ABSTRACT
The first time I read a Suzan-Lori Parks play I flashed to Wittgenstein, not Gertrude Stein. There seemed to me to be a utilitarian focus to Parks’ words-a surgical intensity-that belied her play’s surface impression of hypnotic languor. Surely this is what Wittgenstein meant when he spoke of language games, I thought, and the contingencies of various meanings in languages’ various contexts, words having uses and not mere dictionary definitions,1 family resemblances of certain words, and so on. Wittgenstein believed that the philosopher’s task was to bring words back from their metaphysical usage to their everyday usage, and Parks’ drama seems to play between the boundaries of both. There is a momentum in Parks’ musicality, an aim in mind, a propulsion. But unlike surgical instruments, Parks’ words do not seem sharp somehow, but blunt and easy: “meaning”, it seemed, would come to the reader after the fourth downbeat, or maybe the fifth, head nodding, foot tapping. I couldn’t conceive of actually seeing these dramas staged in the theatre; when, I wondered, would I get to close my eyes and listen?
