ABSTRACT
[The following, which was originally published in HotReview.org, Hunter online theater review, is an edited transcript of a symposium held at Hunter College on April 30, 2004, organized and moderated by Jonathan Kalb. This first of two panels (for critics and scholars) featured introductory remarks by Kalb, followed by twenty-minute presentations by Robert Brustein, Shawn-Marie Garrett, Marc Robinson, and Alisa Solomon, and discussion with the audience.]Jonathan Kalb
This symposium has been organized in conjunction with the Hunter Theater Department’s spring 2004 production, which is Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus, directed by our faculty member Bill Walters, who is with us today and who will be speaking with us on the second panel. The show runs through May 9 and I encourage everybody to see it, not only because I want everybody to see all the work we do in the Theater Department here but also because I think that this playwright, even more than a lot of other playwrights, really has to be experienced in the theater if you want to understand what she is all about. The presence of her work in the theater, the challenges that her work poses to the theater, including her habit of casting spectators in the role of dubious historical witnesses whether they like it or not, are very much of the essence of her aesthetic. I feel sure that our panelists today will have a lot more to say on these issues. I have the honor of welcoming to Hunter today a remarkable array of theater scholars, critics and practitioners who have in part distinguished themselves through their work on Parks’s drama. They have taken on the exciting and daunting task of focusing seriously on the sometimes difficult work of a startlingly new author in a period before others had provided any roadmaps for this, and everyone who turns their attention to Parks in the future, whether by writing about it or giving it life on the stage, owes a great deal to these writers and artists.
Just one point of clarification to begin with. For those of you familiar with her at all, Suzan-Lori Parks is probably known as the author of Topdog/Underdog, a play about two black brothers, one named Lincoln, the other named Booth, who live together in a seedy rooming house and whose names prefigure a tragicomic fate that both is and isn’t obvious from the start. This play transferred from the Public Theater to Broadway in 2002 and was the first drama by an African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. Parks won the Pulitzer one year after winning a MacArthur grant in 2001. It’s important to establish here, though, at the outset, that Topdog/Underdog, a relatively naturalistic work, is not typical of Parks’s other work before or after it. Parks has tried many, many different dramatic forms; in fact, she’s something of a connoisseur of dramatic form. The works on which she built her early reputation were deliberate deconstructions of traditional linear structure.
Suzan-Lori Parks was born May 10, 1963, in Fort Knox, Kentucky, the daughter of an Army colonel who moved the family around quite a bit. By the time she was old enough to move out she had lived in six different states of the union and in Germany, where she attended a German school and learned the German language. She eventually graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College where she began writing plays at the encouragement of James Baldwin, one of her teachers. She came to the notice of the downtown theater community in 1989 for a play called Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, done at BACA Downtown and later at many other theaters, which won three Obie awards. Following that, to mention only her full-length titles, came Betting on the Dust Commander, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play, and Venus. Venus, as many of you know, is built around the historical figure of Saartjie Baartman, a black woman from South Africa who was brought to England in the early 19th century and displayed as a sideshow freak, The Hottentot Venus, because of her large behind. Then came Topdog and a pair of full-lengths that responded in different ways to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: In the Blood and Fucking A. Although she has concentrated so far mainly on plays, Parks has also written a great deal in other genres. She wrote the screenplay for Spike Lee’s film about phone sex workers, Girl 6, and is currently working on several other film scripts, as well as the book for a Disney musical about the Harlem Globetrotters, called Hoops. She has written many essays and she published a novel last year called Getting Mother’s Body, which could be construed as a tribute to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
Now having listed all these titles and honors, I have still told you nothing about what the fuss is all about with this author. I’ve said nothing about her extremely provocative use of history, her fearless use of racist stereotypes to expropriate and diffuse what has been hurtful in other contexts, and I’ve said nothing about her fractured language, the way, as she puts it, she likes to bang words together and watch them do things. This is no cuddly composer of folklore. Her literary heroes are not easy writers but rather prickly and difficult ones like Faulkner, Joyce, Adrienne Kennedy, and Samuel Beckett, about whom she once said, “He just seems so black to me.” Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks, directed by Timothy Douglas. Bowman Wright (Lincoln) and Biko Eisen-Martin (Booth) at Marin Theatre Company (2012). Photo by David Allen (Marin Theatre Company).https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203103845/185f9083-7d03-4391-87f6-02968185eb89/content/fig_8_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
I want to turn things over to our panelists now and will end by reading a few lines from Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. The figures here are in a flagrantly metaphorical boat located in a no-man’s ocean called The Third Kingdom, somewhere between the United States and Africa. Shark-Seer
How many kin kin I hold. Whole hull full.
Soul-SeerThuh hullholesfull of bleachin bones.
Us-SeerBleached Bones Man may come and take you far uhcross thuh sea from me.
Over-SeerWho’re you again?
Kin-SeerI’m. Lucky.
Over-SeerWho’re you again?
Soul-SeerDuhdduhnt-he-know-my-name?
Kin-SeerShould I jump? Shouldijumporwhut?
Shark-SeerBut we are not in uh boat!
Us-SeerBut we iz. Iz iz iz uh huhn. Iz uh huhn. Uh huhn iz.
Shark-SeerI wonder: Are we happy? Thuh looks we look look so.
Us-SeerThey like smiles and we will like what they will like.
Soul-SeerUUH!
Kin-SeerMe wavin at me me wavin at my I me wavin at my soul.
Shark-SeerChomp chomp chomp chomp.
Kin-SeerFffffffffff—
Us-SeerThup.
Shark-SeerBaby, what will I do for love?
Soul-SeerWave me uh wave and I’ll wave one back blow me uh kiss n I’ll blow you one back.
Over-SeerQuiet, you, or you’ll be jettisoned!
Shark-SeerChomp chomp chomp chomp.
Kin-SeerWa-vin wavin.
Shark-SeerChomp chomp chomp chomp.
Kin-SeerHowwe gonna find my Me?
Our mission today, one could say, is to try to help find Suzan-Lori Parks’s “me.” We’ll give it the ol’ college try. Robert BrusteinI first came upon the rich, audacious, and singular talent of Suzan-Lori Parks in 1992 when I went up to Yale to see a production of a work with a marquee-swollen title, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. This was actually her third in a series of plays with equally mind-boggling names like Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (I think Alisa Solomon was the first critic to ever review that play) and Betting on the Dust Commander. These titles didn’t quite match the length of Peter Weiss’s Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, or even Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad. But like all her plays, The Death of the Last Black Man suggested she had more in common with Kopit’s avant-garde mischievousness and Weiss’s supertheatricalism than with the formal and thematic conventions associated with contemporary American realism.
In those days Suzan-Lori herself was eager to distinguish her work in style from the more familiar domestic conventions of say, Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (which George C. Wolfe called “one of the last ‘mama on the couch’ plays”) and in content from what she memorably identified as “the I’m-gonna-get-you plays of the ’70s” (sequels to the “I’m-gonna-get-your-mama plays” of the ’60s). Maybe that was because her teacher at Mount Holyoke was Jimmy Baldwin, the author of a famous essay called “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in which he criticized the same sort of belligerent ideologizing in some black fiction writing. Whatever the case, Parks’s writing has always been as much a product of Western postmodernism as of African-American consciousness and the black experience, an unusual amalgam of the two.
In this she had a literary prototype in Adrienne Kennedy, one of the earliest African-American women writers with more on her mind than race. “It’s insulting,” Suzan-Lori once said at a public symposium. “It’s insulting when people say my plays are about what it’s about to be black, as if that’s all we think about, as if our life is about that. My life is not about race. It’s about being alive.” And she added, “Why does everyone think white artists make art and black artists make statements? Why doesn’t anyone ask me ever about form?” Well if they did, people would have gotten an earful because Parks had been carefully schooled in the formalist breakthroughs of the postmodern school. Like other members of that movement, notably Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans, and James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, for example, she is very preoccupied with deconstructing the English language. And like the author of a play called The Blacks, Jean Genet, who was one of the earliest writers to explore the way skin color influences consciousness, she is deeply concerned with identity and how the presence of the Other helps both to define and to obscure our sense of ourselves. At the same time, her work has been influenced a lot by music, both jazz and classical, from which she derives her concept of what she calls “repetition and revision”—that is to say, revisiting and revising the same phrases over and over again.
But despite her joyous encounter with music and language, it cannot be denied that Suzan-Lori is also writing plays about race. The Last Black Man, for example, is partly an effort to exalt black English into a kind of poetic code and to adapt English words to the black experience. As the play moves the audience through a kind of expressionist history of America, a character named Before Columbus reflects on a time when the Earth was flat, while another insists that the Earth was “roun” until Columbus made it round with a “d.” In short, Parks deconstructs language as a means of establishing the forgotten place of African-Americans in recorded history. “You will write it down,” she writes, “because if you don’t write it down then we will come along and tell the future that we did not exist.” “You will write it down and carve it out of rock.” In the introduction to one of her collections, she adds quite beautifully, “One of my tasks is to locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.” This, I would suggest, is her way of endorsing the Czech writer Milan Kundera’s definition of art as “a struggle of memory against forgetting.” Her plays may sometimes be about oppression, but she never limits herself to writing about oppression. As she says, “To define black drama solely as the presentation of the Black as oppressed is bullshit.”
After The Death of the Last Black Man came two transitional works, The America Play and Venus. The America Play was her first stab at the Cain and Abel relationship between Abe Lincoln, here called the Foundling Father, and his murderer, John Wilkes Booth. Topdog/Underdog was her second treatment of the subject, a sign that she is given to taking a story and revising it. In both works the central figure is a black man trained to reenact over and over again Lincoln’s murder at the hands of Booth at Ford’s Theater during a production of Our American Cousin, which was playing there when Lincoln was shot. Venus, on the other hand, is about the celebrated Venus Hottentot, as she was called. By the way, that word Hottentot began as a derogatory term for the Khoikhoi tribe in South Africa. It was coined by an Afrikaner who said, “They only have two words, ‘hot’ and ‘tot,’” and that’s the way the word came into being. It was later applied to “Venus Hottentot” who was abducted from her South African home in the early nineteenth century to become a phenomenon of English freak shows because of her gargantuan buttocks and breasts. Despite obvious temptations, however, Venus is not a victim play and never pushes sympathy buttons. Parks’s Venus is hugely exploited but always retains an aristocratic dignity and sang-froid laced with a gentle irony. She is exhibited, she’s manhandled, sexually violated, infected with the clap, anatomized and, finally, autopsied by physicians who think they have found the missing link. Yet the play is not only an indictment of white racism but of European smugness and insularity as well. In short, it is less a victim play than a powerful dissent from European concepts of female beauty.
Like The America Play, Venus was a transitional work in the sense that Parks began then to subordinate her linguistic experimentation in order to concentrate more on theme and character. This had the result of making her work more accessible, until with In the Blood, a contemporary version of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter about a homeless black woman and the black preacher who seduces and abandons her, she finally produced a popular work. Her next play, Topdog/ Underdog, even enjoyed a short run on Broadway, and as Jonathan told you, won the Pulitzer Prize. But just as that work covered the same material as The America Play, her most recent work, Fucking A, was a second look at the Hester Prynne story, the one she adapted in In the Blood, with the heroine wearing a scarlet “A” for being an abortionist.
Parks’s style was undergoing changes as well. The dialogue of Topdog/ Underdog is composed in highly syncopated rhythms, the verbal equivalent of the modern jazz riffs that the director George C. Wolfe used as transitional motifs. In her previous plays, Parks’s explorations were performed in a highly charged, imagistic language that kept the poetic content higher than the sociological substance. In her recent, more accessible if less reverberant plays, she uses increasingly naturalistic language and domestic themes. As in Topdog/Underdog, she is more concerned about what she calls family wounds and healing than with big historical flourishes. That may be why, instead of experimental artists like Marcus Stern, Liz Diamond, and Richard Foreman, who are the directors associated with her earlier work, her plays are now being staged by more mainstream artists like George C. Wolfe and Michael Greif. No one can predict where this unpredictable dramatist will go next, whether she will break out into fresh uncharted territory or remain content with a modest, if seedily furnished room in town. In any case, she is definitely an artist whose future work one awaits with the greatest anticipation.
Shawn-Marie GarrettThe title of my talk today is “The Venus Hottentot is Dead: The Historical Saartjie Baartman.” Saartjie Baartman is the name of the woman who became known by the appellation “The Venus Hottentot.” So I’m here to fill in a little historical background about the character, because while the play frequently refers to the little evidence that exists about her, it’s certainly an imaginative version of the character.
The South African Baartman, under the stage name of The Hottentot Venus, was shown before paying crowds in London, in the English provinces and in Paris during the early 19th century. She died at the age of twenty-six in Paris in 1815. Her death is the starting point in Venus, and the play’s most repeated refrain is “The Venus Hottentot is Dead.” Parks perhaps anticipated that Venus’s audiences would need reminding on this point; for of all of Parks’s figures, Venus is the least likely to stay dead anytime soon. Parks views her historical characters as having continuing life as “effigies,” to use Joseph Roach’s term, or “repetitions with revision,” to use Parks’s, that appear throughout history, as Robert Brustein mentioned. The same sorts of patterns repeat themselves, perhaps with revision. Saartjie Baartman isn’t just what James Baldwin, Suzan-Lori Parks’s teacher, called one of the many thousands gone. Nor is she one of the sixty million to whom Toni Morrison dedicates her novel Beloved. Like Morrison, Parks, in her plays before Venus, tended to concentrate on the unknown dead victims of the long international shame of the slave trade. Yet Saartjie Baartman is different. For many South Africans, she is a martyr, a secular saint.
In 1996 a South African Professor of Archaeology named Andrew Sillen called Baartman a metaphor for what has happened to his country. The few Americans today who have heard of her have probably heard about her from the buzz about Parks’s play and its productions throughout the country. When the play premiered and told Baartman’s story, Parks took on a new role in a way as a playwright, something more akin to Brecht’s idea of a writer who gives the audience pleasure through teaching. Her previous plays were much more playful linguistically than Venus is. More literal and less poetical than in her earlier work, Parks’s Venus is a conduit of the real past. Its Brechtian structure and language, its songs, mark a mutation of Parks’s dramatic form, and Baartman’s bones seem to require that. Parks does draw on the same inter-textual strategies; that is, she pulls from historical sources and mixes them with dramatic dialogue, as in her earlier plays. Venus is—mercifully, in my opinion—as far from documentary drama as those earlier plays. Yet Baartman’s ordeal is described in Venus, in all its violent and perverse particularities, through a fragmented structure and multiple ironic distancing devices.
So who was Saartjie Baartman? Through uncertain means and for uncertain ends she left South Africa and ended up in London in 1812. It is thought—and this is reported on slim evidence in a book called The Shows of London by Richard Altick—that her father was a drover, or a driver of animals, who was killed by a Bushman, or Hottentot as the Dutch called them. Then she was taken to London, probably by force, to participate in a freak show. Those events are depicted in the play. In London she achieved a minor morbid celebrity as a sideshow freak called The Hottentot Venus. She appeared nearly naked and crowds were particularly attracted by her butt. This appears again and again in historical documents.
Altick called her “steatopygic to a fault.” Steatopygia is a medical condition that many doctors insist some South African women still suffer from, which involves having a large ass. In fact, it has to do with retention of water and other things that are completely to be expected in the environment in which those women have lived for centuries. In any case, spectators were also attracted by her genitals and private viewings could be arranged. Again through unknown forces, Baartman ended up in Paris in 1813, performing her show—which is to say, being shown off by somebody else. Parks questions this business of Baartman’s agency. She sees Baartman as a diva. She gives her a kind of choice that the historical Saartjie Baartman probably would not have had, a set of rights and a will that she would not have been granted.
The French were even more fascinated by her than the English, for theoretical as well as erotic reasons. The preeminent French naturalist Georges Cuvier, who is for the French what Charles Darwin is for the English, was looking for a scientific basis for race at the time, as were many so-called naturalists, and Baartman seemed an ideal object of study. Naturalists regarded Baartman’s race—which was not just African but the sub-race of Africans called the Hottentots—as “the true missing link.” That’s a quotation from Cuvier. After Baartman’s death, Cuvier (who appears in Parks’s play as the Baron Docteur) performed an autopsy on her corpse and published his results to great acclaim. He also made a plaster cast of her body and, most astonishingly, preserved her genitalia in a formaldehyde jar. These were put on public exhibition at Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where they remained until 1978. At that point I guess they decided they were a little embarrassing.
There were Peruvian genitalia and other genitalia then too. The Musée de l’Homme had a habit of preserving exotic women’s genitalia, and also the brains of great male European scientists. Shelves of brains and genitalia. To paraphrase Shakespeare: a spectacle for mechanic slaves and quick comedians, a study for science and death.
The historian William B. Cohen writes that Baartman was so famous in French naturalist circles that she “dominated much of French scientific thought about Blacks for the remainder of the nineteenth century.” Soon after her remains were removed from public display, Baartman’s case was reopened by scholars and scientists contra-colonialism. In 1982, Steven J. Gould wrote an account of visiting the Musée de l’Homme. He writes in his evocative style about the labyrinthine innards and back wards, which is a pun Parks exploits but Gould misses. And his account reads like something out of Joseph Conrad, a white man’s primal scene. Here’s what he says, after recounting holding the skull of Descartes and looking at the French scientist Paul Broca’s brain: “Yet I found the most interesting items on the shelf just above, a little exhibit that provided an immediate and chilling insight into 19th-century mentalité and the history of racism. In three smaller jars I saw the dissected genitalia of three Third-World women. I found no brains of women, nor any male genitalia. The three jars are labeled ‘une négresse,’ ‘une péruvienne,’ ‘la Vénus Hottentotte.’” Hot on Gould’s heels, many scholars picked up the story of Baartman and she became once again exhibited, displayed, theorized, but this time in scholarly conferences and discussions such as this one.
A few words on the contemporary events that surrounded Venus’s premiere, purely coincidentally. Baartman descended from, as we’ve said, a group of Africans known derisively as Hottentots or Bushmen; even today many people call them the latter. The real name of their tribes are the Khoisan. Sadly, they’ve practically been eradicated through genocide. In January and February 1996, before Venus’s premiere in the U.S., the Griqua National Congress in postapartheid South Africa, which represents the Khoisan tribes, intensified its pressure on South African policy makers to secure the return of Baartman’s remains to South Africa from France. The Khoisan are generally light-skinned and identify themselves as neither Black nor Colored, according to apartheid’s lingering categories, and at first the GNC’s efforts were rebuffed because they lack the political muscle of, say, the ANC. Interestingly, not a single American newspaper picked up on this Baartman controversy in 1996, while it was all over European newspapers. In the year 2000, Baartman’s remains were finally returned to South Africa, and she was really greeted there as kind of a secular saint. A great celebration was held and she was given a proper burial, which, according to the traditions of her people, is essential and necessary for her to pass on to the next phase of life.
A couple of other contemporary creative writers have also picked up on Baartman’s story and it’s interesting to compare their approaches to Parks’s in Venus. In 1979 the white South African poet Stephen Gray conceived an immortal Baartman figure, an Earth mother Venus who reverses the putdown she endured in life. This is an excerpt from his poem, in which she effects a kind of Dionysian revenge: Saartjie Baartman is my name and I knowmy place I know my rights I put down my footand the Tuileries Gardens shake I put downmy foot and the Seine changes course I putdown my foot and the globe turns upside downI rattle my handful of bones and the dead arise.
In another poem, by the American writer Elizabeth Alexander, who is also a playwright, Baartman resumes her mortal dimensions. It is a very naturalistic telling of Baartman’s story. Like Parks’s, Alexander’s Baartman is the family entrepreneur and a kind of diva. For Parks, Venus’s downfall comes when she merges her public and private personas; that is, when she succumbs to the love affair with the Baron Docteur. Alexander imagines Baartman’s inner life and memories as her only sanctuary. Here’s how she imagines Baartman thinking: … there are hours in every dayto conjure my imaginarydaughters in banana skirtsand ostrich-feather fans.Since my own genitals are publicI have made other parts private. Interestingly, Alexander also reveals the secret of the Hottentot Venus’s fabulous popularity. The Venus character explains, … I rub my hairwith lanolin, and pose in profilelike a painted Nubianarcher, imagining gold leafwoven through my hair and diamonds. In the end she fantasizes a kind of Jacobean revenge against Cuvier. If he were to let me rise upfrom this table, I’d spirithis knives and cut out his black heart…so the whole world would seeit was shriveled and hard,geometric, deformed, unnatural. Of course, “deformed” and “unnatural” were the qualities that Cuvier sought to ascribe to all Hottentots, and by extension all Africans, through his autopsy report on Venus. Unlike Gray and Alexander, then, Parks denies Baartman justice. Her play is not a melodrama or a tragedy. She grants Baartman and the audience only whatever comfort lies in performance because it repeats, because it revises. Parks moves Baartman out of the familiar form of revenge fantasy, where both Gray’s and Alexander’s Venuses, different as they are, seek a divinity to shape their ends. Parks’s Venus, like the figures in her earlier plays, can only keep on “waving back,” to borrow a phrase from Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, where figures in Middle Passage keep waving goodbye to their African selves and the distant African shore. Baartman, in a sense, also keeps waving back. That’s the justice that Suzan-Lori Parks can imagine for her in the present.
Marc RobinsonI want to begin by quoting one playwright’s vision of an ideal theater, a theater he famously said would be located in a cemetery “where graves are being dug all the time.”
Before burying the dead man, carry the corpse in his casket to the front of the stage, let his friends, enemies, and the curious sit in the section reserved for the audience, let the funeral mime who led the procession divide and multiply, let him turn into a theatrical company, and let him recreate the life and death of the dead man, right in front of the corpse and the audience, afterwards, let the casket be carried to the grave in the dead of night, let the audience finally leave— the feast is finished. Until another ceremony, occasioned by another corpse, is worthy of dramatic performance—not a tragic one. Tragedy must be lived, not played.
The writer, of course, is Genet, and this scenario (from his essay “The Strange Word Urb…”) anticipates many of the procedures and themes of Venus, not least its own funeral mime in the person of the Negro Resurrectionist overseeing a reenacted life of Venus after presenting her body and announcing her death. The passage also names the deliberately unresolved tension between exhumation and burial—or, more generally, exposure and concealment—in many other Parks’s plays.
It’s an ambivalence for which Genet found a simple theatrical sign. In the stage directions to Deathwatch, he insists that the lighting be as bright as possible all the time in the otherwise tomblike prison cell. The condemned may be out of sight, buried alive in a hole, but they are not unseen. There is always a spectator monitoring their actions. The characters, denied privacy, are always on stage. The same harsh, unremitting light should fill both the stage and the house of The Screens, Genet wrote to Roger Blin, that play’s first director, “because I should in some way like both actors and audience caught up in the same illumination, and for there to be no place for them to hide, or even half-hide.”
There may be no place to hide or even half-hide in Parks, either, so habitual is her characters’ theatricality and so pervasive is the accompanying surveillance. Yet she nonetheless recognizes the strength of an undertow pulling the action down and out of sight. The characters’ response to this extraordinary force is the action. As many critics have observed (Una Chaudhuri, Greg Miller, Alice Rayner, and Harry Elam among them), Parks’s theater occupies a perforated landscape. Her stages are pockmarked with ditches, pools, and graves; the text with lacuna; the bodies with wounds; the narratives with secrets and other recesses from which authoritative meaning won’t emerge. This is a theater in perpetual retreat from visual, verbal, and physical presence, recoiling as readers and viewers reach toward it. We have each made our own list of its hiding places: under the porch or in the slave-ship hold in The Death of the Last Black Man; under the bridge in In the Blood; The America Play’s Great Hole and, less obviously, Lucy’s pledge of confidentiality; in Venus, the cage, cell, and dark bedroom; and, in many plays, the privacy of footnotes and the anticipatory silence before speech or the helplessness after it. These aren’t mere absences or omissions, as some have described them, but arenas of action. Here, in the spaces opened up whenever the action sinks below the surface of declarative language, social behavior, and expository action, Parks’s characters engage with histories both individual and cultural, seize and sift the very matter supporting their presence, and confront aspects of themselves that can’t be regularized into dramatically manageable form onstage or in spoken language.
Not that these recesses are wholly divorced from Parks’s relentlessly spectatorial culture. As in Genet, the idea of privacy exists only as a simulation, teasing characters with promises of a security it can no longer fulfill. “Yr only yrself when no ones watching,” Parks writes, hopefully, in Topdog/Underdog, welcoming the irony that the brothers are actually quoting one of Lincoln’s voyeuristic customers. Is there ever true solitude in Parks’s theater? A naturalist and, later, a photographer hover over the action in Imperceptible Mutabilities. Hester’s bridge is regularly invaded by policemen, welfare officials, and vandals scrawling graffiti. The needy and the menacing burst in on the Hester of Fucking A just when she settles into the first private hour of the night. In Topdog/Underdog, the most intimate companion of one’s seclusion becomes the most intrusive spectator. The action of that play exists in a state of permanent inhibition, as the brothers are always spying on one another or fearing discovery. One brother looks in, unnoticed, from the threshold, or eavesdrops behind a screen. The other hides his possessions—money, porn magazines, weapon—from prying eyes or tries, futilely, to smother the shame that follows his own moments of self-consciousness.
In her recognition of the pull exerted by subterranean spaces, literal or figurative, Parks extends a tradition of concealment in American theater, or more precisely, African-American theater. The oldest hole swallowing her own is in William Wells Brown’s 1858 play The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, the first play published by a black American writer. Its most memorable image is a deep pit in which a slave is kept prisoner by a sadistic overseer. (That synonym for slave owner, as Parks recognized in Imperceptible Mutabilities, nicely captures the relationship of spectatorship to possession.) Jean Toomer’s Kabnis, the play buried in his 1923 novel Cane, places the title character in a murky cellar where he must face a painful ancestry he thought he understood above ground. “I get my life down in this scum-hole,” he says. Marita Bonner’s 1928 play The Purple Flower envisions a dimly lit level below the thin “skin of civilization,” as she calls it. The latter repeatedly cracks—”a thought can drop you through it,” she says—and plunges Bonner’s characters into an atavistic past.
More recent works make Parks’s imagery seem all the more inevitable. Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman is set in what he famously calls “the flying underbelly of the city,” a hot, cramped subway car. Another subway car appears in Adrienne Kennedy’s The Owl Answers. Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders, nearly contemporaneous with Parks’s major early plays, is set in the underground level of a university library, with a single window hung far above the stage. At night, the play’s playwright-protagonist retreats here to consider why her theater is so preoccupied with violence. Of course, the best-known hole in American literature is in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and its protagonist’s monologue sets the standard for all subsequent self-interrogations. In all this theater, as in Ellison’s novel, characters who have had invisibility forced upon them use it to study their disguises, compromises, and inhibitions, if never wholly to shed them. They also surrender to elemental fear, anger, and longing, these emotions no longer cut to fit any landscape other than their own. (In The America Play, Parks writes that the Great Hole “gave a shape” to the Lesser Known.) Out of sight, all these characters hope to arrive at insights penetrating, candid, and selfsurprising.
In Parks’s theater, the pits, underbellies, and cellars of these earlier writers appear as replicas and echoes (to cite two forms from The America Play), or rather, throughout this theater history, each void can be seen as citing an earlier one, digging deeper into a shared absence. In fact, the digging, as the Lesser Known and the Negro Resurrectionist know, is as important as the hole. Parks makes the most of theater’s temporality to confront the experience of losing, not just the subsequent recognition of loss—of retreat, not mere vacancy—and of the dynamic struggle either to resist it or, more often and more surprising, to welcome it and, by trying to control it, to turn it to one’s advantage. As Elizabeth Bishop advises in “One Art,” “practice losing farther, losing faster.”
Images of falling or sinking recur obsessively in Parks’s theater, as if each sequence advanced by a few segments one endless, metaphysical descent, the ground forever lowering just as the characters near it. (Is this a vision of the original Fall from grace as rendered by a playwright who acknowledges Catholicism’s formative influence on her theater?) The Foundling Father slumps repeatedly in his chair after being “shot.” Kin-Seer in Imperceptible Mutabilities sinks through the ocean after being jettisoned from a slave-ship. An Icarus-like pilot in the same play falls out of the sky onto Sergeant Smith. The sky itself seems to fall on Hester during the eclipse in In the Blood, an experience that makes her feel as if “the hand of fate with its five fingers [were] coming down on me.” Miss Miss imagines (falsely, it turns out) her own drowning in the short play Pickling. “Down down down,” says Black Woman With Fried Drumstick. “Down down down down down.” Perhaps this is her account of Black Man With Watermelon, who tumbles through the experience of dying over and over but never reaches the bottom of death.
As characters fall, so too does the idea of character. The Foundling Father, already a fallen version of the real Lincoln, dwindles further over the course of the play, present only as a Lincoln bust early in Act II, then a Lincoln penny, then even further reduced to an intangible face on the TV that reruns the play’s first act, now, in a final diminishment, played in silence. So runs down memory. As Lucy and Brazil try to retrieve the past, it dissolves in their hands and before their eyes. This erosion of character has its equivalent in just about every Parks play. Bodies turn to maimed bodies, turn to body parts, turn to facsimiles of body parts, turn, finally, to mere words for those parts. In this last instance, I’m thinking, of course, of the glossary at the end of the printed version of Venus, perhaps meant to be read and staged as part of the body of the text, on par with its footnotes. (Here too, the corporeal associations of the word “footnotes” are hard to ignore.)
The regression doesn’t stop here. The glossary asserts an authority that Parks deliberately withholds in her other plays. This procedure involves more than interrupting speech with silence. As memorable in themselves as are Parks’s famous “spells,” equally important are the passages of falling toward the moment when silence reestablishes order. Here, to borrow an image from Bonner’s Purple Flower, we can imagine the thin ice of the play’s verbal civilization cracking and the speakers plunging through a languageless chasm, so horrifying that the silence at the bottom comes as a relief. At least that is stable. In sequences that parallel bodily dispersal and decay, writing itself slowly recoils from our attention, as characters burrow into private, coded modes of expression, or pull back even further to a time when they could not or would not express anything.
Enacting a kind of reverse evolution of language over the course of several plays, Parks seeks ever stronger ways of troubling, if not wholly burying expression. Each departure from established language initiates more extreme retreats. After the vernacular are the echoes of the vernacular, or, in Fucking A, the still more remote, exclusive vernacular of the made-up language “TALK.” The buried language of the written footnotes is more accessible than the unwritten ones (in Last Black Man). The preverbal sounds of the glottal stops, quick intakes of breath, and tongue clicks subside to the shaped silence of the spells, which finally sink deeper still, toward the unshaped silences in which characters hear themselves trail off into an unvoiced question or a dash. (The America Play ends in one.) All are ways of marking the sudden failure of any dramatic structure, verbal or silent, to support its characters. A beautiful line from Last Black Man captures this dissolution of language and the desperation to retain it before it rushes away. “My text was writ on water,” says Black Man With Watermelon. “I would like to drink it down.”
Venus could be another text “writ on water.” Parks labels its scenes in reverse order, starting at scene thirty-one and ending with scene one. The structure suggests the melting of a solid into fluid, or the shedding of skins; what once had bulk, presence, slowly disappears until nothing remains. Nothing, or everything. Perhaps the play’s structure is the inverse of the dying that goes on throughout Parks—her theater, with this play, returning to its newborn state, or even to some earlier stage in which, on which, actors haven’t yet turned into characters, haven’t submitted themselves to our attention, a time when everything was still potential, a state of grace.
Does Parks preserve whole strata of experience and emotion by refusing to show them in her theater? Venus is famously said to have died of “exposure.” Hers is only the most obvious instance in which performance is manipulative and distorting. The three-card monte spectacle in Topdog, the mountebank preacher in In the Blood, the phony Lincoln in The America Play (reminding us, further, that Lincoln was of course killed while watching a play): theater in Parks is always associated with fakery and always a dangerous and unprotected space. When her invisible men and women reject such duplicity and sink into their holes, they seek secure fact, not illusion, an image of experience that is real, not merely realistic. They compulsively measure their surroundings, weigh and take stock of its contents—actions that they believe are the first steps toward having a history and, as she puts it in Last Black Man, “hiding it under a rock.” They honor pledges and keep secrets, save money, pickle things in mason jars. They take photographs, write and save letters, keep records and monitor those kept by others, balance the budget. In every case, Parks’s characters are working to “hold it hold it hold it,” as all the characters say seven times at the end of Last Black Man, thereby filling their voids with knowledge, however unexalted. As Lincoln insists in Topdog, “If you dont know what is, you dont know what aint.” Sometimes the holding is simply a matter of usage. Black Man With Watermelon says, “You: is. It: be… You: still is. They: be… Remember me.” At other times, the same need is satisfied less articulately. During the spells, the characters are claiming moments of silence, not merely observing them. They mark them with their particular styles of refusal. The silence literally has their names on it.
Such serious and busy activity returns us to Genet, and I want to end with another look at his passage about a cemetery theater. At the end of the passage I quoted, Genet makes a careful distinction: lives enacted on this gravesite stage are “worthy of dramatic performance—not a tragic one.” He adds, “Tragedy must be lived, not played.” In Parks, too, there is the same assertion of the difference between the playable and the unplayable, and the same cordoning off of territory for life uncorrupted by the theater. Every action, every aspect of character in her theater implies a world of incident and psychology not shown, impossible to show, saved from the fate of being shown. As Venus says, “Love’s soul… hides in heaven… Love’s corpse stands on show.” Up in heaven—or down in a hole. Parks presents us with the drama lodged between the two sites, but the tragedy flanking it remains obscured—“lived,” as Genet said, “not played.” In her plays, we see the stereotypes, archetypes, variations on literary characters, facsimiles of historical figures—masks all—but the people they stand in for remain submerged, causing anxiety by staying just below the surface— landmines, to borrow an image from Imperceptible Mutabilities, that might explode if we’re not careful. The true “tragedies” of the woman in Venus, of the two men in Topdog, of the family in Imperceptible Mutabilities, of the race in Last Black Man, and finally, of the nation in The America Play: Parks knows that there is no way to do them justice in the simplifying medium of theater, the medium that, as Brecht said, “theaters everything down.” She rejects her art to save her subjects. That she does so within her art preserves her own self-protective ambiguity. We can’t pin her down. “Miss me… Kiss me,” says Venus, sounding like Parks herself as she rejects and summons us in an unbroken circle, simultaneously mourning loss and trying to compensate for it.
Alisa SolomonI would like to begin by challenging a particular narrative that has become popular in mainstream journalism since Suzan-Lori Parks won the Pulitzer Prize. This narrative describes her starting out with promising but largely obscure early plays championed by a few white intellectuals until she was triumphantly rescued by those who knew better, George C. Wolfe and The Disney Corporation, who guided her toward the writing of characters you can sympathize with and plots you can follow and sometimes even predict. Of course, I’m exaggerating but only slightly. The embrace of Parks by the mainstream has seemed to require, among some critics—not any of my esteemed colleagues here, of course, but at least among some daily reviewers—a sort of denunciation of her earliest plays or a valuing of them primarily as immature sketches that prepared her for the more complex and controlled canvases that she’s created in the last couple of years. The situation reminds me a little bit of how modern drama surveys typically treat Ibsen, tracing a clear progressive trajectory from overwrought verse dramas to realistic paragons. The prose plays themselves, evolving like an ever more fit species, shedding soliloquies, asides, and all the integuments of the well-made play as they creep, then crouch, then culminate in the upright masterpiece of Hedda Gabler. A grand narrative like this is, at best, misleading. Worse, it tends to turn us into forensic dramaturgs, pushing us to read the earlier plays primarily for clues of the full-fledged works that will follow. I want to stave off that tendency by focusing today on Parks’s first play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. I do not want to ask how it introduces themes and formal obsessions that emerge more fully later or that are left aside in Topdog/Underdog or Fucking A or In the Blood (plays that I admire very much). I want to look at Imperceptible Mutabilities for itself because it’s a powerful work in its own right and really ought to be produced and studied more often.
I don’t have time to give a full reading of Imperceptible Mutabilities, so I want to talk a bit about Parks’s general project with language and the startling dramaturgical strategies that she invents in this play. Let’s begin precariously balanced on a ledge, that is, with a character standing on a ledge, a window ledge contemplating jumping, specifically Mona in the opening scene of Imperceptible Mutabilities. Her roommate is fixing eggs while Mona is peering over the abyss. Part of the complication of these characters is that they call themselves Mona and Chona but they are officially called Charlene and Molly. So Mona, Molly, is standing on the ledge: Charlene
How dja get through it?
MollyMm not through it.
CharleneYer leg. Thuh guard. Lose weight?
MollyHhh. What should I do Chona should I jump should I jump or what?
CharleneYou want some eggs?
MollyWould I splat?
CharleneUhuhuhnnnn…
MollyTwelve floors up. Whaduhya think?
CharleneUh-uh-uhn. Like scrambled?
MollyShit.
CharleneWith cheese? Say “with” cause ssgoin in.
MollyI diduhnt quit that school. HHH. Thought: nope! Mm gonna go on-go on ssif nothin ssapin yuh know? “S-K” is /sk/ as in “ask.” The little-lamb-follows-closely-behind-at-Marys-heels-as-Mary-boards-the-train. Shit. Failed every test he shoves in my face. He makes me recite my mind goes blank. HHH. The-little-lamb-follows-closely-behind-at-Marys-heels-as-Mary-boards-the-train. Aint never seen no woman on no train with no lamb. I tell him so. He throws me out. Stuff like this happens every day y know? This isnt uh special case mines iduhnt uh uhnnn.
CharleneSalami? Yarnt veg anymore.
I begin here not simply because these are the opening lines of the play, but because the impact of language on self-definition is so crucial here. It’s important throughout the play and quite powerfully in the last section, “Greeks,” which chronicles the tragic disintegration of the Smith family, as the breadwinning father, a sergeant overseas, works for his mysterious distinction. But in this first scene the effects of language on self-formulation and social possibility are most explicit. Parks focuses here on black English and its proclaimed inadequacy in mainstream America. Interestingly, she does not strike a tone of complaint. Indeed, in interviews and post-play discussions of this early work, Parks was often adamant about not being pegged as a political writer of a particular kind or as a black writer of a particular kind, specifically those who churned out what she called “those I’m-gonna-get-you-whitey plays” of the 1970s. And as you heard, she said around this time, “It’s insulting when people say my plays are about what it’s about to be black—as if that’s all we think about, as if our life is about that. My life is not about race. It’s about being alive.” With startling imagery and a lyrical sense of wordplay, Parks dramatizes this very predicament.The characters in Imperceptible Mutabilities, among them slaves in middle passage, contemporary black women being spied on by a white naturalist through the medium of a giant cockroach, a proud and proper family awaiting their father’s return from military service, certainly represent different aspects of African-American experience. But it’s through the everyday surreality of what it means for them to be alive that Parks’s allegorical absurdism achieves its power. Grounded in history, yet given to fanciful flights of language, formalistic in its conventions yet full of compassion, Imperceptible Mutabilities theatrically incarnates and uses the double-seeing of theater itself to call attention to our own experience as spectators of that incarnation, of what W.E.B. Dubois called the “double-consciousness” of African-American life. That’s not to say that Parks gives us stories of conventional characters struggling with a familiar assimilationist identity crisis, searching at once for their roots and for the road out of the place where they’re rooted. Instead, she stages that consciousness itself, pulling apart language and image, pointing at their innards, and sometimes reconstituting them anew.
Though Parks is an admirer of the avant garde’s most staunch stager of the conundrums of consciousness, Richard Foremen, her minings of the mind are less cerebral than his. You might say that Foreman stages the left side of the brain and Parks the right. Where Foreman’s non-narrative spectacles are driven by the sparkplug fire of connecting synapses, Parks’s stage poems follow a dream logic in which sights and sounds melt into one another without losing their own shapes. So in one scene when loud Foremanesqe buzzers punctuate Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, for example, Parks’s twining of the disparate elements of slavery in that scene, into a single excruciating image, occupies an emotional terrain that’s far more moist than that of distanced Potatoland. Parks delineates her characters’ anger, madness, and fear, and at the same time she steps a bit away from them to reveal the double-consciousness not only that her African-American characters experience, but also with which they are perceived from the outside. Thus, she is really doubly dealing with double-consciousness. While investigating the outer and inner worlds of African-American life from the inside, she is also showing how both are viewed from the outside, punched into relief by definitions and descriptions made by white folks.
With her stage imagery and her experiments with language, Parks pulls taut this tension between inner and outer life, between black and white worlds, between reality and appearance—a project that is inherently theatrical because it has at its core the question of representation. In the opening scene I read a moment ago, we hear the voices of women in the dark while slides flash overhead. In an interview, Parks explained, “You have these fixed pictures projected up there and down below there’s a little person mutating like hell on stage. I’m obsessed with the gap between those two things.” And she added, “This dynamic parallels the relationship between preconceived images of African-Americans and real people.” At the same time, Parks explores a similar dynamic in the relationship between language and theater. In drama she says, “Language is taken from the world, refigured and set on the page and then taken from the page, refigured and set loose in the world again.” But since language in this literary sense had historically excluded African-Americans, Parks’s undertaking is doubly complex. She explains, “At one time in this country, the teaching of reading and writing to African-Americans was a criminal offense. So how do I adequately represent not merely the speech patterns of a people oppressed by language (which is the simple question) but the patterns of a people whose language use is so complex and varied and ephemeral that its daily use not only Signifies on the non-vernacular language forms, but on the construct of writing as well? If language is a construct and writing is a construct and Signifyin(g) on the double construct is the daily use, then I have chosen to Signify on the Signifyin(g).”
In doing so Parks uncovers the power of language to be performative, that is to call action into being, both in historical terms, as language can oppress as well as express, and in theatrical terms. The very typography of her scripts addresses this latter sense. Parks’s early plays look like long dialogic poems. There are no stage directions and little in the way of moorings for the unsuspecting director. But Parks insists that movement is contained within the speech itself. Often leaving out punctuation that would delineate formal pauses, she lets words run together to find their own rhythms. And with a self-conscious nod to Zora Neale Hurston’s seamless welding of the so-called folkloric and the so-called literary, Parks makes music of everyday usage. Even the way a word is spelled can imply stage action. “The,” t-h-u-h in her scripts, signifies thuh, a slump, while t-h-e, “the,” makes the body do something different. What’s more, for African-Americans the distinction can mean the difference between work and unemployment, even between life and death, which brings us back to Mona on that ledge in near suicidal torment over the difference between “ask” and “aks.”
Throughout the play, as in this scene, Parks plays with language, punning, changing a letter to shift the ground of the world within her words, tugging on the tension of what’s known as standard American English and black vernacular. It’s an issue Mona recognizes clearly. She says,
You lie down you lie down but he and she and it and us well we lays down. Didnt quit. They booted me. He booted me. Couldnt see thuh sense uh words workin like he said couldnt see thuh sense uh workin where words workin like that was workin would drop my phone voice would let things slip they tell me get Basic Skills call me breaking protocol hhhhh! Think I’ll splat?
Conversations between these two women alternate in this first section of Imperceptible Mutabilities, which is called “Snails,” with monologues delivered by the white Naturalist, who is observing the interactions and behaviors of them, among them. His exaggerated language contrasts that of the women whom he’s spying on. He says, “Having accumulated a wealth of naturally occurring observations knowing now how our subjects occur in their own world (mundus primitivus), the question now arises as to how we of our world (mundus modernus) best accommodate them.” His diction is a comic yet sinister, white patriarchal discourse. Parks shows how egregiously he is missing what’s going on in that apartment, in large measure because his language simply cannot describe or encompass it. Though I certainly don’t equate Parks with her characters, I have, I confess, sometimes anxiously wondered whether she wasn’t commenting with this menacing Naturalist on the white critical establishment that might also seek to accommodate her work in whatever “mundus modernus” happens to be the fashion of the moment. Gauging the work on its own terms, of course, is the best and only way to avoid that trap. It’s also the best way to keep Suzan-Lori Parks out of the meta-narratives about playwrights’ careers and keep ourselves open to the inexhaustible conventions of Suzan-Lori Parks’s great theatrical imagination.
