks I love and adore, because that’s where I came up artistically, but so many down-towners hated that Topdog was on Broadway. So many of them were like, ‘You betrayed us and your roots because you did a play on Broadway. You’re not “Suzan-Lori Parks” anymore’. It’s big-time funny to me. Who is Suzan-Lori Parks? Look at this [points to tattoo]. It’s Sanskrit. Written on my arm forever. A gentle translation would be ‘Follow God, the inner guide’. It’s from the Yoga Sutras. It’s Sutra 1:2.3, which is very important to me. It says ‘Follow God’. Not ‘Follow the fans’. Not ‘Follow the audience’. Not ‘Follow the market – make sure you make money’. It says: ‘Follow God, the inner guide’.

KJW

The Sutra number makes me think of the importance of numbers in your plays. 365 being the most obvious example, but you play a lot with the meanings of numbers.

SLP

[Laughs] I don’t know about numerology. I don’t know anything about it. I read my horoscope in the newspaper, but my knowledge of numerology is limited. My choice of numbers has something to do with rhythm. But, yeah, the numbers themselves – in The America Play, Brazil keeps saying, ‘I was only five. I was only five’. And in Last Black Man there’s ‘6 by 6 by 6’. And there are the five fingers of fate in In the Blood. Although that’s also just because there are five fingers on my hand – meaning: The meanings here go way deep but they’re not ‘intellectual’ and they’re not pre-thought out. With 365 – it just rhymed: 365 Days/365 Plays. That was why I thought a play a day would be so fun: the title rhymed. That kind of stuff is like the heartbeat. It’s there and it’s strong but most of us don’t have to think about it much.

KJW

There’s such a sense of the interconnectedness of things in your plays…

SLP

Wow. That’s a play in 365. The Interconnectedness of All Things.

KJW

Synchronicity, eh? [laughs] That’s one of the things that strikes me about your work. You talk about ‘rev & rep’, but I would add a third: ‘ref ’. It’s not just revision and repetition, but also reference.

SLP

Oohh, that’s good! ‘Rev and rep and ref ’.

KJW

Reference to outside elements runs through all your plays, whether it’s Booth and Lincoln, whether it’s the Scarlet Letter, or even your own work, there is this constant stream of outside reference that always gets drawn back in. Rev, rep, and ref.

SLP

Yeah. It’s weird. I mean, what’s smart about Topdog, for me, is that it does keep pointing to The America Play.

KJW

But The America Play already points toward so many other things, and in some ways points forward toward Topdog .

SLP

Sure, but the first Lincoln character doesn’t know that he was pointing forward toward this other play in the future. Although, the Foundling Father is following in someone’s footsteps – so we could assume that he’s thinking of someone who is ahead of him. Hmmm… But, hey, that’s a LONG conversation. We would have to re-invent the wheel of time to figure that one out [laughs].

KJW

Well, speaking as someone who has been in the audience for both, I was retrospectively sitting in the audience of Topdog thinking I was in a funhouse, wondering which is the real thing and which is the mirror.

SLP

[Laughs] Right. Don’t ask me, I don’t know.

KJW

But what is the experience for you then, when you see these things on their feet? What do you feel when you’re looking at your own creation? Are there moments of discovery? Does someone else take your work and show you things about it, and it’s a sort of accidental genius?

SLP

Moments of ‘genius’ are all blessings, but I wouldn’t say my moments of genius are accidental, in the sense of the one who stumbles on a nugget of gold and doesn’t know it. Mostly I write something that’s good, I know it. It’s like on a train or a subway. I always stand at the place in the car where you can see all the other cars. And I love that moment when you round a corner and all the cars line up and you can see all up and down the whole train. I love that. I could just stand there and do that for hours. And that’s how you know when it’s good – it all lines up and you can see it straight down the middle. And the parts of my plays that people think are really good, I usually know beforehand. It’s not a surprise. That doesn’t make it any less cool when people dig it, it’s just not a surprise. Cause I felt it while I was writing – that lining up with the Bigger Thing. It’s not, ‘Me me me – I did this’. It’s more like, ‘I got in line with the Bigger Thing’. It’s like an eclipse or a sunset. Like that moment at sunset where there’s that flash of green light or a full moon when you go, ‘Whoa – look at that!’

KJW

So you’re writing, looking for a particular conjunction or alignment.

SLP

Right, right. Like the hole in Lincoln’s head and the (w)hole of history, and they line up and all of a sudden, through that (w)hole hole comes the play.

KJW

There’s something very Zen about that, very satori. That lightning flash that briefly illuminates the landscape and makes everything clear.

SLP

Right. And you can capture it and write it down so that it can offer illumination to the people who do the play, or see the play, or read the play. That’s what I’ve found with a play like Topdog that has been read by so many people. The lighting comes, the writer writes it down, and then the people are able to re-experience that illumination. I just met two people – I was in Denver for meetings on 365 – and two different people at two different theatres doing Topdog in Colorado. One at Shadow Theatre in Denver and the other was at Steel City Theatre in Pueblo, Colorado. Or the groups of college students I met in India did staged readings of Topdog. Far out. It’s cool knowing you made something that years later is still giving off light. It’s wild how theatre works, because it’s a living thing. Unlike a film, which is up on the screen and, while it provides pleasure and entertainment for those who watch it – it’s not a living thing. A film is pretty much a done deal by the time a mass audience sees it. With a play, you’re hanging a script out there, saying, ‘Enter into this, step into these shoes, feel the fire’, and, through their living-witness energy, lots of people get to participate in a very direct and immediate way and they get to create something new and specific to their own experience. You’re hanging a naked live electric cord out there and saying, ‘Hey, hang on to this’.

KJW

What is America? You wrote The America Play. Many people see you as one of this generation’s great American playwrights. So what is ‘America’?

SLP

America is different now from what it was when I wrote The America Play (around 1994). Does the definition of America change depending on the political dynamics – who’s in the White House? Who is in the big (White) House? [laughs] It changes.

KJW

Can you give a snapshot of right now, before the premiere of 365, what is the America that that play is being born into?

SLP

I get to go to all these communities where people know my work from long before Topdog/Underdog. And I get to say to them, ‘You’re invited to the party’. These are theatre people – and granted, it’s tricky – some are conservative, but most of them aren’t. We’re not in it for the money. So our politics may be more progressive than someone who owns a chicken slaughterhouse in Arkansas. I’m not down on America. America is a place where so many things can happen. I think often we get steered in the wrong direction. There are an overwhelming number of people in this country committed to doing the right thing, even though we’re going in the wrong direction. And it is a country of diversity, and that is our strength. And it is a country where, thank God, because of the sacrifices a lot of people have made, there has been some positive change. I’m still amazed at that. I grew up in the 1960s. We’ve still got a long way to go, but we have, as a country, come a long way. We are more accepting of our diversity than some other countries. Remember that World Cup of Football shit, where some Europeans shouted monkey chants at guys of African descent? Sometimes we are more accepting of others. We’re not the most accepting, but we are working at it. I think we’re making progress. We do a lot of shitty and stupid things also, but I am not one of those America-haters. Hate is the easy road. Too many of my people shed real, live blood so that I can be sitting here talking with you. And I will never forget that. I think a lot of people take for granted the progress this country has made. But I will never forget that. I know my parents worked hard so that I could live in a house a block from the beach in California. The meter maid, a black woman whose name is Sharon, we hang out and chat. She says, ‘Girl, there ain’t none of us but you on that street’. She wants me to know that there aren’t a lot of ‘us’ living on my street. So what is America? America is working toward progress. And we can do so much more good. And the dream is so beautiful – that’s why the heartache is so great. Most of my characters are consumed by heartache. But that’s because the dream is beautiful, not because America sucks.

KJW

Because there is a promise and a hope. And there is a recognition that it doesn’t have to be this way, but we’re not there yet and that causes the heart to break.

SLP

Right. Right. Or we’re so far from it. My characters often feel that no matter what they do, they can’t seem to make any progress. Lincoln in The America Play is following in the footsteps of a man who lived in the past. He’s walking forward in the footsteps of someone who is behind him. What does that mean to him? He gets terribly confused and angry and lost.

KJW

Isn’t that a wonderful metaphor for life in America anyway – we’re all confused and angry about the past. And the idea is, can you transcend it?

SLP

Sure. Yeah. We try. We all try.

KJW

You said you don’t write for audiences and you don’t write for yourself. I believe the word you used was ‘figures’ – you write for the characters themselves.

SLP

Now I write for God. Let’s just cut to the chase. Now I write for God. That’s all. Not God in the, ‘Oh you go to church and it’s the God that your priest with his limited ability to talk about God is allowed to talk about God because he is hampered by the Vatican and stuff ’.

KJW

You grew up Catholic.

SLP

Yeah, I grew up Catholic.

KJW

I feel your pain.

SLP

[Laughs] So you understand what I’m talking about. Not in that kind of God, but the God without limitations. The Source. The ‘That That is All That’.

KJW

‘I am that I am’.

SLP

Yeah – that one. I write for That One. It’s being a lightning rod – you’re struck and then you pass the voltage along to the people.

KJW

Let me switch gears. Your plays are full of violence: emotional, physical, verbal, deadly. People get shot. Marlin Perkins has a gun.

SLP

Horrible. Horrible [laughs].

KJW

Why all the violence?

SLP

I don’t know. I always liked Greek tragedy. So that’s part of it.

KJW

Does it relate to what you were saying earlier about having hopes and dreams, but the everyday reality gets in the way? Like Lincoln, for example, he’s following…

SLP

Do you mean the Foundling Father as Lincoln or Abraham Lincoln? We have to distinguish.

KJW

I actually meant Booth’s brother [in Topdog].

SLP

Oh – that I don’t know. I was talking about the Foundling Father.

KJW

Even with the Foundling Father, if you take a job as Abraham Lincoln, there is a bullet at the end of your career. Or at least there is a bullet at the end of the job. And in his case, there is a bullet every 5 minutes. Although, now I’m going to move away from my own question. One of the things I found most beautiful about the play in an intellectual sense, is that it’s all about the inaccuracy of history. We’re not even sure about Booth’s words – Sic semper tyrannus, or ‘The South is Avenged’.

SLP

Right, right.

KJW

That history itself is rev, rep, and ref.

SLP

Well, it’s just like sitting here going over the details of my chronology. Apparently I’ve been born in five different years and places and I went to Yale and a lot of this isn’t true. What you read about me is not always true and sometimes different every time.

KJW

You’ve become one of your own characters.

SLP

But I think I was all along.

KJW

That’s deep. That’s deep.

SLP

[Laughs] But, you know, right? I must have been.

KJW

Bonnie Metzgar calls In the Blood a ‘now play’. But you’re known for history plays. So ‘now’ means ‘history’?

SLP

Well, I’m known for history plays, but actually, the plays were never ‘history plays’. Like Faulkner says ‘History is IS’. So my plays often feature historical figures. But they’re all ‘now’ plays. Especially the ones after Venus – Venus was like passing a test. I always felt that Venus was my black belt. These days I practice yoga, but before that I practiced karate for 7 years. Word is, after the black belt, everything changes. It’s like you start all over again. I always felt when I was writing Venus that I was getting my black belt in playwriting, and after the black belt you start all over again. I knew the characters would be different after Venus and after Venus came In the Blood, and Fucking A and Topdog and 365. But, to me, the plays have never been history plays. They’re all about the intersection of the historical and the now. Even In the Blood is about that intersection because it is not based on The Scarlet Letter but The Scarlet Letter is one of its parents, let’s say.

KJW

Is writing plays a joy, or is it a form of suffering?

SLP

It is a joy, I mean, it’s difficult. Hard work is mandatory, suffering is optional. I’m more like the Buddhist kind of writer – suffering is an option. Hard work is not an option, but I think you choose to suffer. There’s a lot of joy in writing. And when you get to meet the people who do the plays – everyone from the movie star people like Don Cheadle and Mos Def and Jeffrey Wright to the people at the Steel City Theatre in Pueblo, who are like the Mod Squad, they are so cool, Dorothy, Corey and Kennedy are their names – and there are hundreds, thousands like them all across the country and when I get to meet them, I feel very lucky.

KJW

Your first novel came out a couple of years ago.

SLP

Loved writing it.

KJW

Is there another one coming?

SLP

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m writing one right now. I started out as a short story writer.

KJW

Mr. Baldwin’s class and influence.

SLP

Yeah, that’s where I began.

KJW

How is it different than writing plays?

SLP

It’s not, really.

KJW

It’s the same thing?

SLP

Not the same – because when you write a play, your writing constructs a doorway, and through that door will enter the audience, the actors, the director, the people who create your play onstage. Writing a novel, you still write a doorway. But it’s a different kind of doorway – because they don’t need to bring a novel to life and walk in it and inhabit as they would a play. But the writing process is similar whether a novel, a play, a song, a screenplay, because it’s all still writing. It’s all still this [picks up pen and mimes writing]. Same thing. I write more on a computer now.

KJW

Do you ever write long hand?

SLP

I wrote 365 long hand.

KJW

Really?

SLP

Yep. It was while I was teaching at CalArts. I quit CalArts a few years ago.

KJW

You’ve taught at several places now. How does your writing shape your teaching and teaching shape your writing?

SLP

My writing doesn’t change. I keep the two activities pretty separate. I didn’t go to grad school myself, so my teaching methods are totally informed by my own writing process: ‘Here, hold this live wire. Here, hold this live wire. Here, hold this live wire. Go straight to the nerve. Go straight to the guts’. Not much theory and lots of practice. I love writing. I enjoy my students quite a bit. But it’s also something I can only do in short bursts – teaching. After a while I gotta get back to full-time writing. My students are all great, though – I love you all.

KJW

You’ve talked before about voyeurism and certainly a lot of your writings have people watching other people. In Devotees in the Garden of Lovethe women watch the battle. People watch the Hottentot Venus. Girl 6 certainly concerns voyeurism. I actually want to flip the question and ask you the opposite – about performing. It seems to me that your characters are very self-aware of their own performances in their circumstances. And they perform for each other. Is there an interest in human performance? As a species, can we not stop performing?

SLP

That’s an interesting question. As you were asking it, I was looking around and watching these other people. As my husband Paul says, ‘We’re more of ourselves when we’re being watched because, as a species, we don’t live alone’. An essential part of human being is performance. So there’s a play about a brother who pretends he’s someone else in the daytime and he has the same name of the person he is pretending to be, and when he gets home he has to pretend to be someone else to hide his underhanded motives from his brother. All that makes for a hall of mirrors, or a wave pattern. The characters perform and they’re aware that they are being watched. They are each other’s audience and their awareness of audience somehow makes them aware of us. The hall of mirrors is also a wave pattern. And in every wave pattern there is a spot where it goes quiet – where the mirrors go blind. But I don’t intentionally write it in. It just happens because I’m writing a play in which the characters are trying to be – or, at least, figure out who they are. Gee, the weird way I write plays.

KJW

Weird but successful. It seems to be working for you. What was the impetus behind 365 Days/365 Plays?

SLP

It started as a far out joke. I was hanging out with Paul, my husband, and I said, ‘I’m going to write a play a day for a year and call it 365 Days/365 Plays. Ha ha ha’. And I started laughing, right? And he says, ‘That’d be cool’. And he’s a blues musician, so he doesn’t think theatre is cool. Because he really is cool, right? So he got me to thinking maybe it would be cool. Maybe it would be fun. And I started. Now, looking back, I realize that I was making a sort of daily offering, a daily devotional gift to the art form that has given me so much. And now it’s huge. It’s a love train. Shortly after I finished writing the plays I showed them around and a couple of theatres wanted to produce them, but in a very conventional way. But 365 is so different, I wanted them produced differently. At the core of the plays is something I’ve started calling ‘radical inclusion’. To write a play a day for a whole year, you have to dismiss the bouncer who works the door of your creative mind. All ideas are welcome. All ideas are worthy for play-making. Somehow I wanted the production of the play cycle to dovetail with this ‘radical inclusion’. But I didn’t know how. So one day I’m hanging out with Bonnie Metzgar, who I’ve known since 1989, and we’re sitting around thinking about how a production of 365 can be different and fun. And we’re like, ‘Maybe lots of theatres could do it – like 365 theatres!’ And that was crazy. It was like saying, ‘And then we’re going to go to the moon!’ It was just that nutty – 365 theatres doing the plays. And we were driving around Denver in her car. She’s the Associate Artistic Director of Curious Theatre Company and she also teaches at Brown University. And we’re just riffing, driving around and talking wild and the more we talked the more we thought it would be cool to get 52 theatres in seven cities to do the plays simultaneously. Now we’ve got over 14 cities. And its growing every day. With ‘The 365 National Festival’, all interested theatres and parties are welcome to join in and share in the world premiere. Big theatres, midsize theatres, small theatres, children’s theatres, university theatres, high-schools, senior centres, dinner theatres, seasonal theatres. It’s a love train. It’s definitely a love train. We go out and we meet people. At first they can’t believe that a Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright is sitting down at the table saying, ‘Hey, want to do some of my plays?’ and I’m only charging a licensing fee of a dollar a day. It’s experimental theatre. So many groups around the country are participating. TCG [the Theatre Communications Group] is doing the book and they will list every theatre involved in the premiere.

KJW

Speaking of the Pulitzer. You’re in that rare club – only 11 women have won the Pulitzer for drama.

SLP

Really? Only 11?

KJW

Only 11 since the award was established.

SLP

When was the award established?

KJW

1918. It’s mind blowing when you think about it, especially in 2006.

SLP

But they don’t give it every year.

KJW

Well theoretically, they do give it every year, it’s just some years the committee decides there is no play worthy of the award.

SLP

Do they ever not award the prize in other categories? It’s kind of funny, don’t you think?

KJW

True. But hasn’t theatre always been the bastard at the family reunion? We have to get invited to the party but not everyone’s happy about it.

SLP

True [laughs].

KJW

And there is this notion in our culture that writing for performance is ‘cute’. Books and print and text are literature, but writing for performance isn’t really writing.

SLP

People say plays aren’t really complete until they are performed. But plays are complete – they just exist in another realm, and we, because we are human beings in a material world, must perform them to make them real for us. Plays written on paper are alive, they’re just not alive for humans because we are in our bodies. Topdog felt alive before anyone else read it, before anyone performed it. Venus felt the same way. Switching gears for a minute to talk about Venus – I lecture and I tour and sometimes people have questions about Venus. They’ve seen a production and they have concerns. They always ask me to clarify my take on her situation. One: saying Venus had a hand in her fate is not the same thing as saying it’s all her fault. It’s very important that people understand that. If you want to see what hand she had in her fate, according to my play, look at the play. Don’t listen to your friend talk about the play – they may have seen a production, but if you want to get a clearer sense of what I said, you could also read the play. At the beginning of the play the Brothers ask Venus if she wants to go away. She’s not aware of the subtleties of what they are asking, or of the trap that exists for her. But she is, like most poor people, willing to exchange her labour in order to get out of a poverty-stricken situation. It is important that people understand that. It’s a difficult play, because I don’t say, ‘Blame it all on the white guy’. We each have a hand in our fate – even if it is just a small hand. And admitting that is part of the process of liberation. Neither is Venus about dumping all the blame on the black girl – and if that’s how you read it, you may have missed some of the deeper points. But hey, I also get lots of fan mail from folks who have read/performed/seen Venus and say it’s their favourite play ever. The play is about love, so I guess it hits people hard.

KJW

As you yourself have said, its so difficult to talk about race in America because we want to make it so black and white, pardon the pun.

SLP

The main thing folks misunderstand in Venus is not so much the ‘race’ issue, but the ‘blame’ or the ‘responsibility’ issue. But, yeah, talking about race requires, if you will, a discriminating mind (not racial but time and spatial) and we aren’t encouraged to think clearly and deeply in this country.

KJW

Venus is your most written about play.

SLP

It’s a love play, and it’s difficult. Later in the play, after Venus has spent time in England, the Doctor asks her, ‘Do you want to go to France’ and she says ‘yes’. Why? Because the Doctor’s hands are clean. He has clean hands. She wants to go with the man who has clean hands and who is nice, instead of staying with the Mother Showman who beats her and steals from her and invites men to rape her. Showing that she has this much agency is not blaming the victim. Neither does it let the victimizer off the hook. But if you’re hip to this you can be transfixed by her story, wounded, and then healed. Her dream of a better life is so beautiful and she just misses realizing it. She misses realizing her dream to be someone of means who could send money home and maybe go home and live as a wealthy woman. And there are so many people who love that play. So many people who’ve performed in the play and have told me that it’s made such a positive change in their lives.

KJW

In the past, you’ve disavowed the label, ‘African-American Playwright’.

SLP

Not exactly. But that label is like saying, I write ‘Suzan-Lori Parks plays’. I am an African-American woman and I am a playwright. But our culture too often uses labels as limiting – to denote what is expected of you and what rooms you are allowed to enter. If you’re an African-American and a woman and a playwright, with those labels, too often the thinking stops because the assumptions leap in and folks think they can go on autopilot about you or your work. You SHOULD do this sort of thing; the subjects and topics your work addresses are confined to a particular list. When the label goes on, the thinking mind turns off – so I suggest we turn off or explode the label. When people feel they need to use a label, I’ve sought to hip them to a more accurate, wider-ranging definition.

KJW

Your plays really do show ethnic identity in flux. Hester and her multiethnic children. Lincoln played by an African-American man in whiteface. There’s this whole deconstruction of the notion of ethnicity in your work which is wonderful.

SLP

Black characters, like all characters, ask the fundamental questions of ‘who am I and what am I doing here?’ Those are the questions that the characters in any good play ask. Hamlet is asking them. Lear is asking them. Oedipus is REALLY asking them.

KJW

Well, to bring us full circle, that’s what happens in ‘the theatre industry’. My friend Javon Johnson jokes he’s going to legally change his name to ‘African-American Playwright Javon Johnson’, because he never sees his name without that in front of it when a theatre does one of his plays.

SLP

[Laughs] Right, right.

KJW

You’ll never see ‘the play by Euro-American playwright Arthur Miller’ or ‘the new play by Jewish-American playwright David Mamet’.

SLP

Well exactly. Say it again – ‘Jewish-American playwright David Mamet’. Doesn’t it sound like we’re asking him to crawl into a tiny box for us so we don’t have to think about him as a great writer, and I think Mamet is fantabulous. To label him simply in terms of his race or ethnicity is to ask him to crawl into a little box. So I say, recognize the whole person and you don’t depend on the label. If you’re awake and you’re hip to the work, you don’t depend on the label. It’s like me saying I had lunch with Kevin, ‘my white friend’. Maybe there are some situations where you have to say that, but I don’t know – sometimes we use labels so we don’t have to think.

KJW

But in contemporary America, isn’t race the elephant in the room? It’s either the only thing we think about or it’s this huge doing that we try to pretend isn’t there.

SLP

For some people. But not for everyone. It’s the thing that a lot of people THINK black people should be thinking about. And, not only should we be thinking about it but we should be thinking about it along certain predefined lines. We are encouraged to talk/write about race in ways that may be successful in the marketplace, but not so helpful to the people. And how many interviews with David Mamet discuss the subject of race? Hey, we’re not gonna figure this out today. What we can do is to continue to embrace the work. That’s where the transformation happens. And we can explode the labels. For example: if I call 365 Days/365 Plays a ‘black’ play, my labelling it that way explodes the limited notion of what a ‘black play’ can be. And from here on out, a ‘black play’ can be seen as one that invites everybody to the table. And with this definition, we can more clearly appreciate the works of, say, August Wilson. The work will make the Change. It’s cool how plays can re-make history. But, my plays are not the History Channel. Like with Venus, and with Topdog. So many people say, ‘Why’d you have the brothers kill each other?’ Topdog is not the 11 o’clock news. It’s a play. It’s a play. And at the end of the play, the actors take their bows. At the end of the 11 o’clock news, the shotdead brother does not get up take a bow. He’s dead. But woven into the play is an opportunity for two actors to come together, to work together and create a pageant. I did some of my growing up in Germany. There is this town, Oberammergau. Once every 10 years the whole town gets together and puts on a religious pageant. My plays are very much like that – the community gets together and creates this pageant. It’s not just a vomiting up of history or a regurgitation of the 11 o’clock news. So the idea of pageant-making is intrinsic to it. For example, In the Blood. My favourite part of In the Blood is where I get to listen to the actors run around backstage because they have to make quick costume changes. I was thinking while I was writing the play, ‘This is going to be good – Chilli is going to have to change into Jabber! Ha ha! Watch this!’ The pageant is going on. The playing of the play, the inner workings of the pageant, is often very much in my mind as I write. Not so much, ‘How will a director stage this?’ but more – ‘This is a text with a doorway in it, and through that door will come actors, directors, designers, scholars, audience members’.

KJW

So is that the closest we are going to come to the definition of ‘a Suzan-Lori Parks play’? A new pageant?

SLP

For now. And I may change up. But for now, sure, you can say my work is a new kind of community pageant. It’s that Oberammergau thing. Yeah, that works. And the violence sometimes in my work, sure, like in every good religious pageant there’s blood. And passion. And a miracle, maybe. But mostly there is an invitation for the community to come together and put on a show. Sure, it’s very much an Oberammergau thing.