“Topdog/Underdog,” Suzan-Lori Parks’s tour de force, won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play last night. Revisit Hilton Als’s Profile of Parks, one of the founders of a wave of multilayered, historically aware, and linguistically complicated theatre:
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In addition to these written tributes, Parks had tacked up photographs of people she admires: Albert Einstein, William Faulkner, August Wilson. Of Wilson she said, “He never went to the theatre! And I asked him, ‘Brotha?’ And he says, ‘I didn’t grow up going to the theatre. I grew up reading books and listening to music, so going to the theatre wasn’t something that came naturally to me.’ And you can’t argue with August Wilson, because he makes such good sense.
The only character who struggles with Sergeant Smith’s representation of himself is his middle child, Muffy, who longs for a deeper emotional connection with her largely absent father. Shouting alternately at her mother, Mrs. Smith, and her sister, Buffy, Muffy proclaims, “He duhdn’t like me. Sergeant Smith dudhn’t like me Buffy. He only likes Mrs. Smith he only likes Buffy Smith he only likes his desk. He duduhn’t like Muffy. . . . If he really loved Muffy he’d say Muffy.
As a child, Parks loved the books her parents gave her , but she stopped aspiring to write after her high-school teacher in Maryland told her that she couldn’t be a writer because she couldn’t spell. “I grew up in a way and in a place where you just listened to your elders,” she told a college audience recently. “ ‘Ma’am,’ and all that. So it was, like, ‘O.K., Ma’am, I can’t be a writer because I can’t spell, because you’re the elder and you told me so.
On the advice of Alisa Solomon during that fateful subway ride, Parks sent her next play, “Imperceptible Mutabilities,” to Mac Wellman, who was the literary adviser of the Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association Downtown at the time. “He sort of flipped, and sent it to me,” Liz Diamond said. “And I sort of flipped. And I met Suzan-Lori near Lincoln Center, and we talked and talked. I wanted it to be a trinity, not a play in four acts.
In 1991, Parks became an associate artist at the Yale School of Drama. It was during that time that she began to conceive her next play, “Venus,” which was based, in part, on the life and legend of Saartjie Baartman, an African woman who, early in the nineteenth century, scandalized British and European spectators by flashing her pronounced derrière in various sideshows. “Venus” was the apotheosis of the themes that Parks explored in what she now calls her “B.P.
Ever since the mid-sixties—when Amiri Baraka, a.k.a. LeRoi Jones, had turned his back on the white downtown theatre community where he had made his name, in order to found the heavily politicized anti-white Black Arts Repertory Theatre, in Harlem, and then Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey—much of black theatre had seemed inaccessible to white audiences. But Parks was different.
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