“A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature.” – Suzan-Lori Parks
The medium of literature allows authors, writers, and dramatists to recreate history and tell the stories of those who have been often overlooked. Suzan-Lori Parks does this by using certain people and events throughout history, including her own life, to retell the black experience in an unconventional manner. Parks is an important figure in American theatre because her work was directly impacted by her early life and artistic influences which left a lasting impression on society.
Suzan-Lori Parks was born on May 10th, 1964 in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Her father, Donald Parks, was a lieutenant colonel in the United …show more content…
She was exposed to important liberal writers, such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and William Faulkner. The way they approached their work left a profound influence upon Parks. “But their use of stream-of-consciousness, their willingness to break conventions of sentence structure and language, and their assertion of voices that countered received wisdom were powerful examples to Parks” (Geis, Suzan-Lori Parks). Although they were primarily Caucasian, Suzan also focused on African-American authors and playwrights, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange. Hurston’s career in anthropology and research in African mythology and vernacular peaked Parks’s fascination with mimicking Zora’s own work in saving and recycling history for herself. As a result, Suzan began using those same techniques to create and retell history while critiquing the way Caucasians did it. “This radical attitude towards history bespeaks not only the playwright’s frustration with a Western tradition that in the spirit of Hegel has tended to erase or subsume black history under the white sign, but, above all, her determination to challenge such hegemonic historiography by opposing it with her own” (Metcalf and Spaulding, African American Culture and Society After Rodney King). Adrienne Kennedy rebuked realism, embraced the avante-garde for poetic drama, took different elements of …show more content…
In her earlier works, like Venus, she illustrates the most challenging aspects of the black experience: slavery, institutionalized racism, and the Middle Passage. In Venus, Parks shows us the consequences of Saartjie Baartman’s exploitation, by not only the side-show director but by Baron Docteur who says he loves her but chooses to dissect her body to advance his medical career. Also, Suzan displays Venus onstage, placing emphasis on her protruding posterior as a metaphor for the exploitation of black bodies and that the past cannot be left behind us. “Why the focus on the “black bottom”? Like Toni Morrison, who makes this physical image into a geographic metaphor in Sula—and like August Wilson, who uses it in his play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1979) to foreground the exploitation of a black blues singer—Parks is interested in contemporary reverberations of the historical depiction and appropriation of the “black bottom” (Geis, Suzan-Lori Parks). One of the most critically-acclaimed young African-American playwrights, she received her first Obie award for Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom in 1989. The play, loosely based on her childhood, includes a character named Mr. Sergeant Smith who wishes not to be a stereotypical black man but a decorated soldier who is praised for serving his country. “He tells the
The medium of literature allows authors, writers, and dramatists to recreate history and tell the stories of those who have been often overlooked. Suzan-Lori Parks does this by using certain people and events throughout history, including her own life, to retell the black experience in an unconventional manner. Parks is an important figure in American theatre because her work was directly impacted by her early life and artistic influences which left a lasting impression on society.
Suzan-Lori Parks was born on May 10th, 1964 in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Her father, Donald Parks, was a lieutenant colonel in the United …show more content…
She was exposed to important liberal writers, such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and William Faulkner. The way they approached their work left a profound influence upon Parks. “But their use of stream-of-consciousness, their willingness to break conventions of sentence structure and language, and their assertion of voices that countered received wisdom were powerful examples to Parks” (Geis, Suzan-Lori Parks). Although they were primarily Caucasian, Suzan also focused on African-American authors and playwrights, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange. Hurston’s career in anthropology and research in African mythology and vernacular peaked Parks’s fascination with mimicking Zora’s own work in saving and recycling history for herself. As a result, Suzan began using those same techniques to create and retell history while critiquing the way Caucasians did it. “This radical attitude towards history bespeaks not only the playwright’s frustration with a Western tradition that in the spirit of Hegel has tended to erase or subsume black history under the white sign, but, above all, her determination to challenge such hegemonic historiography by opposing it with her own” (Metcalf and Spaulding, African American Culture and Society After Rodney King). Adrienne Kennedy rebuked realism, embraced the avante-garde for poetic drama, took different elements of …show more content…
In her earlier works, like Venus, she illustrates the most challenging aspects of the black experience: slavery, institutionalized racism, and the Middle Passage. In Venus, Parks shows us the consequences of Saartjie Baartman’s exploitation, by not only the side-show director but by Baron Docteur who says he loves her but chooses to dissect her body to advance his medical career. Also, Suzan displays Venus onstage, placing emphasis on her protruding posterior as a metaphor for the exploitation of black bodies and that the past cannot be left behind us. “Why the focus on the “black bottom”? Like Toni Morrison, who makes this physical image into a geographic metaphor in Sula—and like August Wilson, who uses it in his play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1979) to foreground the exploitation of a black blues singer—Parks is interested in contemporary reverberations of the historical depiction and appropriation of the “black bottom” (Geis, Suzan-Lori Parks). One of the most critically-acclaimed young African-American playwrights, she received her first Obie award for Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom in 1989. The play, loosely based on her childhood, includes a character named Mr. Sergeant Smith who wishes not to be a stereotypical black man but a decorated soldier who is praised for serving his country. “He tells the