Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play a day during the pandemic. The result is a mixture of song and mini-dramatizations that return recent history to life.
, and should be rewarded at this year’s Tonys, including for its stars Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen).The production speeds through the year, reminding us how concentrated and insane the news cycle was, and the effect of living through that with one’s own life in sudden upheaval. We briefly meet the friends and loved ones Parks lost, as well as how she and her family carried on with a new normal.
All the time, her own husband’s COVID-related illness worsens, while an adult actor, Leland Fowler, plays their son—wanting attention, wanting space, wanting them to be around when they are not. We see Parks go back to work on a TV set, where the “six feet” rule is regimentally imposed. All through the events that are personal to her, and the ones well-known to us through the TV news, there is the resonant sense of isolation that the pandemic introduced—a sense of fracture that still lingers.
Parks is also a commanding performer, whose love of music, wit, intelligence, and writerly foibles are all folded up in the show. We see her fighting with her muse, and wondering what the point of writing this show is. Is writing adequate to the task of encapsulating anything? The show is as much a self-interrogation of writing and the writer as it is the pandemic; given what the show covers, Parks also makes clear who and what it does not .
Ultimately, Parks proposes that the crafting of the play, the fact we are here watching it, is a testament to art bringing people together. She knows how hard it may be to watch or even make sense of; it is still all too recent and too ongoing.is neither salve nor provocation, but a scrapbook very personal to Parks, yet recognizable to those leafing through the pages with her.
“I had this belief that theatre would save us. But it won’t. Not in the way I thought it would. But it does preserve us, somehow,” she says. That,
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