Add/View
Comments

Hot Ticket

Suzan-Lori Parks ’85 knew she had arrived well before she got to Broadway. Go back about 20 years to the late 1980s—before the Pulitzer Prize for Topdog/Underdog, before the MacArthur “genius grant,” before the Obie for best new play. Leave the Times Square theatres, the lights and the crowds behind.

Look instead for a grimy little neighborhood bar that was formerly a gas station, a place you’d never hear about unless you happen to live around the block. Walk into the bar and that’s where you’ll find Parks, sitting on a stool behind a makeshift curtain. It’s opening night of her first play and there are five people in the audience.

Two are her parents. The bartender makes a third. Parks is running the lights. She plugs an extension cord into another cord (lights up!). During scene changes, she pulls the cords apart (lights out!). After the show the playwright, actors, and audience repair to the bar—a few feet away— for beers.

A typical tale of humble beginnings, you might think. Think again. Parks tells the story as a dream fulfilled. She told it while visiting Mount Holyoke in March for the theatre department’s production of Week 16 of her most recent work, 365 Days/365 Plays. Parks talked about how she became a playwright, and how that night in the bar encapsulated her personal vision of success. “I had a show in New York,” she said, speaking to a packed auditorium in Rooke Theatre the Sunday evening following the student performances. “I had arrived.” Long before anyone knew her name—much less associated that name with prestigious prizes and rave reviews—Parks had already added herself to the short list of successful American playwrights.

Where does a young woman so early in her career get that kind of confidence? A good upbringing, a strong will, a quirk of fate—or something else? Parks says Mount Holyoke helped her find her gift, and, once found, urged her to believe in it. “I thought I was going to be a scientist,” she said, laughing, as murmurs of surprise ran up and down the rows of Rooke. “I was doing the whole white-coat thing in the lab. I was good at it, but I was dying. I didn’t know writing was something I could do until I took a class with Mrs. Glasser.” (That’s MHC lecturer in English Leah B. Glasser, who was sitting in the front row next to president Joanne Creighton during Parks’s talk.) “We read Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse. I didn’t get it [intellectually], but oh, it reached me here, in my heart.”

Goodbye, glass beakers; hello, words. Provocative words. Passionate, daring, strange, and beautiful words. At the urging of Glasser and other MHC professors, Parks began writing James Baldwin. Noticing her gift for dialogue (as well as her tendency to act out all her stories), Baldwin suggested playwriting, and Parks was on her way.

Twenty years later, Parks is still in love with language, and uses it to explore gender, race, class, beauty, sex, and politics in groundbreaking dramatic works. Don’t ask her to define her plays, however. The morning after her talk in Rooke, Parks met with a smaller group of MHC students, many from assistant professor of theatre Erika Rundle’s seminar, to discuss at greater length the mysterious process of making art. “My plays are all of these things—race and boots, a glass of water at her side. “I never write with an agenda. I don’t do themes. The politics in my work—you don’t see it coming. It’s more like the ‘sugar-coated pill of poetry.’ It goes down before you realize what’s happening!”

Where, then, do her ideas come from? Maybe from the same place inside that led her to write not one but two plays riffing on the American classic The Scarlet Letter, and to title one of them F***ing A. Ideas “just bubble up,” she said, making a scooping gesture with her hands (which were in constant motion, along with much of the rest of her, throughout her talk.)

“It comes from deep within.” “Deep within” is key. Suzan-Lori Parks, famous playwright and all-around hot ticket, doesn’t write to score points, political or artistic. She doesn’t write for the world’s approval or its prizes. Easy to say, maybe, once you have it all, but Parks’s down-to-earth frankness and her warm attention to each student who raises her hand create the impression of a truly generous person without a hint of the diva. “I write because I love it,” she says simply. “My work is all about the cultivation of joy.”

A practitioner of yoga and a watchful observer of the world around and within her, Parks’s entire being seems attuned to authenticity the way a guitarist is attuned to the pitch of her strings. The writing begins first in listening—deeply and carefully. But what’s authentic and what’s good are not necessarily the same thing. How does Parks know the difference? Considering the question for a moment, the playwright spread her arms wide and answered: “First, I practice radical inclusion.” Parks welcomes everything that comes to her as she begins to write, including “dumb jokes, fourth-grade stuff that makes me laugh, crazy ideas, things that make no sense but that I like anyway. Next, let go of the desire to be good so you can give yourself the chance to be great,” she urged her audience.

She writes daily (for 365 Days…, she wrote a play a day for an entire year) and regards her discipline as a “devotional act.” Creating at her desk with a quiet and steady faith, she believes that “the play that needs to come up in me will come.” Her characters—searching, wanting, exploding with hungry life—arise from what she calls her universal Self. It is a self bigger than the individual ego, a self that is “part of everything and everyone.” Only later does she go back, “wielding a sword and getting to be God,” cutting characters, lines, and scenes no longer needed in her final vision of the play.

Out of this process has emerged a body of work that has distinguished Parks as one of Time magazine’s “100 Innovators for the Next New Wave.” Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. In the Blood. Venus. Topdog/Underdog. Her most recent work, 365 Days/365 Plays, was produced at more than 700 theatres worldwide. Throughout it all, Parks retains her serenity—and her goofy, infectious sense of humor. When asked during her talk about her glamorous activities as a famous playwright, she laughed and said, “I sit around the house and watch my cat. I avoid parties. I try to be like Flaubert, who believed you should be as boring in your life as you can, so you can be incredible in your art.”

For the students scribbling down rapid notes, hanging on every word, Parks’s energy seemed to have a galvanizing effect. They streamed into the theatre lobby afterward, talking excitedly, exchanging ideas for performance pieces, solo shows, poetry theatre, dramatic experiments. A little more than a month later, certain girls …, a student ensemble-created theatre piece (developed in collaboration with Rundle), opened to enthusiastic crowds in Rooke.

Drawn from a wide range of texts exploring identity and community, the experimental play reflected many of Parks’s ideas about the possibilities of modern theatre.

The performers may have been inspired by their meeting with this extraordinary alumna, whose last remarks seem to reverberate in the theatre long after her visit. “You’re going to be the real deal,” Parks said, looking at each student in turn. You’re going to be the one they go to at the end of the day for the truth, for what’s really happening. The thing you do at Mount Holyoke has such great value. It’s like a play zooming at you every day! I can tell you, this experience will affect you for the rest of your life.”

Learn More
The college Web site has articles about, and photos and audio clips from, Suzan-Lori Parks’s campus visit.

Photo by Paul Schnaittacher