Bean, Heidi R.

English

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Bridgewater State UniversityVirtual Commons - Bridgewater State UniversityEnglish Faculty Publications English Department2013[Review of the book Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on thePlays and Other Works edited by Philip C. Kolin]Heidi R. BeanBridgewater State University, heidi.bean@bridgew.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/english_facPart of the English Language and Literature CommonsThis item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.Virtual Commons CitationBean, Heidi R. (2013). [Review of the book Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works edited by Philip C. Kolin]. InEnglish Faculty Publications. Paper 53.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/english_fac/53Books186Suzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works. Edited by Philip C. Kolin. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010; 219 pp. $39.95 paper, e-book available.Suzan-Lori Parks just keeps on giving. Since her first play pre-miered as a student production in 1984, she’s penned more than 20 works for stage, screen, and print. Her solo show, Watch Me Work, a meditation on the creative process, period-ically has been attracting audiences to the lobby of the Public Theater since 2011. Her family-reunion play, The Book of Grace, premiered in 2010 and continues to be produced around the US. Her 2011 controversial adaptation of Porgy and Bess for Broadway was acclaimed by Time magazine as the “#1 musical of the year” (and blasted by Stephen Sondheim). And she is cur-rently at work on a musical about Ray Charles as well as on a second novel. Perhaps the biggest challenge of scholars, critics, and fans of Suzan-Lori Parks, then, is simply keeping up with her terrific output.In response to that need, Philip C. Kolin has put together a new collection of essays and interviews that will be useful to undergraduate students of American drama as well as to any-one encountering Parks’s diverse range of works for the first time. Unlike Kevin J. Wetmore and Alycia Smith-Howard’s Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook (2007), a strong collection of essays that covers only Parks’s major plays through Topdog/Underdog (2001), and Deborah R. Geis’s Suzan-Lori Parks (2008), a smart critical monograph on Parks’s plays addressing especially their formal experimentalism, this new collection offers readers a gloss on virtually every one of Parks’s works through 2010 — plays, screenplays, and prose — through an eclectic mix of criti-cal approaches. It also includes a production chronology as well as two new interviews that shed light on this mature stage of Parks’s career.Given the diversity of Parks’s work, no single theme, formal approach, or generic category can serve as an overarching initiation, so instead this collection offers two introductory essays. The first, by Kolin, discusses Parks’s biography, major themes and dramatic strategies, and her dramatic inheritances. The second, by Rena Fraden, explores Parks’s own statements about her work, especially her notion of “radical inclusion” as opposed to essentialism. While both of these introductions perhaps suffer from a bit too much reverence for Parks herself, together they offer both biographical and theoretical context for an effective entrée into Parks’s oeuvre. Fraden’s introduction is especially useful in taking up Parks’s somewhat vague notion of radi-cal inclusion and tightening it into an ethics of form, writing practice, and thematics that can be traced from the formal experimentalism of her earliest work to her very disciplined approach to writing in the 365 Days/365 Plays (2006) project. The remaining essays move forward chronologically through Parks’s career, but three stand out in particular — Christine Woodworth’s discussion of children in Parks’s plays, Shawn Marie Garrett’s examination of Venus (1996), and Jon Dietrick’s reading of Parks’s “red letter plays” through economic theory. Woodworth’s elegant essay explores the representation of chil-dren across a considerable range of dramatic works. Arguing that “the presence of children in Parks’s canon underscores the cyclical, and traumatic, life of families and, by extension, history” (154), Woodworth reflects on the genealogical inheritances and legacies of Parks’s characters. Garrett’s essay yields a fresh perspective on Venus through a discussion of its premiere produc-tion, directed by Richard Foreman in the 1990s. Garrett argues that in bringing his signature style to Venus, Foreman obscured the intentions of Parks’s play — and especially the dynamic of love that the play centers on. In an equally strong but very different contribution, Dietrick examines American attitudes toward economic relations, especially the relation of the symbolic to the real in In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2000). Dietrick finds in both plays “a powerful Books187American anxiety regarding the gulf between appearance and reality” (89), an anxiety rooted in American economic life. Several essays in the collection consider Parks’s work via the lens of performative enactment, with the essays on her earliest plays tending, not surprisingly, toward musical analogies. Nicole Hodges Persley, for example, argues that hip hop’s practice of sampling and remixing is an apt formal metaphor for Parks’s history plays — a suggestive analogy that merits further explora-tion into the cultural significance of this comparison. Jacqueline Wood applies a more familiar discussion of Parks’s jazzing of form and content but applies it to three of Parks’s most infre-quently discussed plays: Betting on the Dust Commander (1990), Pickling (1990), and Devotees in the Garden of Love (1992). Meanwhile, Jochen Achilles examines Topdog/Underdog as metadrama by tracing structural parallels between three different kinds of play at work — stage plays, gam-ing, and play in general. And Charlene Regester identifies correspondences between Parks’s plays and screenplays according to specific modes and analogies of visibility.But the performative enactments to be found here are not limited to Parks, and some of the critics themselves take her writing as inspiration for their own performative engagements. Jennifer Larson compellingly reads 365 Days/365 Plays as a meditation on the notion of the “Great Hole of History,” an image and concept that appears frequently in Parks’s works, and she traces its resonances both through that volume and outward into other works. And Glenda Dicker/sun’s essay on the novel Getting Mother’s Body (2003) is as much a deft riff off of the novel as it is a revealing exploration of the likenesses of Parks’s characters to mythical figures.The collection closes with two new interviews that draw together different stages in the development of Parks’s career. In her conversation with Shawn-Marie Garrett, Parks discusses some of her later works — including Book of Grace (2010) and Father Comes Home from the War, Parts 1, 8 and 9 (2009) — and reflects on what it was like to be the first black woman to win the Pulitzer for drama. But the interview by Faedra Chatard Carpenter with Liz Diamond, Parks’s longtime friend and director of several of her early plays, is a particular gem for the insight it offers into the collaborative process. Diamond has a respect for Parks’s work as well as an integ-rity of her own that was crucial to the success of such plays as Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), and The America Play (1994), and what this interview most keenly reveals is the need for more scholarly and critical attention to the collaborative processes of the entire production team. For students new to Parks’s oeuvre, this collection is wide-ranging, informative, and acces-sible, especially when it comes to Parks’s rather daunting early plays. But more seasoned schol-ars will find treasures here as well in new interviews and new approaches. Perhaps the greatest strength of the collection is its own diversity. As it addresses matters of both text and perfor-mance, drama and theatre, plays and practices, it almost manages to keep up with Parks her-self — and that’s no small accomplishment. — Heidi R. BeanReferencesGeis, Deborah R. 2008. Suzan-Lori Parks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Wetmore, Kevin J., and Alycia Smith-Howard. 2007. Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook. London: Routledge.Heidi R. Bean is Assistant Professor of English at Bridgewater State University. She is coeditor of Poetry after Cultural Studies (University of Iowa Press, 2011) and has published articles and reviews in Postmodern Culture, Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Journal, and Cultural Critique.  heidi.bean@bridgew.eduTDR: The Drama Review 57:4 (T220) Winter 2013. ©2013 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

[Review of the book \u3cem\u3eSuzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works\u3c/em\u3e edited by Philip C. Kolin]

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[Review of the book \u3cem\u3eSuzan-Lori Parks: Essays on the Plays and Other Works\u3c/em\u3e edited by Philip C. Kolin]

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