ABSTRACT
Suzan-Lori Parks is a celebrated Black American playwright whose work has been repeatedly perceived as being absurdist. Parks’ absurdism points to ways forward past mere nihilism and pessimism, rooted as her plays are in humor and playfulness, and her use of the modes and tropes of absurdism offers a new means of considering Black people on stage and a means of representing Black history. Parks employs absurdism to explore Black identity and a means to represent Black history without focusing solely on trauma-as-entertainment. Instead, plays such as White Noise, Topdog/Underdog, The America Play, Fucking A, Pickling, Betting on the Dust Commander, Devotees in the Garden of Love, and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World contain echoes of Samuel Beckett and use the absurd as a mode to ironically explore the Black experience in America.
