Drama Criticism | Parks, Suzan-Lori - Katy Ryan (essay date spring 1999)

Katy Ryan (essay date spring 1999)

SOURCE: Ryan, Katy. “‘No Less Human’: Making History in Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 13, no. 2 (spring 1999): 81-94.

[In the following essay, Ryan explores the sexual, racial, and political overtones in The America Play and considers Parks's use of language, repetition, and absences to subvert white-based and white-written history.]

We stand to-day at the national center to perform something like a national act—an act which is to go into history.

—Frederick Douglass¹

Frederick Douglass spoke the above words on 14 April 1876 in a speech to commemorate the Freedmen's Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. The statue, financed by African-Americans, depicts a kneeling black man, shackles broken, looking up at Abraham Lincoln who holds the Constitution in his right hand and...

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