Please, Get Your Hands Dirty

“Theatre, for me, is the perfect place to ‘make’ history—that is, because so much African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to—through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life—locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.” 
—Suzan-Lori Parks

History is a muddy, unclear thing in Suzan-Lori Parks’s work. In The America Play, the Foundling Father purposefully adds inaccuracies to his portrayal of Lincoln: some, like a stovepipe hat worn indoors, the customers like; and some, like a blonde beard, they don’t. Those who try to interpret history can be confused as well. Brazil has a tough time differentiating between historical figures and those who impersonate them. Truth in history is not something we can simply receive; it is something we have to search for.

In the twentieth century, there has been a concerted effort to integrate histories of marginalized people into the mainstream consciousness. There has been recognition, and attempted correction, of the fact that history, particularly as it fails to tell the stories of submerged cultures, is an incomplete narrative. While other writers have worked to correct this situation through telling un- and under-reported stories, Parks dramatizes the search through history itself. Her characters are urgently searching for a personal family history as well as a place in a larger historical narrative that has relegated them to its margins and footnotes. Instead of telling the lost stories of the minority figures that have shaped this country, Parks illustrates the process that modern minorities must go through in order to find their history— a history that has been buried under centuries of rubble.

For Parks, form and structure are inseparably intertwined with content. “Form is not merely a docile passive vessel,” she says, “but an active participant in the sort of play which ultimately inhabits it.” The America Play begins with the line, “To stop too fearful and too faint to go.” Parks’s footnote tells the reader that this is a chiasmus: a syntactical inversion.  This trick of grammar reflects Parks’s larger purpose: to invert the dominant, received historical narrative. There is a fascination in twentieth century historical drama with repetition and inversion. Parks taps into this fascination with a technique she calls “rep and rev,” (repetition and revision).  This technique of repeating words, phrases, and actions with slight variations creates a meditation on a particular subject or statement.  In this way, the language of the play reflects the action. The language of the play digs into and explores its content in the same way Parks’s characters dig into their history.

The Foundling Father, the main character of Act I of The America Play, is “a digger by trade, from a family of diggers.” In her play, Suzan-Lori Parks invites the audience to become diggers as well. While Parks’s characters literally dig into the earth, they are also digging though public and private histories, trying to unearth something to which they can connect. These characters perform their excavation in a great hole, one, Parks tells us, which is an exact replica of The Great Hole of History. The story is told in a space defined by its emptiness, a location that exists as an absence. With The Great Hole of History, Parks engages the absence and repression of marginalized peoples in the “whole” of popularly received history.

Parks isn’t so much telling her audience a story as inviting them to dig in the dirt with her characters. Instead of concerning itself with what is unearthed, the play concentrates on the process of digging.  The play invites the audience to get their hands dirty, to involve themselves in the process of searching. At the end of the play, what is important is not what has been uncovered, but the very fact that earth has been moved.

—Carle Gaier, Assistant Dramaturg

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