REMARKS
ON PARKS:
A Symposium on the Work of Suzan-Lori Parks
Part Two: Directors
[The following is an edited transcript
of a symposium held at Hunter College on April 30, 2004, organized
and moderated by Jonathan Kalb. This second of two panels featured
presentations by Richard Foreman, Liz Diamond, Leah C. Gardiner,
and Bill Walters, plus a discussion period with the audience.
It was preceded by a critics-and-scholars panel, previously posted.
The editor again extends warm thanks both to the participants,
for making the symposium such a substantial event, and to Leigh
Ronnow, Hunter alumna extraordinaire, for accomplishing the daunting
task of transcribing the proceedings.]
Jonathan Kalb:
Thank you for coming back. This is our second panel on Suzan-Lori
Parks and we have with us this time a distinguished group of directors
who have wrestled with all problems, challenges and joys of doing
Suzan-Lori Parks’s work. I’m going to introduce them
in the order in which I’ve asked them to speak and then,
as in the earlier panel, we’ll open it up to a more general
discussion.
Richard Foreman has received a MacArthur Fellowship and been
awarded the PEN Master Dramatist Award, plus nine Obies and many
other prizes. He has designed and directed over seventy-five productions
at major theaters around the world, including over forty of his
own plays. I assume most of you have visited his Ontological-Hysteric
Theater down in St. Marks Church. Six collections of his plays
have been published, as well as many articles and a number of
books in different countries discussing his work. Richard directed
and designed the world premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus
at Yale Rep and the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater
in 1996.
Liz Diamond is resident director at Yale Repertory Theater and
Chair of the Directing Department at the Yale School of Drama.
Her productions at Yale include Fighting Words and Rice
Boy, both by the Canadian playwright Sunil Kuruvilla, Brecht’s
St. Joan of the Stockyards, and Seamus Heaney's The
Cure at Troy. Other productions of hers include Racine’s
Phaedra at American Repertory Theater, Euripides’s
The Trojan Women at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and
Of Mice and Men at Arena Stage. Next season she will
direct Strindberg’s Miss Julie at Yale Rep and
the world premiere of Octavio Solis’s Gibraltar
at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Liz began collaborating with Suzan-Lori
Parks in 1988 when Parks invited her to direct Imperceptible
Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom in a workshop production
at BACA Downtown in Brooklyn. She directed the world premiere
in BACA’s 1989 Fringe Festival and the show won three 1990
Obie Awards, for playwrighting, direction, and for Pamela Tyson’s
performance. In 1991, Liz directed Greeks, which was
Part Four of Imperceptible Mutabilities, at Manhattan
Theater Club’s Downtown/Uptown Festival, and she directed
the world premiere of Parks’s Betting on the Dust Commander
at the Working Theater in New York. In 1992 she directed the west-coast
premiere of Imperceptible Mutabilities at New City Theater
in Seattle and The Death of the Last Black in the Whole Entire
World at Yale Rep. In 1993 she worked with Parks on The
America Play, conducting readings at New Dramatists and a
workshop production at the Dallas Theater Center. In 1994 she
directed the world premiere of The America Play at Yale
Rep and The Public Theater in New York. Gail Grate as Lucy and
Michael Potts as Brazil received Obie Awards for their performances
in that show. You can see that Liz has been very involved in Suzan-Lori
Parks’s work.
Leah C. Gardiner’s New York directing credits include Kent,
CT at the Zipper Theater, The Mother of Modern Censorship,
and Immigrating Interludes at Tiny Mythic Theater for
Lincoln Center’s Director’s Lab. Her regional directing
includes A Streetcar Named Desire at The Pillsbury House
in Minneapolis, which was honored by the Minneapolis Star
Tribune as one of the top ten productions of the season.
She directed Spunk at the Oddfellows Playhouse in Middletown,
CT, and, most recently, the Philadelphia premiere of Suzan-Lori
Parks’s Topdog/Underdog at the Philadelphia Theater
Company. This premiere is what she’ll be talking about today.
Leah assisted George C. Wolfe on the New York premiere of Topdog/Underdog
and the Broadway production of On the Town. She has served
as Director in Residence at the Public Theater and was an individual
artist participant in the 2001 TCG Conference. She served as Resident
Director for New Dramatists in 2002-03 and was a participant in
the artistic leadership for The Women’s Project and Productions.
She’s a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the
Yale School of Drama. And I might add that she was one of Liz
Diamond’s students.
Bill Walters teaches acting and directing in the Theatre Department
at Hunter College. Bill previously taught at Yale, Tulane University
and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work as a director
and choreographer has been seen throughout the United States and
abroad, most recently in China. Bill is the director of the Hunter
Theater Department’s current production of Parks’s
Venus, and he’ll be talking to us about that.
Richard Foreman:
It’s been a long time since I worked on Venus.
I was originally interested in Suzan’s work, I don’t
how many years ago it was, but at a time when I had stopped going
to very much theater. Up to the time I was forty I went to see
everything. But then I couldn’t take it anymore. So I was
familiar with Suzan-Lori’s work by reputation, and they
sent me the script of Venus and as usual, I looked through
it very casually. I thought: “This looks interesting because
it says ‘Venus’ and there’s a line of dialogue
and then, with nothing else in between, ‘Venus,’ and
dialogue, ‘Venus,’ and dialogue, then just ‘Venus’
and nothing.” I thought that the texture, which is basically
what I respond to first in all writing, seemed provocative and
difficult and interesting. So I said, “Yeah, I’ll
do the play.” Then I thought, “God, how do you do
something like this?” So I went to the library and saw Liz’s
production on tape of The America Play, which I liked.
I thought was very interesting. Then, like I always do, without
paying too much careful attention to the play, I tried to get
a global feeling of what is going on.
Now, the first thing that always happens with me is I make a
set. The story of Venus seemed sort of antiquey. I looked
through a lot of books. I found a line drawing, an etching, in
a book I had of the history of magic shows in the West, and there
was something there from the 18th century, sort of a cage thing.
Apparently somebody was using secret microphones to make voices
come into that cage, but the cage and the people leaning into
the set seemed related to the way that I imagined this play when
I read it very casually. So I designed a set and made a model,
as I always do, and went to my first meeting with George C. Wolfe
. . . well, my second meeting. . . and made my first mistake.
I made a number of mistakes doing this show. George said to me,
“There’s a lot of green in that set. You can do what
you want but my experience has been that green sets never work.”
[laughter] I thought, “I sorta like it but I don’t
know--. I get to do exactly what I want in my own theater but
if George doesn’t like green, okay.” So it wasn’t
green. That was a minor change that I didn’t think was too
serious.
Now, it appeared self-evident that George had been working with
Suzan-Lori for a number of years in crafting this play. It seems
to me that this was perhaps the transitional play when, as people
have said today, Suzan-Lori was changing from being this wild,
experimental artist to being, for better or for worse, a more
commercially acceptable artist. It’s my understanding that
Venus was the transitional play because George was having
her rewrite it to make the play more palatable as a normal evening
in the theater for normal Public Theater audiences. As a result—and
I didn’t object to this—George thought there should
be a lot of cuts. And I didn’t disagree. Now, George was
not there. I mean, George came to like two rehearsals, but he
asked for cuts. And I felt, “Well, I’m doing this
play for them.” It was one of those situations when whenever
we were talking together, we were sort of in league against George,
who was the “commercial” producer. And then, when
he would come around, we would sort accept many of his ideas.
Suzan-Lori was of course friendly towards George, having worked
with him for two years, but I noticed that he was cutting a lot
of the more abstract material. Now whether that’s a mistake
or not a mistake, I’m not really prepared to say because
yes, it was difficult to make that material work, especially in
the way I had decided to do the production.
To me art is nerve, a question of having the courage to do what
you want to do. And I must admit: that’s why I don’t
particularly like working with living playwrights. (Or even smart
producers, and George is certainly smart). I’ve worked twice
in my life with living playwrights who were there at rehearsal,
with Arthur Kopit and Suzan-Lori Parks. And I liked them both
and we got along swell, but I must admit there’s a built-in
inhibition. When I’m doing my own play and we’re rehearsing,
I can say, “Oh my God, is that a stupid line. How are we
gonna deal with this stupid thing?” Now I would never say
that to another writer. I mean, Suzan-Lori might actually enjoy
me saying that. (I don’t know if Arthur would?) Nevertheless,
there’s this built-in hesitation and I think it influenced
my production somewhat in a bad way.
When I read the text originally with this stop-and-go kind of
structure, I thought somehow it needed lights on, lights off,
click, click, adjustment, lights on, lights off, to reflect the
very abstract nature of the play. I think I softened my initial
ideas dealing with that. So when George was cutting the more abstract
parts in my production, he was probably right in terms of what
he saw in the rehearsal studio. By the way, he wasn’t a
dictator. It wasn’t insistence. He just said, “I really
have problems with this, this, that, that.” And I was basically
a hired gun, out to please without sacrificing my vision too much.
I mean, there was nothing but my stuff on stage. It was still
my production. I certainly can’t deny that.
The only thing about the production, well there are two things
about the production that I was pissed off about. This play imagines
a world of English Colonial culture--represented by the Doctor
character, then re-reflected in scenes in which the “freaks”
put on little commentary "playlets" in the theatrical
style of the time. For me those scenes were a big challenge. You
have two worlds—how do they mesh without seeming too obvious
in their message? When we were still in New Haven--I thought we
could suggest the garbage (I use the word “garbage”
in quotes) out of which the English society believed it was “extracting”
the “freaks” they were putting on display in the side
show by putting a lot of crumpled up newspaper all over the stage
floor. Because the English world of the time was also a world
of “garbage.” And when George and Rosemary Tischler
(who was George’s assistant at the time—I think it
was really her idea that I do the play) saw the play remounted
in New York, with all this crumpled up newspaper on the floor—they
came to me and said, “Well, Richard, the string, I know
all that string in front of the stage, I know that’s your
thing. But the dirty newspaper all over the stage, I mean—why,
Richard? Why?” I explained, but they weren’t satisfied.
Maybe they thought it didn’t go with the Public Theater’s
neat image. So we got rid of that crumpled up newspaper. I think
it was an aesthetic mistake but not a major one. The more interesting
issue involved the very good actor playing the doctor. Adina,
who played the Venus Hottentot, was somebody who read for us and
in five minutes we all thought, “that’s her, that’s
it, she’s great.” And she was. Peter Francis James
is another fine actor and he read for something else and we really
liked him, and Suzan-Lori and I both thought-- “You know,
couldn’t he play the English Doctor?” Well, he was
black, but he was pale black, so we thought, what does it mean
if we cast a black man as the doctor? We talked to George about
it and said, “he’s the only actor we’ve seen
who can really cut it in this part.” So he played the doctor.
Now, I rehearsed the play for, I think, six weeks. And I had
Peter Francis James playing the doctor as a sort of bumbling,
shy guy, who was falling over things. There were a lot of ladders
on the set. He would trip on ladders. He had these little glasses,
and was crumpling paper nervously in his fists. After the New
Haven opening, George and Rosemary came to me and said, “Richard,
why are you doing that to Peter? He’s such a good actor
and you’re making him into this wormy little schlep.”
So my big mistake was bowing to their wishes, and changing Peter’s
performance. In New York Peter Francis James played it—a
very good performance—more as a distinguished English gentleman
of that period who was a serious man of medicine, a little disturbed
by his feelings for the Hottentot Venus but nevertheless a man
of culture and determination. In my original version, I identified
him with myself perhaps, this bumbling intellectual who does these
strange things. I think my original version served the play and
its strangeness much better. I thought there were many fine things
about the production but, as often happens in the theater, you
compromise and you negotiate. If I had to do it again today I
would try to have the courage to make it stranger than it was.
Maybe people thought it was strange, but I think it should have
been even stranger. That’s really all I can say.
Liz Diamond:
It’s an honor to be here among these wonderful colleagues
and to talk about a writer who remains my favorite living writer.
Working on Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays, as I look back on it,
was really the great theater training of my life. We came up together.
I’m ten years older than Suzan-Lori, but I was a classic
late bloomer who backed into admitting that I really wanted to
make theater and that I might have something worth other people
paying a few bucks to see. It took me a long time to own my voice
as an artist, and I was only beginning to when I met Suzan-Lori
in 1988.
I remember reading a wonderful conversation that was published
in the Village Voice between Richard Foreman and Elizabeth
LeCompte. They were arguing back and forth about theater and at
one point he said, “You know, when I go to the theater,
I like it when it’s like going to the gym. I want to go
to the gym, the gym of art.” I love that phrase because
I think that working with Suzan-Lori was for me an eight-year
gym for art. I learned so much about what theatricality is, what
theatrical poetry is, about what it means to embody poetry in
three and four dimensions, in space and time, about texture, the
texture of language and how that becomes visible and audible on
stage in an actor’s body. These were really joyous years
of shared learning and discovery for both of us. So I thought
I might talk about some of what I learned working with Suzan-Lori.
I think the first thing I learned with Suzan-Lori, was how to
read a play, which I kinda thought I already knew how to do. Perhaps
I did, but my first encounter with her work was in a sense my
first encounter with everything I didn’t know about how
to read a play. In 1988, Mac Wellman had set up a workshop for
new experimental writing at BACA Downtown at the urging of the
amazing and wonderful Greta Gunderson, BACA’s artistic director.
BACA Downtown was this crazy art gallery/performance space near
the Fulton Mall and I was working there as a director. Suzan-Lori
joined Mac’s new work project. She was twenty-five. Mac
read her play Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom,
gave it to Greta, and said, “You have to do this. This has
to be done.” And they talked about who should do it, and
it was my good fortune that they thought I might be a good match.
I read the play and I remember not knowing how to read it, not
really knowing what was going on. Lines like: “How dja get
through it? Mm not through it. Yer leg. Thuh guard. Lose weight.
Hhh. What should I do Chona should I jump should I jump or what?”
What was up? Only when we got together and Suzan-Lori read it
out loud in my kitchen did I see that I needed to just get very
simple. Simply say, “Okay, who’s talking? Get through
what? Where’s the leg? What kind of guard?” Now you’ve
probably learned in the course of this afternoon that one of the
great, pleasurable features of Suzan-Lori’s writing is that
it’s richly layered and loaded, fraught with word plays
and puns and jokes in which one word starts to ricochet and bounce
around and mean much more than it does on what you might call
the dog shit level of reality. But I found that by starting there
I could begin to direct her work. By saying, okay, here’s
a kid who is maybe half way out the window, has her leg stuck
in the window guard, has a problem, and her sister is talking
her back down from the jump with eggs, food, some nourishment.
By beginning there we began to create something concrete. Making
the abstract concrete is so much the problem of putting on theater,
then allowing it to become abstract again in the imagination of
the audience as they listen and hear this resonant language.
Early on, Suzan-Lori talked about how to cast the play and, as
Alisa described, you’ve got figures that move from one part
of Imperceptible Mutabilities to another. We had five
actors and we knew we wanted a white guy to play the Naturalist
and decided to cast him as Duffy in Greeks later on.
He plays several roles in the play which are conventionally white
characters, and then in the last play he appears again, as the
last son of the Smith family, this African-American military family.
Interestingly, this didn’t cause any consternation at BACA
Downtown, but it caused a near riot at Manhattan Theater Club
when we did it the next year. The audience was deeply troubled
at Manhattan Theater Club that Suzan-Lori had depicted a black
family’s only son—and the last child in the line—as
a white person. They felt fooled with, played with. They felt
troubled. They also felt, I think, obstructed in their understanding:
“What do you mean? What does this mean?” They were
vaguely threatened by it and didn’t know what to do with
it. All of which were understandable reactions. I don’t
think Suzan-Lori and I made it any easier with our response to
their consternation, which was to say “We just felt like
it.” We could have been more helpful. At one point when
I talked to her about it she said something very interesting,
which I found moving at the time and still do. She said she felt
that it made sense because he was the “dream child”
of this family—a statement that she declined to make at
Manhattan Theater Club because she had no confidence that they
would understand this. When I asked her what she meant she said:
a black family would dream of having a child that they wouldn’t
have to fear for, and you don’t have to fear for a white
boy. He’ll be okay. The thought that you might have a child
that you wouldn’t have to protect was critical in her exploration
of this play. In some ways the dream comes true, the assimilationist
dream of that play comes true in the end, which she sees as a
kind of tragicomic fact.
Suzan-Lori was clear from the start that she wanted to write
against the grain of mainstream American theater. She talked with
great enthusiasm about wanting to fight the “belch factor”
in the theater. She wanted to write plays that would be chewy
and a little bit hard to digest, that wouldn’t go down easy.
She was genuinely interested in that. And I loved partnering her
in that project. At the same time, neither of us saw these plays
as opaque, as perhaps some did at the time. And we worked hard
together to make them clear on their own dramatic and poetic terms.
For example, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom,
at first was a four-part play—with four equal parts. One
of the parts plainly did not belong. I told her it felt like a
one-act; its own play. She agreed and replaced it with a poem,
called “Third Kingdom” which she split in two and
put as a kind of thematic environment around the three larger
plays. Once she did this, the whole play worked. This poem provided,
if you will, a kind of watery bed, a poetic bed, on top of which
the rest of the play floated. The phrase "Third Kingdom"
refers to that watery limbo between Africa and America and the
poem was an elegy in which slaves on a slave ship described their
dreams and fretted about where they were going and where they
had come from and how deep the water was and what was swimming
there under the surface of the sea. So we put the show in the
container that was sort of oceanic.
We didn’t have a lot of money. With Imperceptible Mutabilities,
SLP put in $2000, I put in $2000, and BACA Downtown provided the
space. Everybody worked for free, and the actors donated their
performances. The man who created the photographs, Phil Perkins,
did it all for free. That’s how it happened. We painted
the floor together one night—this dark, dark, dark blue-black.
We created a sort of memorial arch under which Sergeant Smith
stood in the last piece. We brought kitchen chairs for the Smiths
in Greeks and a friend of ours built a giant mechanical
cockroach that rolled around and took pictures. When we worked
on our next big project, which was The Death of the Last Black
Man in the Whole Entire World, everything changed because
we suddenly had a budget. We had a longer run. We were casting
with a casting director and it was a whole new world. It was an
extremely hospitable world that opened up to us then. Yale Repertory
Theater invited Suzan-Lori to do The Death of the Last Black
Man, and she invited me to direct it. And there we got to
work with the set designer Ricardo Hernandez.
The Death of the Last Black Man is this gorgeous requiem
for the last black man in the whole entire world. And unlike Imperceptible
Mutabilities, which underwent a pretty massive change during
our work together, Black Man was virtually complete when
I got it. It was this masterpiece of theatrical theater. You have
a man named Black Man with Watermelon and his wife, Black Woman
with Fried Drumstick, and all these other figures: Yes and Greens
Black Eyed Peas Cornbread, And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger, Before
Columbus. When we first talked about the play I said, “Gee,
uh, what, who are these people?” And she said, “All
I can say is, all of them but Black Woman with Fried Drumstick
are dead, but some are deader than others.” And that was
my first clue as to what might be going on in the play—which
tells an extraordinary tale in which Black Woman sits on her porch
and her husband’s body and spirit come flying back to her.
He lands on the front porch with the electrocution cap still on
his head, having just been fried in the town square, and is distressed
because he’d like to die. His body is dead. He wants to
be laid to rest but he can’t be, and the problem in the
play is when and how will Black Man will lie down? When will he
be allowed to cross the river and be laid to rest? He won’t,
it seems, until Black Woman accepts his story, and writes it down—writes
it down and hides it under a rock, which is a refrain that’s
repeated over and over again by the least enfranchised figure
in the play, Yes and Greens Black Eyed Peas Cornbread, an illiterate
slave girl. This injunction is repeated across the play: “You
must write it down. You must write it down and hide it under a
rock.” It’s repeated until Black Woman finally hears
it, and she doesn’t hear it for pages and pages, until she’s
witnessed enough versions of Black Man’s death that she
can no longer deny his story. Then she promises to write it down.
And he can lie down and at the end of the play he’s laid
to rest.
We staged it as, in a sense, a high mass. Suzan-Lori is Roman
Catholic. I remember she said to me, “Whatever it is, it
isn’t Baptist and I don’t want it to be Baptist. Don’t
give me the eruptions of song and gestures.” She said, “It’s
cooler than that.” And she said, “I promise you, the
cast is gonna wanna go there. Don’t go there.” And
it was very interesting because the cast did want to go there.
Many of them were young African-American actors from black Baptist
backgrounds, and they were terribly resistant to this cool, cool
tone that Suzan-Lori wanted in the play. They finally embraced
it because I think they saw what she was after. The end of the
play is solemn, not ecstatic.
The America Play was a huge project for both of us and
it was the one that took us to the Public Theater from Yale Rep.
It was a wild ride and it involved huge debates about how to make
it possible for the audience to enter the world of this play.
I remember vividly, late-night sessions of notes with George Wolfe
in which he’d say, “Marge has got to understand this.”
The first time he said this, I remember looking at Suzan-Lori
and she looking at me—saying, “Who’s Marge?”—before
we realized that Marge was a kind of quintessential subscriber
that he wanted to have access to this world. I understood that,
and I wanted Marge to go to this gym. But I didn’t want
it not to be a gym. I wanted her to embrace going to the gym.
This was hard.
We had huge issues relating to the design of The America
Play. At Yale Rep, Ricardo Hernandez designed a beautiful
container for this show, which takes place in “The Great
Hole of History”: what a suggestive and beautiful phrase
from which to imagine a set! But the play also seems to take place
in a hall of wonders. And so Ricardo created a conflation of those
two images, a sort of mausoleum type space with white formica
walls reaching up to the ceiling, very rectilinear, very sterile,
shiny black coal on the floor. At the Public it just became the
black hole. We started chucking the black coal at the wall, obscuring
what we had created at Yale and going for the one metaphor rather
than the two or three or four. I continue to debate with myself
as to which world I prefer. I loved the strangeness of the former,
but I found the latter space really haunting and dark and more
psychologically disturbing.
Regarding some things that were said earlier about Venus
and Suzan-Lori: when we were talking about Venus as she
was working on it, one of the things I remember exciting me about
the play was its relationship to her own journey as an artist.
In Venus Suzan-Lori explored that scary moment when an
artist achieves, if you will, the apogee of her fame and celebrity,
the moment when she suddenly moves from being a subject to an
object. In a grotesque way, the objectification of the Venus occurs
at the very moment she is at the height of her fame in London.
This moment, when everybody knows her name, begins the tragedy
of her disintegration. I want to say that, despite Disney and
other would-be destroyers and dissectors of Suzan-Lori’s
body of work and soul, I’m not too worried about her. I
don’t think she’s going to suffer the same fate as
Saartjie Baartman. I think she’s tougher than that. I also
think she’s more conscious than Saartjie had the fortune
to be. She’s used her privilege, her fabulous education,
and her amazing poetic gift to undertake an ongoing exploration
of who she is. And it’s continuing in the novel, obviously.
I don’t think she apologizes for the more commercial work
she’s done, and I don’t know what she’s going
to do next. I want to think that something completely astonishing
is going to come out of this genuine happiness in her life, a
sense of place, a sense of recognition that she’s won from
the world. I hope it does.
Leah Gardiner:
Today, I am interested in providing you a visual representation
of how I chose to direct Topdog/Underdog. I have with
me slides of various aspects of the show in hopes of showing you
how I, as a director, took Suzan-Lori’s language to inform
my approach to the play. I was interested in the theatrics of
the piece. This defined a clear sensibility for the piece. As
you can see from the first slide, Hunter’s own Louisa Thompson,
our set designer, created a proscenium within the proscenium.
It was a clever way of enhancing the performance within a performance—very
much present in Suzan-Lori’s language.
In this next slide, Seth Gilliam, who played Lincoln, performed
sitting in a chair, and there was an exaggeration of his character
projected on the back wall. For me, this represented the idea
that, here we are with a black man who is attempting in many ways
to make himself larger than life and the only way in which, in
our society, he can do so is by making a whole lot of money or
by pretending. In this scene here, he’s pretending.
Moving on to clothes: the costume designer, Andre Harrington,
decided to use the layering effect by creating different odd costume
pieces. If you look at the Lincoln character by the street playing
three-card-monte, he has cuffs around his wrists which have been
cut off from a shirt, and he wore a dicky over that in place of
a jacket. The cuffs for us represented shackles, historical shackles
that slaves wore. For me they represent not just that but also
the huge number of incarcerated black men in the United States
today, whom Lincoln and Booth could very well join at any given
point in their lives. So once again, this was taking a naturalistic
thought and blowing it up in an attempt to react to Suzan-Lori’s
sensibility.
Then there was the sound. The final thing that, for me, set each
section of the play very much had to do with history, and with
different forms of the black community. I have a song that we
played at the very beginning of the show, that our composer made
and our sound designer overlaid with historical voices—from
slave narratives of women all the way through to the voices of
Shirley Chisolm and Angela Davis. We chose women particularly
in honor of Suzan-Lori. There were a few men, but we kept them
in the background. We wanted that effect: seeing these two black
men on the stage while hearing the voices of these black women.
So here’s the song [plays tape], and just imagine hearing
this over the sound of slave ships, old historical voices of women,
just a very rich mixture that turned into a much thicker, more
contemporary sound and set the tone for the production.
Finally, I want to read my director’s statement, which
will give you an idea of what Suzan-Lori means to me and what
this production meant to me: “Everything old is made new
again. Fashions return but with a different twist. Musical phraseologies
which seem new emerge from the history bank of sound. Slang words
from last week live in our culture for years. How often are we
reminded that the old really isn’t old, and that the new
is not always new? As in anything rooted in the past, Suzan-Lori
Parks takes her interpretation of what was and assigns a new voice
to it. In Topdog/Underdog, Lincoln and Booth are not
the historical characters as we know them. They are instead two
modern-day brothers who after several years of separation come
back together to revisit their past and redefine their present.
Their history dictates their future, making that which appears
old appear new. Like a jazz riff, Topdog/Underdog flows
like a con game both inside and outside our consciousness. We
swim in the river of the blues with a lot of stops and starts
along the way. Soul music allows us to go deeper into their humorous
sensibilities. Hip-hop guides our understanding of what these
men endure, living in a confined space placed against the backdrop
of urban America. We are presented with the culture of black life,
musical traditions influencing the presence, the language, the
sound and the rhythms of truth. We are participants, not merely
spectators, in a historical-theatrical storybook, one which unfolds
delicately but powerfully before our eyes. As with any epic drama,
Topdog asks us to face the successes and the failures
of our society. In its specifics, it presents boldly drawn characters
who represent the beauty and poetry of our country. We are asked
to celebrate life in its purest form through the eyes of these
two brothers, peeling away at a historical backdrop made anew.”
I’ll stop for the sake of time, but I did have some ideas
about the actors and the language. One person said during one
of our talk-backs in Philadelphia: “there’s no hip-hop
in this play!” And I had to stop and think, but there’s
a beautiful exchange between the brothers when they are shooting
the dozens—a term in the black community which plays on
language: Lincoln says, “Sure, sure yer sure?” And
the exchange is: “sure yer sure. Ya sure?” Booth says,
“I’m sure.” “Ya sure? Sure yer sure?”
And there’s the hip-hop, that rhythm—da duh, da duh
da duh, da duh, da duh da duh da duh—which has its origins
in bebop. That musical combination alone, in my opinion, takes
this play out of naturalism and moves it into much more of what
Suzan-Lori really represents, that is a non-linear, a more theatrical
approach to making plays.
Bill Walters:
Well, I’m going to be very brief because, when Jonathan
and I were first talking about this conference being organized
around the production, I was very excited but I actually asked
if I could be excused from appearing on the panel and just let
the work downstairs speak for itself. As the time for the conference
approached, though, I felt like I didn’t want to seem like
I was hiding and should at least make myself available for some
questions. I’ll say a couple of things about the experience
I’ve had in working on Venus and then after that,
let the work speak for itself.
I found very interesting what Professor Brustein was saying earlier
this afternoon, that there has been a shift in the type of directors
who have undertaken Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays. This is a
theme we’ve heard all day, but he made the point that so-called
avant-garde directors were interested in her earlier works and
more mainstream directors have been more interested in her later
works. I would enjoy situating myself in the former group. I enjoy
working with original texts, my own texts, adaptations, but in
the university setting where you usually pick a preexisting play,
I like picking plays that I can really push against and pull at
and tug and stretch really to their breaking point and sometimes
beyond—big plays, Shakespeare and other texts that can stand
up to that kind of pressure, or else plays that are open-ended
enough to leave you enough room to play. The last play I did with
a group of students was Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights
by Gertrude Stein which I think has more in common with Suzan-Lori
Parks’s earlier plays than with her later ones, since we’re
following that theme.
Venus has been said to be a kind of middle-ground, transitional
play. The experience I found in working on it—and I knew
this was going to happen, going into it—was that I actually
had a lot less to do than I usually do as a director. In many
ways she had already done the work that I usually try to do, which
is push and pull at something until it’s all twisted up
and bent around. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading
her works, and going to watch her works. I definitely feel a sort
of kinship with her artistically. So in looking at Venus
and starting to work on it I really felt more than ever that my
job as a director was to simply get out of the way and help the
thing stand on its own legs, which are very strong I think. I
don’t find it as open-ended as a lot of her earlier works,
and I would actually enjoy working on some of her earlier works
for that reason. I felt like I was there mostly to help it stand
on its own.
With that said, I’m already thinking—and we opened
only three days ago—of all the things I wish that I had
done and what I would do next time. Maybe I didn’t let it
be as crazy as it could have been either. Saying that I tried
to simplify it is not to say there wasn’t a lot of work
to be done. I think it’s actually a pretty difficult text
to approach. Luckily, I felt a connection to it, and the main
job was working with the design team to come up with a physical
space in which this could live and its themes could resonate and
its structure could take shape physically. Also, there was the
work with the actors. Actors, especially younger actors, generally
tend to try to make any kind of text feel natural, feel realistic.
So one of my jobs as a director was to keep them away from that—let
them flirt with it so it could seem like that if they needed it
to but then move away. So there was quite a lot of work to be
done. But I think, largely, it was kind of my job to stay out
of the way.
One of the things that really draws me to all of Parks’s
work is the connection she insists on between form and content,
which a number of people have mentioned today. She talks about
how in her work the container, the vessel, shapes what is being
put in it and vice versa, what she’s writing about dictates
the form that it takes. That’s part of what I’m speaking
about as a director. I usually like to mess with the structure
a little bit, and in her work she has already done that, and I
find that quite lovely and artistically exciting. One of the difficult
things in Venus in particular is the way she has twisted
it around and looped it back on itself. I think that can frustrate
or infuriate some viewers because, as has already been said, it
doesn’t come out as a victim play. And it doesn’t
necessarily come out as a straightforward issue play. We had some
really lovely discussions with the cast right from the beginning.
Especially since I was working with students, I really felt like
I had to address the topics and the themes of the play with them,
and of course, as you can imagine, we never reached any kind of
consensus whatsoever. And that’s exactly the point of the
work, as Suzan-Lori Parks says. She intends to raise questions
and questions and more questions, but she refuses to provide pat
answers. I have found it very rewarding to be walking down the
halls at Hunter over the last couple of months and hear the various
discussions coming out of the doors from various different classes
discussing this. Several people have asked me over the course
of this semester why I chose this play. And did I really feel
like I had a right to choose this play? I think I’ll leave
that to the judgment of others, but I’ve had a wonderful
time working on it and I think that in an educational setting
particularly, it’s been wonderful and rewarding. I definitely
thank Jonathan for letting us follow through with the decision
to do a difficult piece like this.
QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION
Jonathan Kalb:
I would like to use Parks herself as my way into the discussion
phase of this panel and quote one of her essays, called “Tradition
and the Individual Talent.” She writes in this essay: “someone
once told me, ‘Venus isn’t really a Suzan-Lori
Parks play.’ To which I responded: ‘There isn’t
any such thing as a Suzan-Lori Parks play.’ What I mean
is this. I don’t discount the plays I’ve written but
I do realize I am growing and changing as I grow. Once Miss X
starts thinking that she can/should/must only write Xian literature
and anything that is not clearly Xian is a betrayal of the great
Xian tradition . . . once Miss X buys into the existence of an
Xian style of writing and once that purchase keeps her simply
and stupidly repeating her last best hit, then Miss X gets really
stinky.” Parks is talking here about getting out of the
way. She’s describing herself as a moving target, a river
of spirit that we and part of her have to get out of the way of.
So in light of that, I’d like to put this as a question
to the director’s panel. Is there any such thing as a Suzan-Lori
Parks play? Can we take this quote at face value? We’ve
been talking a lot today about early plays versus late plays,
but Leah challenged Robert Brustein’s statement about that
and said that there really are things that thread through all
the works that are very important, characteristic explorations
of Suzan-Lori Parks. Leah sees them in Topdog. So is
there a Suzan-Lori Parks play?
Richard Foreman:
I only know one Suzan-Lori Parks play well, so I’m not the
person to ask. But I’m interested in this issue of “getting
out of the way,” because even though some people say my
theater is totally solipsistic and I’m writing from a very
personal base (I don’t think so), I think the task of all
writers, all artists, is to get out of the way. This is an issue
that is interestingly revealed by Suzan-Lori. An awful lot of
stuff can come through when you get out of the way. To me, art
is interesting when you get out of the way and conflicting contradictory
forces are what come through. They’re not necessarily you,
but they’re contradictory forces. It is not, however, interesting
to me to get out of the way as a writer or a designer, in such
a way that you “go with the flow” of the surrounding
cultural milieu. People have spoken today about development of
a play in terms of the conflicting commercial or experimental
worlds. To me, in the commercial world one hooks into the flow
of the engine of the culture that is going along, chugging along
in a certain direction; certain things are happening in the culture.
But letting the work come to life by letting all the contradictions
come through—this is not "going with the flow."
It’s allowing yourself to be upended by all kinds of things,
like the strange way that Venus’s dialogue appears on the
pages of the text, things like that. And it’s my own continual
battle for art and against normal theater. I would make a comparison
between Suzan-Lori, the experimental Suzan-Lori, and the way I
did Dr. Faustus too. The other person who’s more
like Suzan-Lori than people realize is Kathy Acker, who mostly
wrote novels and did a few plays. I did an adaptation of one of
her novels. Acker is a writer very close to Suzan-Lori in generating
this energy and getting out of the way so that contradictory things
can collide.
Leah Gardiner:
Suzan-Lori told me the most interesting thing with Topdog.
She said that the play was channeled through her. She moves around
a lot when she writes, she’s constantly moving, and I’m
curious about whether each of her previous works was channeled
the same way she described. With Topdog, she said, she
was moving around, moving around, moving around, and all of a
sudden something said, “sit!” And she sat, and the
play came out, and she was just a vessel. She said it’s
as if a hole in her head opened up and the play just came through
and within a few days the play was done. So if, in fact, that
is the process in which she wrote the other plays, I would wonder
if, in fact, that helps define what a Suzan-Lori Parks play is.
Richard Foreman:
I’ve gotta try that. [laughter]
Liz Diamond:
I’ve done, what, five of her plays, and a couple of them
in different configurations, and there are ways in which tremendous
images and poetic strategies go through them all. There’s
a musicality that happens in some of her more elegiac writing
that you can hear from play to play to play. I can give an example.
In Imperceptible Mutabilities, Mrs. Smith, in one of
the most gorgeous speeches in the play, which is said more than
once, says: “On thuh horizon any day now soon. Huh. You
girls know what he told me last furlough? Last furlough I got
off that bus and thuh sky was just as blue—wooo it was uh
blue sky. I’d taken thuh bus to thuh coast. Rode in thuh
front seat cause thuh ride was smoother up in thuh front. Kept
my pocketbook on my lap. Was nervous. Asked thuh driver tuh name
out names of towns we didn’t stop at. Was uh express. Uh
express bus. ‘Mawhaven!’ That was one place—where
we passed by. Not by but through. ‘Mawhaven!’ Had
me uh front seat. Got to thuh coast. Wearin my brown and white.
‘You ain’t traveled a mile nor sweated a drop!’
That’s exactly how he said it too. Voice tooked up thuh
whole outside couldn’t hear nothin else.” Etcetera.
Then in Black Man, you get this amazing speech where
Black Woman with Fried Drumstick says, “Yesterday today
next summer tomorrow just uh moment uhgoh in 1317 dieded thuh
last black man in thuh whole entire world. Uh! Oh. Dont be uhlarmed.
Do not be afeared. It was painless. Uh painless passin. He falls
twenty-three floors to his death. 23 floors from uh passin ship
from space tuh splat on thuh pavement. He have uh head he been
keepin under thuh Tee V. On his bottom pantry shelf. He have uh
head that hurts. Dont fit right.” Etcetera, etcetera. For
me there’s a voice there that’s unmistakable. I don’t
know how to articulate it outside the words themselves. Now in
her writing, lots of different figures speak in lots of different
ways. This happens to be an extremely fluid melodic, vowel-filled,
open-sounding song, right? Then she’s also got speeches
that are extremely clipped and staccato. Like the speech in Black
Man, “Do in diddley dip die-die thuh drop. Do drop
be dripted? Why, of course.” Staccato, rhythmic, high-speed
riffing is replicated across the plays. You get it in Imperceptible
Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, in Aretha Saxon in the
second play. So I do think that there are these gorgeous, poetic
and musical sounds and a strategy of wedding sound to sense and
insisting on the plasticity of language and on the way the actual
sound of a word creates, if you will, character (as in Shakespeare),
that informs all of her writing.
Richard Foreman:
Well, like all writers, she doesn’t always know what she’s
talking about when she’s talking about herself. Of course
there’s a Suzan-Lori Parks play--and what you describe is
these two different versions. But I heard everything you were
talking about in the second staccato version already present in
the first version.
Liz Diamond:
Yes indeed. Fair enough.
Leah Gardiner:
Here I would argue that Topdog is very much within the
same genre. “Watch me close, watch me close now, watch me
close.” It’s the exact same duh-du-duh, duh-du-duh.
It has the same kind of rhythm. There are lines that have the
same musicality, staccato, the jazz. It’s consistent throughout
her plays.
Richard Foreman:
And I would propose that when she says, “There is no such
thing as a Suzan-Lori Parks play,” she’s saying it
for polemical and justifiable reasons, and all of us experience
this. Every play has to be approached and dealt with—as
an audience member or as an artist working on a play—inch
by inch. It’s the inch-by-inch work that distinguishes goodness
from badness, not, “Oh, I have a great theme in this play,
I have a great overall structure.” Nonsense. It’s
the inch by inch--Is it true? Is it really happening? Does it
really reverberate with other things in the play? Any artist wants
to say, “No, you can’t make a simplified global pattern
out of me or my work”—a global Suzan-Lori Parks play.
She doesn’t want anyone to say, “I’m going to
see a Suzan-Lori Parks play tonight and I can relax because I
know what I’m going to get,” because that stops you
from doing your inch-by-inch work.
Question from the audience regarding the difference between
the experience of directing Suzan-Lori Parks plays and directing
other authors’ plays.
Leah Gardiner:
Well, I had a great first day of rehearsal. One of my actors,
who is a television actor, an intelligent actor, sat down as we
were about to read through and said, “I would just like
to let you know something. I have no idea what this play is about.
I have no idea.” And I could’ve done one of two things
then. I could’ve shot myself, or I could’ve just said,
“Right, well, let’s just dive in.” Luckily I
just decided to dive in. But that was the first time I’ve
cast actors who I’ve not auditioned, and it was also the
first time I ever had an actor say, “I have no idea what
she’s saying, what this play is. I don’t understand
it.” The one thing he did understand, though, was the rhythm
and the music.
Liz Diamond:
I imagine it’s changing a lot over time, directors’
experiences with actors on this work. Back in the early nineties--which
was, you may remember, some of you who are old enough, a period
of very passionate exploration of ethnic and political identity:
feminist plays, African-American plays, Asian-American plays--there
was kind of an explosion of work in this way. When I started working
with Suzan-Lori there was some question on the actors’ parts
about a white director working on Suzan-Lori’s plays. I
remember the first rehearsal for The Death of the Last Black
Man up at Yale Rep, we had a lot of student actors in the
show, along with some wonderful professional actors. There was
a very interesting tension in the room. The kids who were in this
very traditionally white institution had been doing Shakespeare
and Moliere and all this stuff, and they were finally getting
to work on a contemporary play with a contemporary voice, telling
stories which in many ways they considered theirs. And there I
was. The professionals, the older actors, had really no issues
with this whatsoever but watched and waited. But there was a lot
of tension around the table about this. A student raised her hand
at one point and said, “I’ve just got to express a
certain concern here that, Liz, I mean, Suzan-Lori, why’d
you pick her? Why’d you pick her?” Suzan-Lori talked
about that for a minute and said, “What are you asking?”
And the student said, “Well, she’s not black.”
And Suzan-Lori turned and said, “You’re not?”
And it was a great diffuser—at that time a kind of necessary
moment.
I found it very exciting. There was a lot of cultural border-crossing
I got to do, a lot of learning while working on these plays.The
actors would pour out their stories and their relationships in
connection with this text. Sometimes Suzan-Lori embraced that
and sometimes she wanted to stop it because she felt that it was
getting in the way of the work. In particular, there were actors
who would look at the writing on the page, as Alisa described,
you know you look at a word like “t-h-u-h” and extrapolate
from that that a kind of black vernacular was being asked of them.
And Suzan-Lori would get very angry and say, “They’ve
gotta read it. They’ve gotta read it word for word.”
Inch by inch. Inch by inch. Absolutely hew to what’s on
the page. She said, those spellings are not a license to speak,
carte blanche, in a kind of youthful black vernacular across the
play. It’s somewhat abstracted. So it was interesting that
that would raise great hackles, particularly among young actors,
who would get very concerned about what she was saying about that
speech. So quite ahead of anything that would happen in the transaction
between audience and stage, there was in the rehearsal hall all
this material about art and race raised in those early days, and
perhaps now as well, these great emotional issues surrounding
the politics embedded in the aesthetics in the writing.
Jonathan Kalb:
Liz, you mentioned before that Suzan-Lori did not want the extroverted
emotional expressions of the black Baptist tradition in Black
Man when you directed it. And yet that play is very ceremonial.
Suzan-Lori is clearly interested in ceremony and ritual. Everyone
in the play is, in a sense, looking for the ceremony that Black
Man needs to be finally buried, and with that the women can
find rest too. So when you talk about abstracting black vernacular,
I wonder if maybe what she wants is not actual ceremonial expression
from life but rather something that’s intentionally artificial,
that she has invented, and that you therefore have to find and
define in the theater. Is there a parallel here?
Liz Diamond:
One of the first things we did when we worked on Black Man
together was to go up to St. John the Divine and St. Patrick’s
and attend some masses together. She was raised Roman Catholic.
So was I. We were both recovering Catholics maybe. Both of us
had certain kinds of deep attachments, I must say, visceral attachments
to certain aspects of what you might call Catholic ritual—the
drag, the fancy clothes, the gold, the incense, the Latin in my
case. I was old enough for that. And a certain terribly stately,
slow process. I think in her case it was very much connected to
rhythm. She was resistant to bringing Baptist rhythms into the
piece, particularly at the end. She wanted more the call-and-response
of the Catholic church, which is very slow and cadenced. I don’t
know how to describe it musically, but it’s kind of a formal,
strict, metric rhythm, as opposed to the more propulsive bending
rhythms you might hear in a Baptist church. And that’s what
we went for.
Question from the audience requesting clarification of Leah
Gardiner’s remark, “We are participants, not merely
spectators,” in her director’s statement for
Topdog/Underdog.
Leah Gardiner:
Well it’s interesting—if I can piggyback on what Liz
was saying about religion and the Catholic Church. If you think
about how the Catholic Church works, you participate by going
up each week for communion. You go to confession. There’s
a kind of participation in the ritual that exists within the Catholic
Church. I think that with Suzan-Lori’s work, in particular
in Topdog, it’s important for the audience to participate
in what’s happening up there. These are familiar characters,
familiar people to us who cross racial boundaries. Their economic
plight relates to any country, any place in the world where poverty
exists and people are struggling. We all understand what that
is, and if we are conscious beings, we can be participants in
that and not necessarily spectators. It could be the artist in
me who’s hoping that everyone in the world does that. I
could be idealistic in that sense, I suppose, but I do feel like
in this particular play, in order to get the more visceral response
to what’s happening on stage it’s important to see
yourself as someone who’s up there and in there. I think
that the music is the thing that draws you in and makes you a
participant and not necessarily a spectator. In our production,
people were tapping their toes and swaying just because the kind
of music that we chose allowed them to participate like that.
Question from the audience requesting clarification about
a director “getting out of the way.”
Bill Walters:
For my part, I certainly didn’t intend to say that you just
show up at rehearsal and sit back and watch it all unfold. There
are still a lot of choices to be made and there’s still
a lot of listening to be done to the text. And in a text like
Venus, all the things that we talked about, the way that
it’s set on the page, the spellings, the rests and spells
that she includes, everything goes into the structure of how she’s
built this thing. It has something to do with, I think, listening
to exactly that, the tensions that she had built into the script
in creating an atmosphere in which these things can start to come
to life on their own. Essentially, she has given you all the chemical
ingredients and it’s a matter of setting up the appropriate
environment for them to do their thing. But that requires very
meticulously creating that appropriate environment.
Richard Foreman:
If I could just add to that: this is very important for all artists.
It’s one of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a director.
I’d be sitting there in rehearsal all the time looking with
a focused attention, saying, “Why is she doing it that way?
No, no. What can I do to make it better?” Then at a certain
point you realize that’s wrong, and you sit back, and instead
of focusing on that and figuring out why it’s not working,
you open your field of vision, use peripheral vision, use a wide
field of vision. You go into a semi-daze. You glaze over. And
you say, “Oh, she’s doing it that way and she’s
bad, that’s bad, but in that badness there is a necessity
and a goodness that we have to learn how to exploit.” So
you, the director, have to go back and forth between making decisions
and letting it be what it wants to be, the material, the performer.
You often forget that--you have to let it be.
Jonathan Kalb:
I think that’s a great closing comment. Thank you very much
to all of our panelists.
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