ABSTRACT
Shelby Jiggetts
Who are some of the people who have influenced you?
Suzan-Lori ParksWell, James Baldwin is one because he told me that I should try writing theater. He told me to go down that road. I was at Mount Holyoke College at the time, and he was a visiting professor at New Hampshire College. He was teaching at Hampshire around 1983, I think. And it was a course in short-story writing. In that class, I was really animated, and he asked after a class reading, “Why don’t you try writing plays; have you ever thought about writing plays?” And being that I was very impressionable, I tried just that. These days I’m not impressionable at all. I’ve become hard. Back then, I was like a piece of wax. Another writer who has had an influence on me was Tennessee Williams. I remember I read one of his plays. I mean, it was the kind of play that people, you know, the cool people, were calling dumb theater, but it was theater that I liked. I’m a big fan of bad theater. Tennessee Williams is not an example of bad theater, but it could be compared to “serious theater.” I went to see Amadeus in Philadelphia, and I loved the people in costumes runnin’ around. I just saw them runnin’ around and I was thinking, damn, that is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen! Look at ’em—runnin’! And they had wings on and stuff. It was great! What the play is about… I had no idea. And I didn’t care. Musicals like The Sound of Music or Oklahoma, you can’t beat them. I mean, just the idea of people, you know, in costumes. You know those nuns and the cowboys—I mean in the separate musicals. The nuns and their costumes—I love that whole thing.
SJWhat does play writing mean to you?
SLPThe more I think about plays, I think plays are about space. Plays are about space to me. Plays are about space, and, say, fiction is about place. I think that one of the things that led me to writing plays is the understanding I have inside about space, because I moved around so much when I was younger. And I think somehow that sort of helped along that process. Maybe it’s just the pageant of people through my life. You know, all the strange people not connected to any one backdrop.
SJWhat does moving around mean, and did that influence your writing?
SLPMy dad was an officer in the army, and we moved around everywhere—well, I mean it seems like we lived everywhere. We lived in Germany for a while. We lived in Kentucky, we lived in Texas, we lived in California and North Carolina, and Maryland and Vermont, and all over Germany when we were there. And some other places that I can’t remember. At one time we were moving every year. I think moving around had an influence on my writing.
SJYou talk about people who encouraged you: were there people who tried to discourage you from play writing?
SLPI was being discouraged from studying English literature by my teacher in high school and discouraged from writing plays by some of my teachers in college. Those two things together, there’s nothing like it! There’s nothing like rejection to make you strong!
SJIn what ways were you discouraged?
SLPWell, my teacher in high school said that I shouldn’t write because I couldn’t spell. She told me that if I studied anything, don’t study English. I was very good at chemistry. Actually, I wanted to become a scientist, so I was very good in those two subjects; I thought, oh, I’ll be a rocket scientist. But then I read Virginia Woolf—ah, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. That novel pulled me from the science lab into the literature lab. I said good-bye to physics. Then I wrote my first play in college; and in the English Department most of the professors were really nice, but the professors from the Theater Department didn’t think I knew anything about theater because I hadn’t taken a class or anything. I was just writing plays for an honors project. And they sort of gave me the old thumbs-down. I have to admit, the play I wrote wasn’t a good play. It was badly written; it was a first try at writing. But it had all of the things in it that I’m obsessed with now. Like memory and family and history and the past. And the play had a lot of dirt on stage which was being dug at.
SJA recurring motif.
SLPExactly. The digger motif. And the Theater Department guy, whom I will not name, said, “You can’t have dirt on stage. That’s not a play.” You know, not having read Beckett’s Happy Days, I hadn’t even seen the Morca plays where they put sand all over the stage. For some reason, I didn’t really like theater. Theater was where a lot of people with too much attitude wore funny clothes and funny little costumes, and they talked with funny voices even though they were from, like, New York and New Jersey. And I didn’t respect that. And then there was this woman, this professor, a great professor, Mary McHenry, who was an English professor, still at Mount Holyoke. When I didn’t get honors, I felt totally dejected. But she made me understand that I can do anything I want. After seeing her, I was just, like, “Ah, forget it. I can do anything. I’ll just be, like, crazy, you know.”
SJAh, how liberating.
SLPYeah, she’s great. You know there are some people who come into your life and save your life. Meaning they do what you need. But I still couldn’t stand theater. I thought theater was dumb. Why would I want to do that? I liked fiction writers. Theater people to me were the actors. I didn’t know any playwrights. Or actually people at Hampshire who wrote plays were really, really cool, and they were really exclusive, and, of course, I would try to make friends, but they didn’t want anything to do with me because I was really dorky. I didn’t know anything about theater. I was pretty ignorant. I read a few plays. Actually, I read Shakespeare because I was an English/German major.
SJLet’s talk about your linguistic word play. I love the way you play the language. And that dialect that you use in your work recurs. I think now when people talk about your voice, it is that very American dialect that has a voice in the characters. Where did that come from? What’s the earliest that you recall using it? Was it in that first play?
SLPWas it in the [Sinner’s Place]? [Sinner’s] Place was the first play. Two girls are growing up, and one moves away and one stays home. Then the one that stays away comes back, so there’s all this tension. You know, memory and history. And these two people who are a lot alike are now different. So I think there might have been word play in that, because they spoke differently although they had lived in the same place. But I don’t know where it actually started. It probably started when it was most visible. And it was most visible in Imperceptible Mutabilities because it looked so strange, and that is one of the reasons why people found the play, or rather still find the play, difficult to read because, basically, it’s just an attempt to get things on the page how I think they sound to me. For example, it’s some letters together S-S-S-N-U-C-H. I remembered that because it was the only thing on The America Play. And I was just sniffing because I had allergies, and I’m sitting here thinking, that’s an S? Well, actually it’s like a series of Cs and Hs. So, it’s an attempt to get, you know, the sounds on the page and the fun that I had with that. Sometimes it depends on who they are talking to. Sometimes it depends on what they are trying to say. Sometimes people say, “o.k.” Sometimes people say, “k.” And it’s fun to write. So, I just was trying to get more specific because, if someone says, “I’m going with you, ’k?” that’s different from, “I’m going with you, o.k?” It’s different, it’s a different thing going on. It’s “the” sometimes, and sometimes it’s “thee.” It’s a recording of, not only the way words sound, but what that means. The difference between “k” and “o.k.” is not just what one might call black English versus standard English, for example. Or black English versus mid-Atlantic English. It’s not that, so much as it’s an attempt: I am trying to be very specific in what’s going on emotionally with the character. Because if you just try out, “I’m going with you, O.K,” “I’m going with you, ’K,” it’s a different thing going on. If you jump to that word faster, if you put your words together in a different order, you’re feeling something differently, and it’s just an attempt to try to be more specific so that I don’t have to write in all these parenthetical things. It’s a Shakespearean thing, and it’s a Greek thing. They did it in their time with things like the line, and things like that. It’s just getting more specific, letting the words hold the emotion. Instead of some parenthetical stage direction.
SJThere is such emotion attached to the way language falls that it’s more than oral. There is an emotional resonance too?
SLPExactly. See, I write from the gut, or the balls. I don’t have balls, but I know someone who does. That’s tacky, I know, but I write from the gut. I think theater should come from there. Especially because it’s life and, you know, you gotta infect people with language—it comes from the gut. If you sit around and try to infect people with some kind of idea that you have that’s not grounded in your gut, they’re not going to feel anything with their gut. They’re going to walk out of the theater maybe with some great ideas, but they are not going to feel it. Your whole body should be involved in the whole experience.
SJYou do not provide the map in your writing; you give us a lot and you give us this language, but just looking at two very different directors and their approaches to the same play provided a more emotional experience, the other a more sort of engaging intellectual experience.
SLPWell, I think I provide the map, but I think the map is the map of—you know—I’m not going to say the map of the world, but the map of, say, New Jersey. I mean it’s the map of a piece of land. And what I try to do is say there are 10 roads, 20, 50 roads—take one. I get a kick out of just seeing what people do. I think that the playwright provides the map. But I think a bad play only has a one-way road. Yes, I think the bad play has one road; one idea, one message, one way of doing it. It’s so much about one thing. And everybody walks out of the theater going, “Yeah, homelessness is bad,” for example. That’s not a map; I don’t know what it is. It’s bad art.
SJSo you’re not disappointed when people come away with an intellectual experience rather than an emotional one?
SLPI’m not disappointed. I’m saying what I enjoy. What I think theater or a play should do is provide the opportunity to feel it in your gut. It’s in what a director chooses. What’s a great scene from a play? I think the writer of Oedipus provides the opportunity for a gut-wrenching experience. But, then, each production has the freedom to do what it wants to do. And sometimes the people, the very talented team, only has the means—the economic means or the emotional means really—to go so far to understand it in such a way, and sometimes they have the means to understand it another way, and it just depends on the production. I’m not disappointed. When the director does a great job, I try not to get involved. And that’s what I love.
SJPeople in your plays tend to observe other people, like the naturalistic surveys.
SLPAh, like the Founding Fathers observing themselves.
SJFoundling Fathers observing themselves and talking about themselves.
SLPYes, there is a lot of watching going on. I like to watch. When I lived in London years ago, someone said to me that the most exciting thing about Hamlet is that it’s about theater. I thought that was so interesting. Then as I wrote my plays, I thought the most exciting thing about theater is that it’s about theater. The most exciting thing about watching theater is that people are watching, and I think that’s fascinating. That’s why I get nervous when I go outside. There’s so much watching going on. People are watching you, you are watching people. It’s like overstimulation. I think that is what theater’s all about. It’s about one person looking at somebody else. What’s really exciting is that people who are watching are dressed up in costumes and pretending they are not who they really are, and that’s really fun to me. Yes, there’s a lot of watching in Venus. In Venus, the doctor is watching Venus, and the Resurrectionist is watching everybody. Then actually at the end he becomes the watch, the death watch on Venus. So, it’s all this kind of looking. There’s a whole lot of looking going on.
SJYou think that’s culturally based in the black community?
SLPI’m sure, I’m sure there’s something there that’s about that. Remember, we lived in Vermont in the early 1970s. It always happens wherever you are. Vermont in the early 1970s, Germany in the 1970s. I think it’s a byproduct of being different from other people. I think it’s culturally based, and it’s also what the forum of theater is all about.
SJDo you think that, as black people, we are watched more?
SLPYes, I think so.
SJThat’s the sort of a scenario you put in plays. Venus is being watched by Europeans. It seems that so many things led up to The Hottentot Venus being a topic of interest for you. A black woman who is watched by European society.
SLPIn Devotees [in the Garden of Love] black people are watching something we never see. We can assume that it’s just a bunch of black people having war. We can assume that by extension because we never see the war. We are told about it but we are never told, but the two black women on the hilltop are watching the war. So yes, I always think it’s culturally based. But there’s always something else going on. There are riches on the medium in which it is working and something personal which is of course connected to the cultural experience but also to something else. Which I’m sure I’m defining as I go along because I’m not sure. You write your own story and then you don’t know really what it is. The watching really works in the plays because theater is about watching. I think that if theater weren’t about watching, I would think it would be some comment on what Europeans are doing to us.
SJYes, but the other thing too is that the watchers provide a kind of guide. For example, the Resurrectionist is our host, and this is the story of a woman’s life.
SLPExactly. So now put that into the equation—those are two black men. The Foundling Father and the Resurrectionist who are diggers, by trade. They are both diggers who are watching the whole business. Basically, if you stretch it… you… I mean, yes, the doctor is watching Venus, but who is watching the doctor? The Resurrectionist—the black man is watching the doctor. So what really is going on there? I’m not sure. The Founding Fathers watching the Foundling Father whose name he never reveals, but who else is he also watching? He’s got one eye on Lincoln. Lincoln is not watching him even though Lincoln is behind him. Lincoln can’t see him, so he is somehow behind Lincoln.
SJWe can talk about that question, too, when we talk about your art. I mean we’ve talked about how preoccupied black people are about race, and what’s exciting about your work is that you have black people preoccupied with each other. In really wonderful ways, history is there. History obsesses them, but not a “this one did this to me” kind of history. I think about the way that you talk about slavery and the way slavery is used in your Imperceptible Mutabilities.
SLPIt looks at the bigger picture. It’s not only trying to tell the story of your people, or put the blame on somebody. I think that is what some artists do. Their art says, “If I could just put this heavy weight on somebody, I would feel a hell of a lot better.” Which is true, but I think they, over time, learn that the important thing is to solve the riddle of the universe instead of just putting the blame on somebody else. That’s really the question. For example, it’s black out there, so that’s like a black hole. It becomes more of a powerful thing than putting the blame on somebody else. Because if you think about the history of humankind, it’s relatively short compared to the history of the universe. These bigger things resonate on our daily lives like quantum theory. That resonates—the atomic theory and all that—resonates in our daily lives, as does “The Big Bang Theory.” So it’s the bigger thing that makes for more interesting relationships between things.
SJWho are some of the dramatic writers you admire?
SLPI like Adrienne Kennedy because she made me feel like I could do anything at that moment. I admire the hell out of her as a person, as a courageous person. We were on a panel together, and someone was telling us that we should all call ourselves feminists. They were asking me, “Do you call yourself a feminist?” And I said, “I call myself Suzan-Lori.” And they asked Adrienne, “Why don’t you call yourself a feminist?” and Adrienne said, “I reserve the right to call myself whatever I choose to call myself.” Lorraine Hansberry, I admire, again, right along there with Tennessee Williams. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to write as many plays as she wanted to, but something like A Raisin in the Sun or To Be Young, Gifted and Black is incredibly inspiring and beautiful. I don’t want to write plays like August Wilson because he is writing them. You know we only need one August Wilson, as we only need one Suzan-Lori Parks. I do admire what he and Lloyd Richards together have managed to do with the American theater scene because it is hard out there, and they managed to get out there and make wonderful theater. You got to stay on your toes in this business.
SJDoes staying on your toes mean that you read your reviews?
SLPI used to, but I haven’t read one since 1990. I have had one read to me since then. But I get really nervous when people I don’t like talk about my work. I sort of create this thing of anonymity, and I don’t like to talk—it makes me very uncomfortable. So when people talk about my work, I kind of don’t really pay attention to them. Not because they don’t have anything to say, but because it makes me very nervous.
SJSo you’ve never really heard anything about yourself that really seemed wrong or true?
SLPSome people have said, “She’s some kind of witchcraft genius.” But would you let that really sink into your head?
SJIf form and content are inseparable, where do you begin? If you wanted to tell the story of African-American history—strange sons, love, or an African woman displayed as a novelty for the king, or the death of the last black man—how does the play begin?
SLPA play begins with characters. It never starts with an idea. I think some people say, “Oh, I have a great idea; I want to talk about the homeless problem.” And then they write a play about homelessness. But my plays never start with an idea about anything, and it is only way, way late in the game that I figure out the question: So what’s the play about? And not even then. I’m still thinking about what The America Play is about. So it’s very late in the game. I always start with characters, sometimes a word. Death of the Last Black Man started with the words on the wall, the writing on the wall.
SJDo you think that it started when you got an idea that was on the wall and the phrase lingered with you? Do you think something could be built around that?
SLPYes, some characters, some things out there give up themselves and allow themselves to be turned into characters and plays. Then some things don’t—they want to rock and roll. It is not as if they wanted to take journeys and conflict—they just wanted to rock.
SJWhat about the influence of music on your writing? Your writings vary, you know, the use of the refrain, the use of circular and motion. It is very musical.
SLPI listen to a lot of music, different kinds of music for each piece. The Last Black Man was jazz. I listened to it a lot before I wrote the piece. That was basically just sound, and I put it together to make a story or melody. Yes, you can kind of pat your foot to it. For Venus, it was definitely opera. I can’t remember what it was for The America Play. The other play might have been opera, too.
SJHow does music feed you during your writing? Does opera give you that sense of space that you were talking about? Or pageantry?
SLPIt does give me a sense of space and pageantry. Yes, and a story on the grand scale is pageantry. An epic, sort of complicated in a way that is not difficult to understand. Opera is complex, but it is not obscure. It is driven by nothing but human emotion, tragedy. There are so many things going on. But also jazz in a different way. When I was having such a hard time finishing Venus last year, it was John Coletrane’s “Blues Train” that totally got me through that experience. I listened to that so many times. I must have listened to it a million times. Then it was also the “Goldberg Variations,” because Bach is like jazz. I don’t mean to say it that way, but the “Goldberg Variations” are so great. It does feed. It’s faith, structure. Sometimes if you have nothing else to balance you, you have to create a surface like a painter would. A surface on which you can build the foundation of the play. Some people use an idea, which I think is a false surface. I think you need some sort of structure like the “Goldberg Variations.” How many are there, 24, 27? Then the end, and it’s like great. What a nice structure, how easy. So you have that surface, and you just do your thing. The same thing with Ornette Coleman. There he goes down the road, and then they all sort of come back together; and they might do something weird at the end, but it’s structure. It’s a kind of structure, so it sort of creates a surface. That is why I steal from them all. I do. I steal a lot from those musicians because they have a great structure.
SJLike every good writer, you do your homework in every play that you write. Unlike every good writer, your homework finds itself in the play. When I first asked you about the play within a play in Venus, do you remember what your answer was? You said because it was a real play.
SLPIt was there actually. It was actually a play like it was actually happening when she was alive. Bad answer, but I was stalling big time. I knew there was an answer; I knew it had to be there, and I wasn’t sure why.
SJWord play.
SLPAnd word play, and black people on display, and womanly parts, and plain parts. The quotation is: “Who in the performance of his manly part does not wish to get claps,” which I have changed a little bit. It was actually said in the late 1700s. It works, and it makes the scene good because it makes it so that we see the chum. The School Chum is so bad that he’s great. It picks the doctor up a little bit, and they see that he actually feels bad. But he’s one of those people who feels guilty, and that’s enough. Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Beth Schachter, Muhlenberg College, 2008. Scene 24, The MotherShowman (Holly Cate) calls out to spectators to come and see the Venus Hottentot (Catherine Davidson) in her cage: “What a bucket!/ What a bum!/What a spanker!” 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_3_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
SJWhat draws the need to put in the information? In a way, it’s so incredibly smug because you give us all these wonderful guides to how your mind works and to the larger world that has influenced the mind of the characters, which is really exciting. Just facts and the way they work their way into the plays. So I was going to ask you about its relationship to history because, to me, so many of these plays are about history. The footnotes all seem to play with the notion of history, because when you share something you found in a book—is that history? History incorporated in dramatic writing? Is it still history? It seems to be part of the joke.
SLPIt is part of the joke, I think. And I think because theater—or as I see it or as I want to use it—can make history. It is sort of the reverse of, “Don’t believe everything you read.” I’d say: Believe it, because it is true. Or: Don’t believe everything you see. I think because if you looked back into the past or looked up onto a screen, a film screen, or looked in a show, or looked on the shelf in the library, you don’t see enough of you. Or even if you do see enough of you, I do think you have the right to put some of you up there by any means necessary. If that means putting some of you into the 20th century, into the 1990s, and you want to be a poet, or a novelist, or a rap star, or basketball player—do it that way. If that means inserting some of you back in the early 1800s, why not? I think it is just as valid as what we are told happened back then. I think it has an equal weight. It should not be viewed as, “Oh yes, this is some historical document.” But rather, “Oh yes, this is an account, not of what happened but of what was. Or an account of what is.” Faulkner has this great thing: he talks about is and was, or was and is. History is not “was,” history is “is.” It’s present, so if you believe that history is in the present, you can also believe that the present is in the past. It’s mostly directional.
SJIn what way are you writing this? Is it multidirectional?
SLPExactly, so you can fill in the blanks. You can do it now by inserting yourself into the present. You can do it for back then, too.
