Suzan-Lori Parks 1964-

American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist.

INTRODUCTION

Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for drama for her play Topdog/Underdog (2001), Parks is one of the most highly acclaimed African American woman playwrights in contemporary theater. Her use of "rep & rev" (repetition and revision) to reexamine and reconfigure Eurocentric historical episodes is lauded for providing an afrocentric history and identity to historical events—elements that are largely missing from the Eurocentric historical record. Innovative and at times controversial, Parks uses language reminiscent of African American dialects and vernacular to give multiple meanings to the spoken word and expose the hidden message behind the dialogue of her characters. Often depicting and exaggerating black stereotypes, Parks draws attention to their invalidity and the ignorance upon which they are based. Parks's plays are noted for their originality, nonlinear progression of time, poetic dialogue, political and social agendas, and depiction of the search for identity.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1964 to Francis McMillan and Donald Parks. Because of her father's career as a U.S. Army officer, the family relocated frequently during her childhood, including to the former West Germany, where her parents enrolled her in the local German school system rather than the school set up for the children of American military personnel. This immersion in the German language gave Parks a valuable perspective on her native language that was to inform the dialogue she would later write for her plays. Returning to the United States, she enrolled at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, initially to pursue a degree in chemistry; she later switched her major to English and German literature. While at Holyoke she enrolled in a fiction writing course at nearby Hampshire College taught by esteemed American writer James Baldwin. Baldwin, after hearing Parks read her work aloud (she often acted out the parts herself), encouraged her to pursue writing plays as a profession. Parks remembers that instance as a turning point in her life. She subsequently delved into the work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange, two dramatists whose works were free from conventional theater restraints and addressed contemporary social issues. Her first play, The Sinner's Place (1984), helped her receive honors for her English degree but was rejected for staging by Mount Holyoke because it was too innovative for the drama department. After graduating in 1985, Parks enrolled in the Yale University School of Drama, hoping to learn the craft of playwriting by training as an actor. After one year she departed for New York, where she produced Betting on the Dust Commander in 1987 and Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom in 1989, which won the Obie award for the best Off-Broadway play of 1989. Parks's subsequent awards have included several grants and fellowships, a PEN-Laura Pels Award for Excellence in Playwriting in 2000, and a second Obie award, for the play Venus (1996). Parks has taught at many colleges and universities, including Yale University, the University of Michigan, New York University, and Northeastern Illinois University, and in 2000 was named director of the California Institute of the Arts performance program. She continues to write plays and screenplays and has ventured into fiction, publishing her first novel, Getting Mother's Body, in 2003. In 2006 she released 365 Days / 365 Plays, the culmination of an ambitious undertaking in which Parks wrote a play a day for one entire year. In 2001 Parks married noted blues musician Paul Oscher.

MAJOR WORKS

Since her first play, The Sinner's Place, Parks has demonstrated a passion for searching for knowledge, his- tory, and identity. In her first play to be produced in New York City, Betting on the Dust Commander, she examined family relations, upheaval, and movement. This work has been attributed to Parks's constant relocation during childhood. She gained critical and popular attention with her next production, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, a tetralogy of four short plays—Snails, The Third Kingdom, Open House, and Greeks. In Snails a white naturalist disguises himself as an exterminator so he can "bug" the home where three African American women live, thereby gaining insight into the actions of these women in a nonwhite-influenced surrounding. Through this "study" the women lose identity and respect and become objects to manipulate and examine. The Third Kingdom reenacts the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean. In lieu of the dearth of known history from these subjugated people, Parks provides memories and cultural references that create a new, solid history for African Americans to follow. In Open House Blanca, a former slave, is dying and her memories are being stolen from her—symbolized by continuous tooth extractions—linking her loss with African Americans' loss of culture, identity, and voice. In Greeks Parks further elaborates on the assertion that African Americans have an unsure link with the past and therefore have a difficult time understanding their present. Parks continued the search for an African American past in her next play, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990). In this play, the main character, Black Man with Watermelon, is continually beaten, enslaved, and killed, yet always returns to the stage to tell his story. Parks highlighted the importance of "telling the story" as a way to fight the negation of African Americans, whose literary silencing during the years of the slave trade has rendered their story almost forgotten. For The America Play, which premiered in New York City in 1994, Parks created a protagonist who grows to adulthood obsessed with the life and death of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated while viewing a theater performance by actor John Wilkes Booth in 1865. This protagonist, dubbed the "Foundling Father," finds work as a carnival sideshow attraction in which he sits in an ersatz theater chair wearing "whiteface" paint—a reversal of the early twentieth-century minstrel shows in which white comedians wore "blackface" paint in order to imitate and denigrate African Americans. For a small sum, arcade visitors can take a shot at the Foundling Father with a cap gun.

Parks recreated the sideshow atmosphere in Venus (1996), a fictionalized account of the curious case of Saartjie Baartman, a South African Khoi-San woman brought to England in 1810 as a sideshow attraction and dubbed the "Venus Hottentot" due to her exaggerated female form. In Venus Parks rewrote this history, casting Baartman not as a docile pawn but as an accomplice in her fame and destiny. A willing participant, Venus uses her African "otherness" to obtain wealth and love. Parks explored Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in her next two plays, In the Blood (1999) and F———A (2000). In the comi-tragic In the Blood, Hester, a homeless single mother, lives under an overpass with her five multi-ethnic, illegitimate children. The play stresses that identity and culture are becoming increasingly difficult to discover and claim, a condition that leads to disillusionment and diaspora. For F———A's Hester, the "A" stands for Abortionist. This play, like the former, ends in tragedy as Hester's son, who was a sweet youth, transforms into a violent and brutal man. Parks's next work, Topdog/Underdog, won the Pulitzer Prize, making Parks the first African American woman to receive the award. In the play, which Parks wrote in a matter of days, two brothers, named Lincoln and Booth, struggle to succeed in life. Lincoln, a sad figure who was once a skilled purveyor of three-card monte—until his partner was shot—now works in an arcade shooting booth costumed as Abraham Lincoln, paralleling Parks's Foundling Father in The America Play. Booth, a skilled shoplifter, ridicules his brother's job and tries to convince him to return to the far more lucrative monte game. The two share a rundown tenement room, where they drink and quarrel to the point of violence. In 2003 Parks released her first novel, Getting Mother's Body, about a black family from Texas during the 1960s. In the novel, sixteen-year-old Billy Beede, pregnant and abandoned by her coffin-maker lover, attempts to dig up her mother's corpse in order to retrieve the diamond ring and pearl necklace with which she was supposedly buried. Among the novel's colorful characters are Billy's churchless minister uncle; his one-legged wife; and Dill, a lesbian who was once Billy's mother's lover. In late 2006, Parks's 365 Days / 365 Plays premiered; about seven hundred theaters across the United States each committed to producing one week's worth of the plays, so that by the end of a year's time, all 365 plays would have been performed somewhere in the country. Among the playlets are brief monologues and dialogues; short plays treating broad subjects like war as well as minute trivial details of a single day; pieces involving the deaths of notable figures like Barry White or Johnny Cash; and scripts that simply list stage directions.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Critical response to Parks's plays has been largely favorable. Although some commentators charge that she reinforces racial misconceptions with her use of stereotypical language and gestures, most reviewers contend that her over-the-top depiction of stereotypes is meant to lampoon these misconceptions and make a farce out of the underlying prejudices that drive stereotyping. She is applauded for her attempts to fill in the gaps of African American memory and history, and for her refusal to rely on the Eurocentric history that has been dominant for centuries. Her innovative use of plot and lan- guage—especially black English—has prompted debate, with some observers calling her dramatic works powerful and her dialogue poetic, and others criticizing the storylines as fragmented and her language as dense and unintelligible. Several scholars emphasize the musicality of her writings, commenting on her use of a rhythmic repetition of words or phrases, a technique outlined by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his seminal work The Signifying Monkey. This method, called "rep & rev," has its origin in the improvisational nature of jazz, in which a line or phrase is revised in some way each time it is repeated. Commentators have also associated this "improvisational" quality with Parks's "openness" with regard to the arrangement and organization of the performance of her scripts. In what Jennifer Johung called her "specifically unspecific writerly marks," Parks often leaves directing, acting, and staging directions vague and ambiguous. Still other critics have focused on Parks's controversial decision in Venus to portray Baartman as a willing accomplice to her own exploitation. While some reviewers found the award-winning play monotonous in its repetition of well-worn themes of sexual and race exploitation, others have praised it as a significant achievement that is both comical and horrifying in its depiction of the pain of racial and sexual humiliation.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Sinner's Place (play) 1984

Betting on the Dust Commander (play) 1987

Fishes (play) 1987

^*Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (play) 1989

Anemone Me (screenplay) 1990

The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (play) 1990

Greeks (play) 1990

Pickling (radio play) 1990

The Third Kingdom (radio play) 1990

Devotees in the Garden of Love (play) 1991

Locomotive (radio play) 1991

The America Play (play) 1994

The America Play and Other Works (plays) 1995

Girl 6 (screenplay) 1996

Venus (play) 1996

In the Blood (play) 1999

F———A (play) 2000

Red Letter Plays (plays) 2001

Topdog/Underdog (play) 2001

Getting Mother's Body (novel) 2003

Their Eyes Were Watching God [with Misan Gagay and Bobby Smith; adapted from the novel by Zora Neale Hurston] (screenplay) 2005

365 Days / 365 Plays (plays) 2006

*This work is a tetralogy of short plays: Snails, The Third Kingdom, Open House, and Greeks.

CRITICISM

James Frieze (essay date winter 1998)

SOURCE: Frieze, James. "Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: Suzan-Lori Parks and the Shared Struggle to Perceive." Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (winter 1998): 523-32.

[In this essay, Frieze examines Parks's use of the technique "Rep & Rev" in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom.]

[Mr. Sergeant Smith]:

Thus events of my destiny ssgonna fall intuh place. What events? That I dont know. But they gonna fall intuh place all right.¹

The thinking of Mr. Sergeant Smith, would-be hero of the fourth and final section of Suzan-Lori Parks's Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, is wishful in the extreme. He has, after all, been waiting what seems like an eternity for the Commander to honour him with that vague, but distinctly noble thing: a Distinction. Waiting for the Distinction is also the chief preoccupation of Mrs. Smith and of their children, Buffy and Muffy. The family's waiting is far from passive. In anticipation of Mr. Smith's homecoming, they clean the house, and especially father's desk. They discuss the clothes that the girls should wear for the big welcome, settling for "perm press […] polka-dotted […] swisses" (59). They pore over the letters that Mr. Smith sends them, searching for clues as to when the Distinction will be awarded. Though the official purpose of examining the letters is to ascertain how much favour father has managed to curry with the Army, their analysis is also driven by an unofficial purpose: to determine how much daddy is thinking of each member of his family.

To interpret correspondence with a precision appropriate to military matters, the three female Smiths have constructed a ledger, with multiple columns, which they fill in as follows. Mrs. Smith: […] "Subject": uh letter. Check thuh "non bill" column. […] Buffy: "Contents"? […] Mrs. Smith: Write—uh—"general news." […] Slash—"report of duties" (62, intervening dialogue omitted). Then the final columns: "‘Mention of Work’: check: ‘yes.’" When it comes to the category titled "Mention of Family," an argument ensues, since Buffy was mentioned but Muffy was not. Sandwiched in the middle of these formalities is the column titled "Signs of Distinction." Mrs. Smith asks, "What'd we put last time." "Last letter's Signs of Distinction were ‘on the horizon,’" informs Buffy. "Before that?" asks the mother. "Soon," says Buffy. "Before that," she adds, with exemplary efficiency, "he reported his Distinction to be arriving quote any day now unquote" (62-64).

To comfort her sister Muffy, who is upset at not being mentioned, Buffy tells her of a family called the Censors. "Mr. Censor," says Buffy, "is a man who won't let Sergeant Smith say certain things because certain things said may put the Effort in danger." She explains that Mr. Smith "deals in a language of codes—secret signs and signals" (64). It is no coincidence that Buffy, the most adept of the female Smiths at coordinating the ledger, is also the most deeply immersed in the lore of military intelligence. So zealously does the ledger map the place-into-which-events-can-fall that, akin to the army's "language of codes," the "signs and signals" of the ledger take on a life of their own. The interpretive codes have become more substantial than the events to which they refer.

Whether their absurd behaviour causes them to be isolated, or whether isolation makes them odd, the Smiths appear to be without friends or neighbours. Being isolated makes them very much at home, however, in the Obie Award-winning (that is, Distinguished) world mapped by Suzan-Lori Parks in her first major play. Like the Smiths, the three other groups of characters introduced during the course of the play have somehow become unhinged, not only from each other, but from origins, society, and destiny. Reacting against this unchaining of being, Parks's writing incubates a kind of collective consciousness. The characters strive to rearticulate their immediate environment with its historical and cosmic underpinnings. This striving leads them to construct surreal frames of reference in which dreams and metaphysical insights are continuous with mundane domestic details and with the methodological practices of science, organized religion, and the Army. Within these frames of reference, the characters moor themselves, semi-wittingly, to floating signifiers—objects and motifs which are psychologically rich and socially familiar: a desk; a rock; a cockroach; a boat; a gun. Parks encases these symbolic objects in multinuanced locational phrases such as "fall intuh place," "Open House," and "Third Kingdom."

In deploying these objects and tropes, Parks draws on the African-American tradition of "repetition [and] difference" that Henry Louis Gates, Jr., charts in The Signifying Monkey.² "Rep & Rev," as Parks calls it,³ found its apotheosis in jazz composition, a central principle of which is the establishment of a particular phrase or harmonic line which is then repeated with a signal difference. Parks's theatrical application of the technique conjures up the experience of meanings changing, often barely perceptibly, over time.

Echoing Parks's "Rep & Rev," I will come back to the Smiths (at the end of this essay) via a discussion of the three other sets of characters that constitute Parks's play. While blow-by-blow chronological analysis can be a tedious and inadequate form of scrutiny, I use chronological order here because Imperceptible Mutabilities so provocatively links the production of chronology to the framing of identity. In the mini-essays that preface the collection of her plays, Parks comments that "Standard Time Line and Standard Plot Line are in cahoots!" She sees time as "circular,"⁴ but satirizes any attempts to map time (including her own) by furnishing her essay with pseudo-scientific diagrams. "Standard Plot Line" deploys the phenomenon of foreshadowing to install linearity as the dominant temporal pattern. Foreshadowing channels nuances in a single direction. In contrast, Parks encourages multidirectional reading, the free play of intertextual nuances. "Through each line of text," she explains, "I'm rewriting the Time Line—creating history where it is and always was but has not yet been divined."⁵ She writes a narrative which uncovers the effects of previous narratives.

The first section of the play features three roommates. They are named Mona, Chona, and Verona—or rather, they used to be. In the first scene of the play, Chona, now named Charlene, states that "[o]nce there was uh robber who would come over and rob us regular." A few lines later, Mona, now Molly, says: "[o]nce there was uh me named Mona who wanted to jump ship but didnt" (26). The third scene of the play begins as follows:

Molly:

Once there was uh me named Mona who wondered what she'd be like if no one was watchin. You got the Help Wanteds?

Charlene:

Wrapped thuh coffee grinds in um.

          (27)

Like the "coffee grinds," Mona's identity is a series of residues packaged as an urban convenience. Physically and ontologically, the used coffee conjures up images of Black identity being ground down and wrapped in discourse. From her first appearance—at the very start of the play—Mona herself is, in a sense, buried beneath language. She recites a language lesson:

Molly [Mona]:

[…] "S-K" is /sk/ as in "ask." The little-lamb-follows-closely-behind-at-Marys-heels-as-Mary-boards-the-train. Shit. Failed every test he shoves in my face. He makes me recite my mind goes blank.

          (25)

After beginning, here, by showing the effects of narrative, Parks goes on to uncover those effects, to peel away accreted discursive layers in search of the sense of "me-ness" that Mona feels has been stolen from her. The Mona/Chona scenes are interspersed with monologues by a character named The Naturalist, who discusses his strategies for researching his subjects with the aid of a "fly"—a device used by anthropologists to study subjects in their natural environment (27). The Naturalist gains entry to the Mona/Chona household in the guise of Lutzky, an "exterminator professional with uh Ph.D" (28), on whom Mona and Chona rely to treat the enormous cockroaches (a parodic rendering of the anthropologist's fly) that reside in their living-room. Pretending to wipe out their infestation problem, Lutzky infests them in the name of research.

Lutzky's claims to cleanse the living-room recall the similarly euphemistic question that The Naturalist, Lutzky's double, poses in his first appearance in the play: "How. Should. We. Best. Accommodate. Our subjects" (29). What betrays The Naturalist's purpose in this fascinating speech act is his ghettoization of each word in the sentence. Bearing in mind that the human-sized roaches in the living-room are placed there by Lutzky, his real question, exactly opposite to how it is framed, is: "how can I infiltrate my subjects?" Lutzky, like The Naturalist, does not destroy, but contains by pronouncing that he can destroy. Mona and Chona are impressed, not by what Lutzky does (the roaches only grow bigger), but by what his weapons can do. The remote promise of violence serves Lutzky/The Naturalist as an ingenious alternative to actual violence. It is the cover under which the Naturalist changes the things he objectifies, a process encapsulated in his symbolic changing of names—Mona to Molly, Chona to Charlene, and Verona to Veronica.

Under his (generally remote) management, the characters' living-room has become a kind of purgatory. While idealized purgatories are places of reckoning and recognition, The Naturalist wants to maintain this particular purgatory as a place of misreckoning and misrecognition. When The Naturalist visits the living-room, he struggles to maintain control as a nexus of narratives begin eerily to overlap, irrupting into the surface of Parks's text and into the consciousness of the residents, threatening to blow The Naturalist's cover. Chona/Charlene acts the dutiful hostess, accommodating everyone's needs. While assisting Lutzky in treating the roaches, she finds time to cook up a peach cobbler. Meanwhile, Verona/Veronica watches a rerun of her favourite television program, Wild Kingdom, narrated by her hero, Marlin Perkins. Though supposedly a rerun, the episode plays out bizarrely, Perkins wielding a gun on "thuh wild beasts" (35) while Lutzky hoses down his clients. Between two fanciful narratives of invasion, colonization, and destruction—Lutzky purportedly looking for roaches, and Perkins surveying an African jungle—Parks inserts a third narrative which is all too familiar. This third narrative springs from Verona's distress at the unexpected violence unleashed by Perkins. Verona calls the police to complain, but the police refuse to come, causing Verona to wonder if they have paid their taxes. A farcical, overblown scene mutates into one that is flatly domestic.

Downstage right,⁶ Mona/Molly lies down, not quite sleeping, not quite daydreaming, in a kind of "daymare." This image of Mona frames the scene. Lying down on the ground of memory, Mona contextualizes the scene's fragments of narrative as repressed memories irrupting into consciousness. As Parks systematically dismembers reality, Mona re-members it.

One of the key uses to which Parks puts "Rep & Rev" is the establishment of a multi-temporal logic in which past and present, archaic and urbane, are wrapped together—as personified by the folding of Mona into Molly, Chona into Charlene, and Lutzky into The Naturalist. The play is not precolonial or postcolonial. It is set, in so far as it is "set," in the overlap between before and after, between what is determined and what is reversible. Parks provocatively ties the materialities of urban and suburban life to the archaic and the metaphysical. While the Mona/Chona/Verona scenes grow out of and recede back into domesticity, the Seers—the portentously named characters of the "Third Kingdom" scenes—inhabit a poetic limbo between the archaic and the urbane.

The second set of characters featured in the play, the Seers—Kin-Seer, Us-Seer, Over-Seer, Shark-Seer, and Soul-Seer—appear to be on a sea voyage, though only two of them, Over-Seer and Us-Seer, are convinced that the journey is indeed an aquatic one. Over-Seer's name and authoritative bearing resonate with the slave masters of the Middle Passage. Us-Seer seems to embody the home body, standing in both for those who are left behind when slaves depart and those, within the diaspora, who are themselves left behind by practices that divide to conquer. The other three—Kin-Seer, Shark-Seer, and Soul-Seer—ride an ambiguous sea of symbolism that frequently mires them in confusion. Kin-Seer, for example, announces: "Last night I dreamed of where I comed from. But where I comed from diduhnt look like nowhere like I been" (37). Questioning him, the others establish that Kin-Seer saw "2 cliffs where thuh world had cleaved intuh 2." Kin-Seer describes "wavin" at someone on a far-off cliff, someone he refers to as "my uther me." Later in the scene, Soul-Seer, whose gaze seems to be fixed straight down, sees a sight that makes him recoil. He cries out: "ssblak ssblakallblak!" Over-Seer explains to him: "Thats your self youre looking at! Wonder #1 of my glass-bottomed boat" (37-38).

The Seers find it hard to recognize themselves and their environment. It falls to Over-Seer to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. Over-Seer informs them that when "[h]alf the world [fell] away," a wet place was "inscribe[d]" between the two worlds called "the Third Kingdom." This topographical narrative is complicated, however, by Over-Seer's qualification that "[t]he 2nd part comes apart in 2 parts" (37-39). Breaking down parts of a binary into other parts is Parks's way of clearing a space for the examination of identity dynamics. In an essay titled "An Equation for Black People Onstage," she insists that it is not necessary to have White people on stage to portray Blackness as relational. Opposing the notion that "the Klan … have to be outside the door for Black people to have lives worthy of dramatic literature," Parks argues that Blackness is already in-between because relationship to the other is an integral part of the self.⁷ She asserts that "[w]ithin the subject is its other."⁸ To show how Black people carry the relationship to Whites within them, and to think beyond that relationship, Parks dramatizes Black people relating to each other and to themselves, trying on Blacknesses which are defining but also mutable.

In experiential terms, the Seers embody the confusion of living in limbo. In textual terms, they are a bridge—albeit rickety—between domesticity and archaism. They image a form of seeing which is unwittingly poetic, and display a visionary capacity which is startlingly vivid but horrifyingly incomplete. In the 1989 production of the play, directed by Liz Diamond, the Seers were presented as voices on tape.⁹ The stage was dark, except for black-and-white slides projected onto a black screen. Historically aspecific, the slides featured fragments of bodies, hands, and feet in thick mud. The Seers are themselves icons out of focus, mangled archetypes, elliptical points of reference.

Parks challenges the supremacy of the actual as an index of truth by privileging iteration over explanation. At the beginning of the play, Mona, contemplating suicide, asks: "What should I do Chona should I jump should I jump or what?" Rather than answer Mona, Chona asks her if she wants some eggs. Though the two women continue to talk at cross-purposes, an oblique relationship emerges between "scrambled" eggs and Mona being "splat" on the ground (25). In Part Two of the play, Mona's question is echoed by Kin-Seer, who asks: "Should I jump? Shouldijumporwhut?" (40). Riffing on particular lines and phrases allows Parks not only to connect characters but to evoke the historicity of metaphor, the way in which metaphors stored in the cultural image bank are borrowed and resisted at different points in time—sometimes deliberately, sometimes less so. Each iteration surveys the distance that has been travelled since the last iteration in terms of both time and consciousness. Parks mines the gap between what has happened and what has not happened, what is lost in memory and what is over-familiar.

The central character of the central section, and symbolically a(nother) kind of middle passage, is Aretha Saxon. Aretha is enslaved to a family of Saxons—Charles Saxon and his children, Anglor and Blanca Saxon. When Aretha learns that her time as a guardian has come to an end because her "lease" has "expired," she insists on taking photographs of the family with big, "toothy" smiles (41). This task of preservation proves tricky because her subjects are confused and unwilling. Aretha is undeterred by the defectiveness of the images; it is the idea of archiving that drives her: "Dont matter none at all. You say its uh cry I say it uh smile. These photographics is for my scrapbook. Scraps uh graphy for my book." Aretha appears to have swallowed whole the rhetoric that validated slavery. Pathetically echoing Hollywood happy endings, she murmurs: "Mm gonna remember you grinnin" (54). Culture, she seems to believe, can overcome nature.

Parks chisels at the culture in which Aretha is entombed. A character named Miss Faith functions, like The Naturalist in the first section of the play, as a personification of what needs to be stripped away. Just as The Naturalist makes science his posture, a disguise in which he believes, religion gives Miss Faith an excuse for her actions. She spends her time in Christian prayer but is far from meek, and infinitely more pragmatic than she is spiritual.

Under Miss Faith's supervision—literally under it, as Miss Faith sits on a high platform overlooking her¹⁰—Aretha measures space to assess how many slaves they will be able to accommodate. As Aretha works, Miss Faith instills in her respect for documents, especially records and statutes (42-44). "The power of the book," Miss Faith explains, "lies in its contents. It contents are facts." Alluding to the fact that Aretha's term as a slave is about to "expire," Miss Faith "extract[s] Aretha's teeth with a large pair of pliers." This diligent dentistry proceeds despite Aretha's screams.¹¹ Taking words out of Aretha's mouth, Miss Faith informs her patient: "if we didnt pluck them we couldnt photograph them" (46-47).

Miss Faith personifies the archivism critiqued by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault states,

[t]he archive is not that which, despite its immediate escape, safeguards the event of the statement, and preserves, for future memories, its status as an escapee; it is that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability.¹²

What Foucault suggests is that the contours of the "statement" are not fixed at the moment of its inception. Over time, they develop, and can mutate. This mutability betrays, for Parks as for Foucault, the duplicitous nature of archival history and theology. The public face of the archive is that which smothers the fugitive quality of the utterance by recording it. The private face is that which attaches itself, unseen, at the very moment that the statement is born. By so doing, the archive provides an invisible framework within which the statement can be read. This framework—what Foucault calls a "system of enunciability"—inscribes a logic which confines future analysis to a narrow realm of possible interpretations. Establishing the "system of enunciability" of the "statement-event" is job one for Miss Faith and for The Naturalist. Aretha's scrapbook, like the ledger kept by the Smiths, reflects Parks's belief that indoctrination is an instilling, not merely of knowledge, but of ways of knowing. For Parks, the ability to control one's own identity depends not only on redefining particular events, but on reconceiving the very systems that hold events in place.

Slowly, barely perceptibly, Parks's characters shed their ingrained ways of knowing: they begin to unlearn. Analysis of their own failure causes the characters to question ways of seeing, including their own. This retrospective questioning comes to a head in veiled epiphanies—critical visions which, for character and spectator alike, are revelatory but muffled. These fragmented visions do not burst in from outside the machine of the narrative; they are precipitated by its breakdown.

Transgressing the narrow realm of interpretations permitted by Miss Faith becomes, for both Aretha and the audience, a matter of reading signs which articulate the mundane and actual with the heightened and fantastic. In a scene prefaced (in the printed text) with the word "Dreamtime," Aretha goes to meet her maker, who turns out to be her earthly master, Charles Saxon. He asks for her papers, which state that her name is also "Charles Saxon." She informs Charles that her husband is dead (44-45). A subsequent scene casts Miss Faith as a real estate agent, showing Anglor and Blanca a potential home. Aretha is cast—or, to the extent that this is her dream, casts herself—as an awkward curiosity who hovers around the house like a bad memory.

In these scenes of multiple and mis-taken identity, Parks directs attention away from the question of who is really who, inscribing (con)fusion—not only about heritage, but about the distinction between factual and metaphorical truth—as generative. Boxed in, indoctrinated, relieved of her teeth, Aretha exercises power through re-inflection. Her fragmented visions are the imposition of her idiolect upon the systems, personified by Miss Faith, that work to station her. It is an imposition which productively reveals inconsistencies in, and thereby begins to unravel, those systems. Aretha may have swallowed the rhetoric that validated slavery, but in digesting she rearranges, so that Miss Faith's book becomes more "scraps uh graphy for [her own] book."

In Parks's hands, repetition-compulsion metastasizes from a psychic into a semantic and then into a social disturbance. Merging the fantastic and the actual, Parks leads both Aretha and the spectator away from the deciphering advocated by Miss Faith, and by The Naturalist, and towards multidirectional reading. In so doing, she makes available a virtual identification between character and spectator based on the shared struggle to perceive.

Gazing upward, imagining that he has caught a man from falling out of the sky, Mr. Smith trips over a mine. He is awarded a Distinction only after, and because, he loses his legs. Later, when his children interrogate him, he asks each of them: "You one uh mines?" (70). Embedded within this pithy interrogative are several of the questions that Parks prompts her characters, and her audience, to ask. What belongs to and defines me? How does my identity trip me up? How should it conceal itself? That Mr. Smith voices these questions in four densely signifying words reflects the fact that recognition of the self depends, for Parks, on the formation and application of a personal idiom. The Distinction—both before and in the moment that it is awarded—imposes itself on Sergeant Smith. He begins, in a minor but triumphant act of signifying, to turn things around. Having been dis-membered in losing his legs, he begins to re-member himself by imposing his way of knowing. It is a kind—a horribly ironic and far from magical kind—of reversal.

For Mr. Sergeant Smith, time is initially a vista of possibility. Linear temporality furnishes him with a sense of destiny encapsulated in the epithets "on the horizon," "soon," "any day now" (63). By the end of the play, however, the character of time itself appears, from Mr. Smith's perspective, to have deteriorated:

Time for somethin noble was yesterday. There usta be uh overlap of four hours. Hours in four when I'd say "today" and today it'd be. Them four hours usta happen together, now, they scatters theirselves all throughout thuh day. Usta be uh flap tuh slip through. Flaps gone shut.

          (71)

Smith's comment on the dispersal, and increasing inhospitability, of what he experiences as "today" invokes with new clarity what the play (until this point) has cumulatively alluded to. What is insinuated by Parks's satirical portraiture of self-misrecognition, and is now stated by Mr. Smith, is the power that lies in the spatio-temporal codes on which identity relies. Time and space underlie the governance of identity, and of mechanisms, such as race, which frame identity. The very systems that purport to hold identity in place can be used to perpetrate those subtle forms of social exclusion predicated on self-exclusion and self-misrecognition.

As he reads back on his life, Mr. Smith allows the audience to read back on the characters that precede him within the history of the play. Though characters such as Mona, Chona, and the Seers are less able than Mr. Smith to articulate their experience, the characters testify through inter-articulation. Inter-articulation by the characters—of what happens in their dreams and on television with what happens in their waking interactions—evolves in parallel with Parks's radical narrative. The narrative is a perceptual template which works against the templates that station her characters.

The play ends with Mr. Smith answering questions about evolution from his son, Duffy. Duffy is confused by his father's reference to the family as turtles, an allusion to the long wait for the Distinction. Mr. Smith explains: "No, boy—Duffy—uh—Muffy, Buffy, no, we ain't even turtles. Huh. We'se slugs. Slugs" (71). Conceiving progress is about looking forward, but also about reading back. The evolutionary scale on which Mr. Smith reads back from turtles to slugs itself refers to a passage iterated twice during the "Third Kingdom" scenes (39, 55). In this passage, Shark-Seer dreams that a fish swallows him. He becomes the fish. The fish becomes a shark. The shark goes ashore and is given shoes. Parks guards against simple metaphorical correspondences by making ontology impossibly double, self-concealing. The dream evinces, not particular identity positions, but the dynamics of relational identity. In the paradigm of Shark-Seer's fish story, identity is made visible only after it has been swallowed.¹³ Endowed with shoes—new possessions with which to traverse a new culture—the swallowed splits into "uh third Self made by thuh space in between" (39). Since nature and ideology both abhor a vacuum, the "space in between" is bound to be filled, to become an interstice in which a new identity is built. What Shark-Seer faces is a challenge similar to that which Parks sets before her audience: the challenge of building meaning in the crevices within temporal and spatial logic; the crevices, that is, between reading in one direction (conceived of as forward) and reading in an opposite direction (conceived of as back). The play challenges its audience to read multidirectionally.

Meeting that challenge depends on retrieving people (Buffy/Muffy; Mona/Chona; the Seers) from the systems (reflected in the names) that seem to swallow them. Parks prompts the audience to salvage substance from the forms that rise above it. Driven both by deconstructive and thetical impulses, she deploys "Rep & Rev" to put systems in their place, paving ground that can begin to accommodate subjects.

Notes

1. Suzan-Lori Parks, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, in The America Play and Other Works (New York, 1995), 58. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

2. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1989), xxii-xxiv.

3. Suzan-Lori Parks, excerpt from "Elements of Style," in The America Play and Other Works, 9-10.

4. Ibid., 10-11.

5. Suzan-Lori Parks, "Possession," in The America Play and Other Works, 5.

6.Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, by Suzan-Lori Parks, The Brooklyn Academy of Contemporary Arts Downtown, Brooklyn, NY, 26 September 1989, production detail.

7. Suzan-Lori Parks, "An Equation for Black People Onstage," in The America Play and Other Works, 19.

8. Ibid., paraphrasing Toni Morrison, "Black Matters." See Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 1-28.

9.Imperceptible Mutabilities, production detail. See note 6.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), 129.

13. In the 1989 BACA production, the slides accompanying Shark-Seer's dream were of bejewelled and well-dressed women, lending a concreteness to the social commentary.

Jennifer Johung (essay date March 2006)

SOURCE: Johung, Jennifer. "Figuring the ‘Spells’ / Spelling the Figures: Suzan-Lori Parks's ‘Scene of Love (?).’" Theatre Journal 58, no. 1 (March 2006): 39-52.

[In the essay below, Johung analyzes the "spells" that make up the "Scene of Love (?)" in Venus, commenting that the "infamous [scene] necessitates an adjustment in the way that readers and producers of Parks's work think about the intersections between the activities of writing and performing, as well as the interactions between the interpretation of the written marks on the page and the embodiment of the corporeal markings of performers onstage."]

a spell

An elongated and heightened (rest). Denoted by repetition of figures' names with no dialogue. Has a sort of architectural look.

This is a place where the figures experience their pure true simple state. While no "action" or "stage business" is necessary, directors should fill this moment as they best see fit.

The feeling: look at a daguerreotype; or: the planets are aligning and as they move we hear the music of their spheres. A spell is a place of great (unspoken) emotion. It's also a place for an emotional transition.¹

Scene 19: A Scene of Love (?)

The Venus

The Baron Docteur

The Venus

The Baron Docteur

The Venus

The Baron Docteur

The Venus

The Baron Docteur

The Venus²

Suzan-Lori Parks's one-page "Scene of Love (?)" from her 1996 play, Venus, dares readers, performers, and directors of printed drama to ask the question—what are we to do here? A name is printed on the page of a playscript: we expect it to be followed by a line of dialogue or a stage direction, but we only have the name until the next line where another name is printed, and so on. At first glance, Parks's short scene of "spells" refuses to impart guidelines on the passage of performance time or the determination of performance space and performing bodies. But what if different guidelines apply? And what if these elusive guidelines exist outside of the accepted conventions of dramatic writing and theatrical practice? Suppose we consider this formal shift from determinacy to indeterminacy as functioning to expand, rather than confound, the frameworks through which readers and practitioners make specific interpretative decisions. Then, we can also begin considering the processes by which the material specificity of performers within a performing space can be activated, paradoxically, by refusing the particularity of one formal framework for either readerly or directorial interpretation, in order to specify the alternate material condition of specifically raced bodies.

The ostensible illegibility of this kind of formal experimentation from an African American writer has been met with criticism; as Harry Elam and Alice Rayner point out, "[Parks's] craft has been vilified by some African Americans for being incomprehensible."³ Indeed, New York Times writer Monte Williams has disclosed that "some blacks have complained that Ms. Parks's work is too abstract to accurately capture the black experience."⁴ Although Parks has declared that "there is no single ‘Black Experience,’ there is no single ‘Black Aesthetic’ and there is no way to write or think or feel or dream or interpret or be interpreted"⁵ so as to resist the critical blind-sighting of her simultaneously experimental form and material specificity,⁶ certain aspects of her formal experimentation—however individualized in a singular character, narrative stand, or rhythmic structure—do seem to operate specifically alongside an African American cultural experience. In contrast to the indeterminate status and function of Parks's spells, the language she accords her characters is highly specific, so much so, in fact, that she disregards stage directions altogether, embedding every action and emotion in the very physical digestion and delivery of the words themselves. As she says in an interview:

The difference between "k" and "o.k." is not just what one might call black English versus standard English, for example. Or black English versus mid-Atlantic English … If you jump to that word faster, if you put your words together in a different order, you're feeling something differently, and it's just an attempt to try to be more specific so that I don't have to write in all these parenthetical things.⁷

Though Parks is quick to indicate that such writerly specificity is not solely an attention to the nuances in black vernacular speech, her attention to formal structure and the shift in dramatic interpretation that it entails are thus deeply intertwined. The implication here is that African American history and identity can be revised—or, more precisely, rewritten—through formal interventions.

However, while material specificity and formal experimentation may converge in Parks's dialogic constructions, the exceptionally unspecific spells and the illegibility of their function within a dramatic structure at large remain an interpretative conundrum. Thus far, Venus is Parks's only work to include an entire scene of spells. The scene is suspended in the middle of a play that re-members the historical figure of the South African "Hottentot Venus," Saartjie Baartman, who, because of her large buttocks and prominent genitalia, was put on show in nineteenth-century England; after her death, her body was dissected, studied, and exhibited in Paris.⁸ Venus is Parks's Baartman, and the Baron Docteur is the scientist who liberates her from the freak show, becomes her lover, and instigates the precisely measured investigations of her various body parts. Their love is elusively depicted on Parks's page through the unhinging of a direct link between specifically dramatic formal constructions and the specific material conditions of scenic action, in order to open up a potential space outside of dramatic conventions that may gesture more precisely to the processes of cultural and historical revision so urgent in Parks's work as a whole. The scene of spells is not merely unspecific, but usefully so. The negotiation between formal imprecision and the alternatively precise and revisionary material conditions of the raced body of Venus in love with the presumably white, European body of the Baron Docteur may be mapped onto the continual passage between unspecific textual notation and variously specific performance interpretations. Under these terms, Parks's infamous "Scene of Love (?)" necessitates an adjustment in the way that readers and producers of Parks's work think about the intersections between the activities of writing and per- forming, as well as the interactions between the interpretation of the written marks on the page and the embodiment of the corporeal markings of performers onstage.

Neither dialogue nor stage direction, Parks's new writerly activity literally marks an intervention into the process of interpreting textual marks, and their figurative relationship to embodied spatial and temporal determinations in performance. Following upon the advances in textual editing as motivated by the combinations of verbal and visual codes within Modernist and avant-garde poetry, painting, music, and performance, the interpretation of both the function and the operation of Parks's new marks must also be tied to such an expanded concept of textual notation.⁹ Beginning in the 1980s and led primarily by Jerome McGann, a revision of textual criticism and editing prompted the re-evaluation and subsequent revaluation of the material conditions of text.¹⁰ McGann argued that an examination of the bibliographical codes of elements such as typography, layout design, or weight of page, for example, alongside the linguistic codes of the words themselves, was required in order to acknowledge the entwinement of verbal and visual forms of expression. Building upon McGann and writing extensively on the visuality of poetic texts, Johanna Drucker has argued that the visual logic and schema of typography, structure, and formatting act as analogues to the production of vocal sound and/or silence, their materiality participating graphically in the production of meaning.¹¹

If we can consider the markings of a poetic text as matter that signifies textually as well as visually, then how can we consider those very same material codes with respect to a performance text? In his current work on print and performance, W. B. Worthen contends: "the material properties of a dramatic text—typography, layout, page and cover design—matter to the ways specific groups of readers (actors, directors, audiences, reviewers) understand its potentialities for performance, insert them into the conventional behaviours—the ‘performative regimes,’ so to speak—of theatre practice."¹² Calling attention to the disjuncture between the "slow reading" invoked by modern poetry to foreground the material surface of texts and the "speed reading" inferred by modern dramatic texts, Worthen offers examples within performance scripts of textual material that cannot be so easily or speedily translated into performance—moments and matter that force us to rethink the way we read and thus perform, direct, and interpret drama.¹³ Harold Pinter's pauses, Patrick Marber's emphases, Sarah Kane's punctuation, David Grieg's layout, and Suzan-Lori Parks's spells all support Worthen's claim that, in considering the print-form of drama, we may begin to identify an interplay between the page and the stage that informs the way we make decisions about performance. Isolating Parks's spells, on the page and onstage, as seemingly outside of any kind of theatrical practice, Worthen writes:

This materialization strikes me as something more like the challenge first offered to readers of Waiting for Godot, or perhaps to readers of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a material text that appears less to direct our performance than to claim a space outside contemporary conventions of reading, theatrical or otherwise.¹⁴

I agree that Parks's spells take us outside of not only the domains of the typically verbal performance script, but also of the theatre's determination of onstage presence and action, space and time. But I also want to suggest that these typographical challenges that operate within visual as well as verbal domains can direct an alternative means of embodying the page, albeit in an indirect manner whereby the elusiveness functions to question the very conventions that move page onto stage. At the very least, we can no longer read the spells as only linguistic determinants of speech, silence, or space, but must, in conjunction, acquire a visual articulation that expands interpretative potential by widening the conceptual frameworks that drive practical decision-making. Elizabeth Dyrud Lyman proposes that Parks is developing a new system of dramatic writing that "stands precisely at the intersection of editing and performance: the (re)distribution of dramatic information in the text, from purely verbal language to a fusion of verbal and visual languages."¹⁵ Tracing the decisions of print interpreters (editors and publishers) as they have affected and been affected by Parks's stage interpreters (directors and performers), Lyman argues that print must finally embrace the visual logic of dramatic texts as a serious participant in the production of meaning on the page as well as in the production onstage. Along with Worthen, Lyman significantly advances the field of inquiry into the activities of writing and performing toward a much-needed convergence of the materials and methods of print notation and performance. Such an expanded notion of writing, reading, and interpreting performance print-marks could indeed benefit from a pursuit of the visual dimensions implicated in this very different relationship between the mark and its determination of body, space, movement, and time.

Nonetheless, we still do not know what exactly to do with Parks's "Scene of Love (?)." And though we may recognize that Parks's marks operate visually as well as verbally, we still do not know how to articulate and interpret them on both levels simultaneously, or why the way we interpret them is significant to the kinds of interventions that Parks is making both within and outside of the theatre. Of course, the inexactitude of this suspension outside of dramatic conventions might precisely be the point. Directors are urged by Parks to fill these moments "as they best see fit." Yet, establishing a set of formal terms and concepts capable of operating simultaneously within and across verbal and visual frameworks would enable producers of Parks's scene of spells to negotiate the transition from the verbal-visual page to the space, time, and bodies of the stage. This usefully imprecise negotiation would afford interpreters an expanded vocabulary for articulating their performance decisions.

I. To Index the Figure

In defining a set of terms conceptualizing the movement back and forth between verbal and visual determinants, operating across both page and stage, I find Rosalind Krauss's notion of the index-as-imprint especially valuable. Writing about 1970s art installations and photographic experimentations in her two "Notes on the Index," Krauss undoes the stability of the index as a marker of physical presence and linear temporality. Conventionally, an index is a graphical measurement of presence that typically serves as a guiding principle that directs the observer's perception of natural phenomena.¹⁶ Krauss, however, reverses the terms of this convention, proposing the concept of a "presence fixed indexically," or the installation of presence by means of the index.¹⁷ Dennis Oppenheim's large-scale 1975 installation, Identity Stretch, elaborates upon her argument. Oppenheim transferred the image of his own thumbprint onto a large field outside of Buffalo, New York, by magnifying it one thousand times and fixing its traces in the ground through lines of asphalt. Through the distortion of Oppenheim's thumb and the translation of its print into grooves and mounds of asphalt that the viewer walked among, the installation could be seen and experienced as an index. Instead of the index acting as a marker of presence where the original thumbprint is a direct marker of the actual surface, Krauss suggests that the index is itself capable of instantiating presence by bringing an alternative version of Oppenheim's thumb into being. In Krauss's revised concept, the conventional indexical operation of "encoding reality" becomes one of "imprinting it."¹⁸ As an imprint, the index is both a displaced marking and a marker of displacement, whose referents are unfixed and constantly changing. Krauss explains that "[t]hough they are produced by a physical cause, the trace, the impression, the clue, are vestiges of that cause which is itself no longer present in the given sign."¹⁹ Therefore, the presence proposed by the index-as-imprint is paradoxically not present. Instead, the index is an operation of presence—an operation that works to imprint presence in its absence.

How, then, does considering Parks's spells as indices on the page help us to understand the function of her indeterminate stage marks? In her own definition of a spell, Parks points readers to the early photographic technique of daguerreotype. Popular in America from the 1840s through the 1860s, the technology was initially intertwined with the long-established art of portraiture, producing the first exact images of people.²⁰ This very exactitude, however, is precisely what photography destabilizes by and through the operation of the index. Roland Barthes, from whom Krauss draws, defines the photographic image as a "message without a code." Through the activities of framing, reduction, flattening, and distorting, the photograph no longer remains in direct relation to the object, person, or scene that once existed before the lens of the camera. In his essay "Rhetoric of the Image," Barthes associates this "loss of equivalence" with "a statement of quasi-identity."²¹ The photographic image then becomes an indexical imprint of the subject's absent presence, simultaneously presupposing and reinstating identity.

As a mark of simultaneous pre- and postpresence, the photographic image as index, through Krauss's reinterpretation, operates in parallel to Parks's own process of simultaneously notating the page and the stage, and perhaps more importantly to her development of an indexical concept of quasi-identity. In order to mark subjecthood indexically, Parks writes the names of what she calls stage "figures"—designated as such because they are absent in normative historical narratives but made present through the very act of Parks's imprinting.²² Her indexical imprinting of these figures is deeply engaged with the reconstruction of African and African American identity through a history of diaspora. As defined by cultural theorist Paul Gilroy,

[d]iaspora identifies a relational network, characteristically produced by forced dispersal and reluctant scattering. It is not just a word of movement, though purposive desperate movement is integral to it. Push factors, like war, famine, enslavement, ethnic cleansing, conquest and political repression are a dominant influence.²³

Through this physical and psychic displacement, the linearity of the past is ruptured, as people, places, and cultural systems are lost, forgotten, and reinvented outside the borders of any one nation. Parks herself claims that she writes her figures from a "fabricated absence" that she imagines as "the story that you're told goes, ‘once upon a time you weren't here.’"²⁴ This narrative opening that Parks parodies must be reconstructed out of the absence of a unified past, instead charting a story that must somehow begin from nothing. Founded without a beginning, the fabricated absence that Parks invokes becomes produced as well as productive, continually reconstituting itself into a presence.

If this notion of presence reimagined in the face of absence can only be a figure of presence in the light of these revisions of diasporic identity as displacement, what does it mean that Parks's spells determine, in her words, "a place where the figures experience their pure true simple state"?²⁵ Taking Parks's statement in conjunction with Krauss's model of the index, I propose that the relationship of the figure to her status as subject is indexical. As a figure in Parks's play, Venus is an indexical imprint of the historically real nineteenth-century Saartjie Baartman. Venus's subjecthood is a figuration that is formally displaced through the imprint of her name on the page—an imprint that, as in Krauss's reworking, instantiates her presence as a figurative presence that must then approach subjecthood by way of a relational construct between subject, figure, and name. Indeed, passing towards and away from subjectivity through the marking of more than one name, more than one time, Parks's figures can only experience their pure true simple state in repetitive alternation with another figure's name, as in the "Scene of Love (?)" between the Venus and the Baron Docteur.

In Irma Mayorga and Shannon Steen's November 1998 production of Venus at Stanford University, the relational construction of subjectivity that occurs in the spells was heightened by the performers' concentrated exchange of looks. In the "Scene of Love (?)" as in many of the other scenes in which she is put on show or otherwise watched, Venus was placed on an elevated and rotating platform. A birdcage-like enclosure came down from the ceiling, imprisoning her, while the Baron Docteur circled around, moving closer and then stepping further away. At all times, as each circled past the other, eye contact was maintained.²⁶ As Parks herself admits, "there's a lot of watching in Venus. "²⁷ About an African woman who was put on show for crowds of white spectators both in her life and after her death, the play is, in Elam and Rayner's words, "a show about show business and theatricality."²⁸ In their essay charting the play's negotiation between narrative and spectacle, Elam and Rayner also turn their attention to the exchange of looks between performers that in turn makes evident the exchange of looks between spectators and performers. For Elam and Rayner, Parks recuperates the look as a pose: in doing so, she opens up a site of resistance in the face of the re-inscription of an oppressive and degrading spectatorial gaze. Extending Craig Owens's summary of Homi Bhabha's and Dick Hebdige's concepts of "posing," Elam and Rayner write:

The pose is an act that paradoxically accepts and refracts the gaze of the spectator…. It arrests the line of sight and transfixes the one who is looking…. This return of the spectator's gaze, in other words, both refuses the desire of that gaze and mirrors back the absence of the object of the spectator's gaze, as if to say that "it is not me (other) you are looking at; whatever you see is your own absence." And in this sense, the pose is, paradoxically, the "representation of the representation."²⁹

In this deflection of the look by the one-looked-at, the presence of the looker is instantiated through and by the presence of the other that comes back to the looker as an absence. The simultaneous instantiation of the displaced presence of the looker and the figurative presence of the one-looked-at—a process I call an indexical presencing—is dependent on the relational nature of Parks's "pure true simple state."

A spell's pure, true, and simple state can also be achieved by turning this repetitive alternation inwards, which Parks notates as the repetition of only one figure's name. For example, in a sequence that takes place before the Chorus of the Spectators approaches, looks at, and attempts to touch Venus, Parks inserts a spell for Venus alone. Thus preempting the look of the spectators, Venus poses and looks at herself, her own figurative presence always already established. In Elam and Rayner's terms, she represents her own representation, to be further indexed by the looks of the spectators.

The Venus

The Venus

The Venus

The Venus

The Chorusof the Spectators

Lookie-Lookie-Lookie-Lookie

Hubba-Hubba-Hubba-Hubba

Lookie-Lookie-Lookie-Lookie

Hubba-Hubba-Hubba-Hubba³⁰

In both this moment and in the "Scene of Love (?)," the spells' imprint of subjecthood is relational; it is an imprint that must exist because of and through either the boundaries of other figures or other figurations of the same figure. We can then qualify Parks's statement, since this pure true simple state is only possible in a complex moment of inter-relationships between Parks's re-membering of the nineteenth-century figure, the figure of the printed name on the page, and the figurative subjecthood embodied on the stage. Functioning as an index of historical presence as well as of subjecthood, and operating through the imprint of a name, Parks's spells mark out a concept of figurative subjectivity.

II. To Write the Performing Body

In considering this revision of presence through, by, and in the face of absence, we must also recognize that Parks's imprint is primarily a product and process of writing. I activate writing here in the Barthesian sense of "writing and not the written."³¹ As neither speech nor transcription, writing negotiates the return of the body as neither "too present" nor "too absent."³² Turning to Jacques Derrida's further examination of the longstanding binary between speech and writing that he, too, dismantles through the work of writing, I want to remain committed to Barthes's concept of the body returning as both present and absent—indexically, as it were—through the operation of writing. In order to examine why the writerly form of the spells is significant to Parks's reimagining of figurative presence, Derrida's notion of the "supplement," in supporting Krauss's focus on the visual image, extends the terminology applicable to the operation of indexicality that I have been tracing in the relationship between Parks's textual marks and their embodied status, and between the figurative presence of names and bodies.

For Derrida, writing is "the greatest sacrifice aiming at the greatest symbolic reappropriation of presence."³³ Writing is necessary to remake the absence of speech into presence; it must be added to speech to remake the failure of speech's presence into a writerly presence founded on absence. Because it is additive, writing is supplementary. It stands, as Derrida says, "in-the-place-of,"³⁴ and as such it is a substitutive presence, filling a void. But in doing so, writing also must define the void, calling attention to it as the absence of presence that marks the presence of writing. As a material mark, writing "accumulates presence," but it does so by marking the continual negotiation between presence and absence.³⁵ And because writing enacts the operation through which presence is resurrected through absence, writing can also enact an operation through which alternate, abandoned, or ruptured histories are reconfigured from the location of the present.

In Richard Foreman's 1996 production of Venus at Yale Repertory Theatre and the Public Theater in New York, writing materially framed the stage space. Describing the scenography in the New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that the walls of the stage were "emblazoned with chains of words."³⁶ These lines of texts, according to Elam and Rayner's reading of the production, called attention to the fact that Parks's reinstantiation of Saartjie Baartman must always be trapped in the words of her historical past, a story that quite literally "shaped the stage in words."³⁷ By spatializing the entire performance within a framework of writing, the Foreman production conceptualized Parks's commitment to her own activity of writing as intervening decisively in the reconstruction of displaced history. Parks explains: "History is not ‘was,’ history is ‘is.’ It's present, so if you believe that history is in the present, you can also believe that the present is in the past … so you can fill in the blanks. You can do it now by inserting yourself into the present. You can do it for back then, too."³⁸ The collapsing of past with present, of absence with presence, can therefore productively activate the void of the absent past. Addressing the indeterminacy at the heart of Parks's experimentation, this kind of conceptual collapsing is at work in the formal structure of her writerly marks—a structure that continuously determines and then dismantles the imprint and embodiment of names and figures along the lines of a metonymic formation. As a discursive construction, metonymy enables the incommensurable nature of one thing to stand in for, or over, a completely different other thing. Upholding the boundaries of two defined entities in the face of their collision, metonymic operations can reconfigure the way we dismantle binary constructions through displacement rather than conflation. Parks herself uses the activity of writing and the indexical imprint of the writerly mark as impetuses for various acts of dismantling: breaking up the linear succession between the historical past and the historical present; breaking down the distinction between the absence of historical origin and the presence of individual subjecthood; breaking through the absence of speech with the presence of the material mark; and breaking in the mark of a figure's name with the embodied figure.

In their employment of naming as a discursive as well as a corporeal imprint, Parks's spells also metonymically mark a continual passage back and forth between the page and the stage. The spells are, thus, an index on the page and of the stage. They do not, however, exist between the page and the stage, but are, in my mind, both the page and the stage. The spells reimagine textual markings as simultaneously pre- and postperformance, as both incomplete and complete, empty and full, absent and present, semantic and asemantic, material and immaterial, writerly and corporeal, since—to keep Barthes in the front of our minds again—writing marks the indexical return of the body. For performance theorist Peggy Phelan, "in moving from the grammar of words to the grammar of bodies, one moves from the realm of metaphor to the realm of metonymy."³⁹ Phelan's notion that bodies too have a grammar which functions metonymically contributes significantly to how we understand the indeterminate status of Parks's spells as both writing and performance. Using the operation of metonymy to draw attention to the displacement between the performing body and its subjectivity, Phelan writes: "Performance uses the performer's body to pose a question about the inability to secure the relation between subjectivity and the body per se; performance uses the body to frame the lack of Being promised by and through the body—that which cannot appear without a supplement."⁴⁰ For Phelan, the body in performance is metonymic of presence: it always stands in for the subjectivity of a character or of the performer that is never fully present within itself—a subjectivity that must be made visible or readable through the body as supplement.

In Foreman's production, the actress playing Venus, Adina Porter, was costumed in a bodysuit with artificially padded, enormous, and bare buttocks. In their reading of this negotiation between the constructed body of Venus and Porter's own body, Elam and Rayner contend that the padding did not hide but rather called attention to the actress's body parts that were "not outside but literally inside the contested display of the body."⁴¹ The black body as the object of the desiring gaze was materially shown to be an imaginary construction, since the padding covered over the actress's own buttocks, which in turn had to be read from within the supplemental ones. Thus embedded in the choice of costume design is a way to conceptualize the extension of Derrida's operation of writing to encompass the writing of performing bodies. Since the body of Parks's reinstantiated Venus costumed in a padded bodysuit framed Porter's lack of a huge posterior as present, foregrounding the presence of absence, her artificial body was therefore supplemental because it continuously placed and displaced this absence as presence.

While the absent presence of a black bottom flickered between the actress's real one and the artificially constructed one, a similar move may also occur more generally across Parks's writerly marks and the bodies they direct. In Parks's spells, the writing of the figure's name supplements—placing and displacing—the figure's body; the body in turn supplements the writing. This two-way supplemental relationship occurs simultaneously, so that writing and body index one another. The spells, then, write out the names of the figures in order to question the direct, unified relationship between the presence of the writerly mark and the presence of the performer's body, and between historical presence and the presence of individual subjecthood—relationships that Parks revises as indexical. Performers must indexically negotiate the embodiment of these figures, their own bodies becoming figurations that can never fully assume subjectivity because of their very definition as figures. As such, the spells initiate a constant negotiation back and forth—a flickering between the absent subjectivity of the historical figure and the present subjectivity of the figure in Parks's play, and between the absent subjectivity inherent in figurative presence and the material presence of the body of the performer.⁴²

III. From Imprecision to Improvisation

The continual, indexical, and supplemental passage between words and bodies, text and performance, affords an endless set of options for directors to practically experiment with Parks's elusive demarcations "as they best see fit." Parks says: "I think I provide the map … And what I try to do is say there are 10 roads, 20, 50 roads—take one. I get a kick out of just seeing what people do. I think that the playwright provides the map. But I think a bad play only has a one-way road … that's not a map."⁴³ But in order to recognize any of these various maps, practitioners must first extend the terms through which they might be accustomed to approaching a performance text. Although the spells may seem dramatically unspecific, suspended as they are outside of the accepted conventions of dramatic writing, their imprecision nonetheless charts an alternately specific model of materiality instantiated within and through absence. Yet the expansion of a verbal-visual vocabulary applicable to a dramatic practice that also embraces the particularities of absent histories and subjects also demands an alternative means of accessing the specific spatial and temporal vocabularies implicated in this conceptualization of imprecision.

As Parks's spells require a new process of interpretation, they also chart a different kind of spatial and temporal understanding between notation and performance, offering the possibility of reinvention to each new performing body within the very marks that notate each performance. Director Liz Diamond, who collaborated with Parks on her earlier plays Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and The America Play, says that rehearsals allow her and her performers to collectively discover what to do with Parks's "dynamics." "And you can't do that," she explains, "you can't even do that reading out loud—you can only do that when everybody is up on their feet and their bodies are moving in space and you've got somebody 15 feet away from somebody else."⁴⁴ Rehearsals provide a space and a time for improvisation, for working on one's feet, for trying new things out and taking new things on, with Parks's spells reorienting the spatial and temporal starting points.

This reorientation of space and time, as activated through a shift from imprecision to improvisation, relies both formally and conceptually on the complex passage already identified in musical notations and their embodied instantiations in performance. In her article on Venus, Lyman cites the Virginia Live Arts production, in which director John Gibson interpreted Parks's spells as avant-garde musical notation, the space on the page equaling time in performance. "In other words," Lyman explains, "in Gibson's production an equal amount of time was devoted to ‘A Scene of Love (?)’ (in which there is no dialogue), as to a page from the Docteur's intermission speech (containing 313 words)."⁴⁵ As other scholars have also pointed out, musical structures—most prominently, the structures inherent in jazz—have deeply influenced Parks's writing, as even her foundational dramatic structure of "Rep and Rev" is a concept integral to jazz whereby a musical phrase is repeated and revised slightly each time.⁴⁶ While notational transcriptions are never primary documents of jazz performances because the jazz score is rarely the final authority, the structured openness of what does exist as jazz's notational and/or embodied demarcations provides a means to frame the openness afforded to producers of Parks's spells by conceptualizing indeterminacy as a productive and paradoxically specific imprecision.

Jazz composer George Russell has articulated a seemingly paradoxical theory of jazz improvisation, one that theorizes the unframing of conventional music theory within the framework of specific, improvisatory performances, thus pointing us toward certain spatial and temporal practicalities with regards to Parks's spells. According to Russell, his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation organizes tonal resources from which the musician may draw upon to create his improvised lines, "like an artist's palette: the paints and colors, in the form of scales and/or intervallic motives, waiting to be blended by the improviser."⁴⁷ The Chromatic Concept is not a system; there are no rules. Rather, it provides a structural understanding of the possibilities embedded in any musical moment. "You are free to do anything," Russell allows, "for you can resolve the most far-out melody since you always know where home is."⁴⁸ Home is, for Russell, the chromatic scale of "polymodal" tones made possible in the vertical spread of a chord, or the series of notes marked one on top of the other and sounded at the same time, each note implying another new scale of tones and thus possible horizontal or temporal progression. Although relying on a series of complex musical examples to open up new avenues for improvisation through the potential use of more than one tonal scale, Russell's notion of polymodality nonetheless provides a practical framework for reorienting the spatial and temporal contingencies that confound Parks's interpreters. If we can imagine the names of a spell as musical notes, then we can conceptualize the space of spell as a vertical spread or chord—with all names/notes sounded together—gesturing toward a horizontal progression through time—with one name/note sounded after another. Russell's polymodal possibilities for improvisatory interpretation are housed simultaneously in each name/note and in the intervals between them. Applying Russell's concept to Parks and under the terms that I have been proposing, the possibilities for improvisation can be housed in our understanding of the indexical writerly imprint of one name and its spatiotemporal relation to other names. In Russell's words, we are free to do what we want if we can locate our decisions in reference to this kind of conceptual home.

Directors and actors ultimately do have to make specific decisions. And whether they involve rotating platforms and cages, padded costumes and lines of text, or slow passages of time, these decisions temporarily embody Parks's notation according to specific yet atypically dramatic codes elaborated within each performance. As implied by Russell's concept, improvisation does not exist outside of codification, but is bound to the performer's negotiation of potentiality embedded within the codes—a negotiation that pries open the possibilities afforded by the notational marks and establishes the performer's own bodily insertion into the space and time of those marks. Parks's process of opening up marks and establishing the frameworks for their embodiment is driven by the material particularities of her conceptual re-imagining of dramatic practice. Flickering back and forth from the imprecise page to the precise stage, her spells momentarily and conditionally situate an embodied subjectivity that is figured (written, notated, imprinted) through repetitive and alternating naming on the page, and is then figured (embodied) by the performer in relation to the writerly naming of other figures (would-be characters) that, in turn, contingently figure (determine) the bodies of other performers.

So when the Venus is approached by the Baron Docteur for the first time, and their love-at-first-sight is scripted as an entire page of spells, Suzan-Lori Parks's "Scene of Love (?)" demands our attention—not only because, as readers, directors, and performers, we are not so sure what to do, but also because we are beginning to recognize the very material concepts effected in Parks's specifically unspecific writerly marks, and to understand that any practical decision should only be a momentary specification in order to invert the spells' suspension outside of dramatic conventions as a suspension contingently embedded within dramatic reinvention. What is it that, in her words, "best fits" in this scene? I think she gives us as good an answer as we will ever get: that we can do what we think fits. A spell, for Parks, is a look, a place, a state, a moment, and a feeling. We can expand what we mean by these various possibilities and thus expand what we think fits, if we come to acknowledge both the notational and the notional possibilities invested within such inexactitude.

Notes

1. Suzan-Lori Parks, "Elements of Style," The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 16-17.

2. Parks, Venus (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997), 80.

3. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Alice Rayner, "Body Parts: Between Story and Spectacle in Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks," in Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater, ed. Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 275.

4. Monte Williams, "From a Planet Closer to the Sun," New York Times, 17 April 1996, C1, 14.

5. Parks, "An Equation for Black People Onstage," in The America Play and Other Works, 21.

6. For example, in a 1995 interview with Parks, Steven Drukman suggests that "critics are resistant to seeing you [Parks] as a formally innovative writer, a theoretical writer. You always have to be writing about, as you just said, ‘black on black violence,’ or something like that … I'm not quite sure why that is, what this resistance is of critics to seeing you as a formalist, or as formally experimental." See, Drukman, "Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond: Doo-a-Diddly-Dit-Dit," TDR [The Drama Review] 39, no. 3 (1995): 61. Elizabeth Dyrud Lyman quotes Parks in 1990: "Why doesn't anyone ever ask me about form?" See, Lyman, "The Page Refigured: The Verbal and Visual Language of Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus," Performance Research 7, no. 1 (March 2002): 90.

7. Parks, quoted in Shelby Jiggetts, "Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks," Callaloo 19 (Spring 1996): 311.

8. For historical details, see Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 223-61. At the request of president Nelson Mandela, Baartman's remains were returned from France to South Africa and buried near her birthplace in 2002.

9. Early twentieth-century experiments included figured verse, orchestral scoring, painted calligraphy, typographical experiments, and collage by such artists/writers as Guillaume Apollinaire, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and the Dadaists. Later twentieth-century experiments included the inscription of the performance process within the text, score, or poem by Jackson MacLow, John Cage, Charles Olson, and David Antin.

10. See Jerome McGann, Black Riders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992); and The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

11. See Johanna Drucker, "Visual Performance of the Poetic Text," in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 131-61.

12. W. B. Worthen, "The Imprint of Performance," in Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, vol. 1, ed. Worthen and Peter Holland (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 214.

13. Ibid., 216.

14. Ibid., 229.

15. Lyman, "Page," 90.

16. Krauss gives the example of weathervanes that register the wind, coding its direction through the index of their arrows.

17. Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 1," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 209.

18. Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 2," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde, 216.

19. Ibid., 217.

20. See Floyd and Marion Rinhart, American Daguerreiean Art (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1967); and The American Daguerreotype (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981).

21. Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 36.

22. Parks, "Elements," 16.

23. Paul Gilroy, "Diaspora and the Detours of Identity," in Identity and Difference, ed. Kathryn Woodward (London: Sage, 1997), 318.

24. Drukman, "Parks and Diamond," 67.

25. Parks, "Elements," 16.

26. Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus, dir. Irma Mayorga and Shannon Steen, Stanford University, November 1998. In a recent conversation, Steen told me that, in their production, the spells were based on the look between characters.

27. Parks, quoted in Jiggetts, "Interview," 313.

28. Elam and Rayner, "Body Parts," 268.

29. Ibid., 278-79.

30. Parks, Venus, 145.

31. Roland Barthes, "From Speech to Writing," in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 6.

32. Ibid., 7.

33. Jacques Derrida, "‘L… That Dangerous Supplement’ …," in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 142-43.

34. Ibid., 145.

35. Ibid., 144.

36. Ben Brantley, "Of an Erotic Freak Show and the Lesson Therein," New York Times, 3 May 1996, C3, 1.

37. Elam and Rayner, "Body Parts," 273.

38. Parks, quoted in Jiggetts, "Interview," 316.

39. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 150.

40. Ibid., 150-51.

41. Elam and Rayner, "Body Parts," 272.

42. In using the term "flickering," I am invoking the notion of alternation as well as the sudden slippage through which the "being there" of subjectivity becomes and is instantiated through its "not-being-there," so that the presence of subjectivity is only momentary, fleeting, and constructed in alternation with its absence. N. Katherine Hayles writes about the "flickering signifiers" that make up the visual display of text on computer screens, so that the displacement of presence by the pattern of codes creates the fiction of presence. It seems to me that virtual presence—constituted through flickering signifiers that are, according to Hayles, "characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuation, and dispersion" (30)—might be another way to consider Parks's spells. In the realm of virtual reality, Hayles substitutes the term "pattern" for presence and the term "randomness" for absence. See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

43. Parks, quoted in Jiggetts, "Interview," 312.

44. Liz Diamond, quoted in Drukman, "Parks and Diamond," 70.

45. Lyman, "Page," 97.

46. See, for example, Drukman, "Parks and Diamond," or Louise Bernard, "The Musicality of Language: Redefining History in Suzan-Lori Parks's ‘The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,’" African American Review 31 (Winter 1997): 690.

47. George Russell, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation (New York: Concept Publishing, 1959), 1.

48. Ibid., 27.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Als, Hilton. "The Show-Woman: Profiles." New Yorker 82, no. 35 (30 October 2006): 74-81.

Anecdotal account of Parks's work as a playwright, touching on such topics as family influences, professional associations, thematic concerns, and writing style.

Foster, Verna A. "Nurturing and Murderous Mothers in Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood and F———A." American Drama 16, no. 1 (winter 2007): 75-89.

A psychosocial examination of the opposing feelings of love and rage experienced by the mothers in In the Blood and F———A, comparing these individuals with the maternal figures in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Toni Morrison's Beloved, and with the mythological sorceress Medea.

"For the First Time, the Drama Pulitzer Goes to a Black Woman." Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 36 (summer 2002): 60.

Contains an announcement of Parks's receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for drama; also includes a brief synopsis of Parks's life.

Young, Jean. "The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus." African American Review 31, no. 4 (winter 1997) 699-708.

Argues against Parks's contention in Venus that the main character, Saartjie Baartman, was a ready and willing participant in her own exploitation.

Additional coverage of Parks's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 55; Contemporary American Dramatists; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 201; Contemporary Dramatists, Eds. 5, 6; Contemporary Women Dramatists; Drama Criticism, Vol. 23; Drama for Students, Vol. 22; Literature Resource Center; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4.