When the playwright Suzan- Lori Parks was in high school,a teacher asked what she wanted to be as an adult. Parks already knew. She had been sitting under the family piano writing songs and plays since elementary school. “I was like, ‘I wanna be a writer,’” she recalled. The teacher’s response was not encouraging. “It was suggested to me that I not be a writer — because I was such a poor speller.”
Rather than sink into discouragement, Parks absorbed the insult, turning it into part of her origin story. “I appreciated the note,” she said wryly, “because it planted a little seed in my subconscious: I gotta learn to spell. So I’m really good at spelling now.” She has recast that potentially hurtful experience using her own distinct sense of playfulness, frequently deploying the phrase “a spell” as a stage direction. She defines it as an elongated pause, or a place “where the figures experience their pure true state.”
When we met in January at a downtown cafe, Parks greeted me enthusiastically, standing before a wall of blooming flowers in the dead of New York winter. Dressed in purple-and-lavender-striped fingerless gloves, fur-lined boots and a black Comme des Garçons jacket, she looked every bit the iconoclastic downtown New Yorker. At 60, Parks carries herself with the energy of someone half her age, her presence a combination of gravitas and lightness, wisdom and childlike exuberance. One of America’s most celebrated playwrights — a recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant,” a Guggenheim fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize — she is in the midst of a renaissance. There is renewed recognition that her plays, inventive provocations whose sometimes scathing visions of race and gender can unsettle audiences, have something to tell us about the troublesome relationship between individual identity and national community.
Heidi Griffiths, a longtime collaborator and friend of Parks’s who has worked as her casting director, described the playwright to me as someone “who will go off into the wilderness and find a place that she has to excavate. Often the things she reveals are the things that history has left long buried. She doesn’t look away; she keeps excavating.”
The 2022 Tony Award-winning revival of “Topdog/Underdog” was a reminder of the intellectual and aesthetic commitments that make Parks a one-of-a-kind figure in American theater. It starred Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins as two brothers who are victims of an existential joke. Before their parents abandoned them, their father named them Lincoln and Booth — after the American president and the man who assassinated him. Lincoln, who works at a local arcade as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and is repeatedly assassinated, moves in with his younger brother, Booth, after his wife throws him out. Booth, a street hustler, wants Lincoln to teach him three-card monte, a game Lincoln mastered before giving it up for a respectable, if demoralizing, job. They are loving yet also distrustful and wounded, interacting with the world through a bittersweet swagger. Through the brothers, Parks brought vital, sometimes biting street language into the theater. She also suggested how history resonates down through generations. Lincoln’s repeated assassination is not just a clever conceit: In watching the brothers, we witness how the American backlash against emancipation shadows Black life.
In “Sally & Tom,” which opens this month at the Public Theater, Parks takes up the “relationship” between Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved woman who bore him seven children: Sally Hemings, who was 14 when Jefferson began a sexual relationship with her. It tells the story of a Black female playwright named Luce and her white director husband, Mike, veterans of a radical outsider theater troupe called Good Company who are trying to break into the mainstream with a production about Hemings and Jefferson. Under pressure from a fickle financier, Mike pushes for a simple story about reconciliation and forgiveness. Luce works at cross purposes, struggling with how to portray a more complicated version of Hemings and Jefferson’s entanglement — they are slave and master, girl and adult male, as well as lovers. In Luce’s rendering, this is not a love story, but it also isn’t one of simple violence.
With the help of the director Steve H. Broadnax III, Parks has constructed a dizzying production that weaves a story of Luce and Mike’s backstage wrestling with needy actors, nervous backers and their own diverging desires with scenes from rehearsals of their play in progress. We shuttle between two communities — Good Company and Jefferson’s plantation at Monticello — whose members are bound to one another yet often at odds, poised at the intersection of coercion and acceptance, cruelty and care.
Parks forces the audience to contemplate how intimacy takes root in the thick of injustice. The reality of this ambivalent attachment — and the vulnerability required to address it — is her starting point. Rather than evade the question of intimacy in favor of tidy social and political arguments, Parks embraces its formidable complications. “Vulnerability and introspection are our superpowers,” she told me at the cafe. “And we all have them — so why don’t we use them? We’re not using our superpowers.” One of her superpowers is using theater and history as invitations to be in the world together in a new way.
Rather than evade the question of intimacy in favor of tidy social and political arguments, Parks embraces its formidable complications.
A Kentucky-born daughter of an Army officer from Chicago and a college professor from Texas, Parks had a childhood that unfolded across Texas, California, North Carolina, Vermont and Germany. Her middle-school years in Germany were disorienting: While the other American kids attended American schools, her mother placed Parks and her brother — two lone Black children — in German schools.
They became fluent in German, but Parks struggled to make friends. She remembers herself as a frightened kid holding a lunch tray in the cafeteria, uncertain how to go about connecting with her peers. Libraries became a solace. “The library was a refuge for me,” she recalled. “Every lunchtime it was like, What do you do?” She mimicked her childhood self, standing before a cafeteria with her lunch tray in hand. “You look around, hoping to find a friendly face, and everyone else is already in their group. So anyway, I would go to the library and sit.” The librarians allowed her to eat her lunch even though food wasn’t allowed there, a kindness for which she was grateful. There she would immerse herself in books, and had a special fondness for Greek mythology and African folk tales.
Parks’s library isolation gave her the gift of self-reflection and creation — going the way your blood beats, to riff on James Baldwin’s advice about living truthfully. “I mean, there I am again with my lunch tray, not fitting in anywhere. There’s a certain anxiety of ‘Who am I?’” She found her identity to be, as she put it, “one of the ones who listens to the spirit.”
When it came time for Parks to apply to colleges, her parents encouraged her to consider New England, where they had attended graduate school. Parks ultimately settled on Mount Holyoke after she fell in love with the campus’s 1,200 trees. She started there in 1981, and in her junior year was admitted into a seminar taught by James Baldwin, who was then on faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She had been an admirer of Baldwin’s since 1972 — her parents gifted her a copy of “The Fire Next Time” for Valentine’s Day that year when she told them she wanted to be a writer — and was thrilled to study with him. Each week, the 15-person seminar workshopped a few students’ writing, and when Parks brought her stories to class, she would stand up and perform them as if they were theater. “I’m acting out these stories, and Mr. Baldwin suggested I try writing for the theater. He told me I could be good.”
After class, Baldwin would invite the students for drinks at a nearby bar, but Parks couldn’t bring herself to go. “To me, it wasn’t appropriate,” she told me, gently mocking her genteel Southern side. “I’d been looking at his face on the back of this paperback since I was in fifth grade!” For the young Parks, Baldwin was an educator, not a peer. The most important lesson she learned from Baldwin’s seminar, though, was how to show up, not just as a writer but as a human being. “What I received was how to conduct myself in the presence of spirit,” she told me, conjuring the religious underpinnings of Baldwin’s work. “You have to wrestle, tussle with the angels. I like writing because you get to hold the hand of the spirit.” For Parks, it became clear that the writer’s vocation was one of listening to the ancestors, and reverence for what you might learn.
Parks graduated in 1985 and moved to London to study theater at the Drama Studio for a year before returning to the United States and settling in New York. In 1987, she staged her first production, “Betting on the Dust Commander,” in a bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was only the second play she ever wrote, but it features all of her signatures: a mythic sense of time, a concern with how history echoes in intimate relationships and a reveling in language. The play tells the story of a Black couple, Lucius and Mare, who have somehow been married for over 100 years and speak in a style so country and rough that to an untrained ear it could read as pure caricature. At one point, speaking of his own death, Lucius compares himself to an old racing horse. He hopes that when he nears the end, “they stretch me out like that. Hope they get me in thuh home stretch fore I get all stuck up: arms this way, elbows funny, knees knocking, head all wrong.” Dwelling in the language of the rural South, which many might dismiss as backward, Parks listened for and shared its wisdom.
What followed was a prolific run of incisive and experimental productions. In the 1990 jazz requiem “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World AKA the Negro Book of Dead,” Parks filled the stage with a parade of historical figures, racial stereotypes and folklore characters (the play opens, for example, with a line from a character named Black Man With Watermelon). She confronted racial stereotype and distortion while also exploring Black people’s complex interiority. Her 30-year relationship with the Public began in 1994 with “The America Play,” about a Black man who works as both a gravedigger and (like the character in “Topdog/Underdog”) an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and “Venus” (1996), a lyrical portrait of Sarah Baartman, the 19th-century Khoekhoe woman known as the Venus Hottentot. In Parks’s depiction, the woman who was exhibited like a zoo animal and exploited is not simply a victim but a woman in search of intimacy and a sense of self. Aside from the steady production of new plays, Parks has embraced a variety of projects. She wrote the screenplay for Spike Lee’s 1996 film “Girl 6,” about a young Black woman actor who becomes a phone-sex operator. She was tapped to write the screenplays for film adaptations of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” as well as for Lee Daniels’s 2021 biopic “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.”
Parks’s day-to-day doings have a disciplined rhythm that is conventional even in what is an unconventional, spellbound life. She and her husband, Christian, a jazz musician and composer from Munich, are parents of a 12-year-old son. “When you’re a parent, life sort of has a certain flexibility,” she says, “respectful flexibility, where you can include and incorporate the boundaries that you have to erect to get your work done.” Each weekday, she wakes up at 4 to meditate and do yoga. Her son rises at 5:30 to read and play the violin beside her. She teaches in the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University, where she delights in facilitating among her students the kind of community she values dearly. “I love being with people and talking about the creative, being with people as they walk their path, because it can be very lonely. It can be very frightening. It’s a trip, so I’m like, ‘I’m a trip advisor!’”
Parks likens her eclectic body of work to a circle of trees: “You might have five redwoods in a circle. They’re all separate trees, but they’re actually all joined at the root. Some of us as artists flower like that; and some of us flower like the oak.”
If her corpus is a circle of redwoods, they’re joined at the root by her commitment to depicting Black life with historical and cultural specificity, and to understanding history’s absurd impact on individual lives. But at a deeper level, Parks is obsessed with the interplay between devastation and joy. The director Kenny Leon, who helmed the recent production of “Topdog/Underdog,” told me that “Parks, like many of the greats, loves her people, her culture and her country.” Contextualizing Parks among some of Black theater’s titans — Baldwin, Hansberry and August Wilson — he emphasized that she “loves Black culture and tackles its complex challenges.” That love insists on play and fun in order to disintegrate easy ways of thinking about race.
In her plays, humor is a place where we might set down, however briefly, the baggage of racism that weighs down every interaction. But there are also moments of vulnerability that allow us to see things differently. Simply put, Parks disarms. In “Sally & Tom,” there’s an instability at work in the play’s very staging and conceit: Tracking Luce and Good Company in the run-up to the premiere of their own play, “Sally & Tom” alternates between backstage drama and rehearsals that teleport the cast into Monticello, forcing them to confront the oppressive racial order that supported Jefferson’s intellectual life. One moment we are listening to Hemings beg Jefferson not to split up her family; the next she removes her curly wig, pale makeup and corset to become Luce, a contemporary Black woman who, though confronting the complexities of an interracial relationship, is not held captive.
With its multiracial cast, interest in interracial and queer intimacy and emphasis on race’s psychosexual dimension, “Sally & Tom” echoes recent theater hits like “Hamilton” and “Slave Play” in order to ironize both starry-eyed multiculturalism and cynical provocation. At one point, two members of the cast and crew — Geoff, who is white, and Devon, who is Black — are talking about the relationship. “Tom was nice to Sally,” Geoff says, nostalgically comparing Jefferson’s supposed chivalry to the coldness of contemporary hookups. “ ’Cause, I mean, they did stay together for over 30 years.” Devon retorts: “She was his slave, yo.” The company’s stage manager, Scout, is an aspiring Asian American actor who plays Jefferson’s younger daughter, Polly. In a nod to the vexations of nontraditional casting, she wonders whether she really has a role to play in this story. “Were there any Korean Americans in America in 1790?” she jokes. “How much skin do I actually have in this game?” The play’s jagged humor cuts in many directions at once, poking fun at the narrow and simplistic terms of our racial discourse. Instead, Parks asks us to reckon with the ways race confounds easy accounting.
In a striking scene from Luce’s play within the play, after Sally begs Jefferson not to send her family away, he attempts to elide his power over the teenage girl. “I love you,” he whispers. “I thank you,” Sally responds. At the performance I saw, the audience laughed at Sally’s answer. When Parks recounted the scene to me during a conversation, though, I did not interpret it as a joke. I heard it as both an assertion of a strategic transaction and an open question in Sally’s mind. Never mind love: Could good will and favor, the root of gratitude, be bestowed from slave to master? Could such warm feeling honestly coexist with the bitterness of unfreedom? Or was it just an act of sour piety to get along?
In March I saw Parks perform at Manhattan’s Rockwood Music Hall — not a play, but a set with her band, Sula and the Joyful Noise. (The band’s name is not a reference to Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel, “Sula,” as I first thought, but a childhood nickname Parks’s father gave her.) Parks isn’t new to music — she has played piano since she was a child, and has written songs for and played music in her plays. Inside the venue, as she met up with the other band members, the energy was warm. The room filled up with a multiracial and multigenerational group of friends and fans. The band, as Parks described it, is a “test kitchen,” and this was their first live gig.
Onstage, Parks was petite but mighty, with an electric guitar strapped in front of her. Her husband, Christian, armed with a perennially amused countenance and a deeply grooving bass, stood on one side of her. She is the one woman in the band of “dudes,” as she calls them, wearing a miniskirt and pink-glitter-dyed boots that once belonged to a beloved deceased neighbor, and a matching pink ruffled guitar strap, with her waist-length dreadlocks rolled up into huge buns as if she were a feminist superhero. Singing in a voice that sounded like what might happen if Bette Davis, Ida Cox and David Byrne had a baby, she channeled different personae. In one song, she embodied the spirit of a fugitive slave with a sardonic take on self-emancipation: “I have misplaced myself,” she repeated, eliciting a lively call and response from the crowd.
The lyrics and situation — a diverse crowd joining Parks to evoke the spirit of a runaway slave — felt like the kind of productive provocation Parks’s work insists on. She delivered a message from the American underside, welcoming all comers. In the venue, the fabled “e pluribus unum” was the song of the slave rather than that of the master.
Even though the Sula of this band is Suzan-Lori Parks, I couldn’t help thinking, as she sang, of Toni Morrison’s Sula: a Black woman who came of age in the Jim Crow 1920s, made dangerous because she was an “artist with no art form.” Parks is the opposite, a Black woman artist of the 2020s who has many art forms — playwright, novelist, screenwriter, composer, actor, musician — all because, as she says, she can. As I watched Parks thrust her shoulders forward, one eyebrow cocked, inviting the crowd to sing along with her the refrain “I misplaced myself,” I thought: Here is a woman who has rooted herself to her values, her communities. Here is a woman who has placed herself.
Imani Perry is a professor at Harvard University and a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Her book “South to America” won the 2022 National Book Award for nonfiction.
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