Parks, Suzan-Lori - Liz Diamond (essay date 1993)
Liz Diamond (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: Diamond, Liz. “Perceptible Mutability in the Word Kingdom.” Theater 24, no. 3 (1993): 86-87.
[In the following essay, Diamond analyzes Parks's experiments with language, casting, and non-linear time in her plays, particularly Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom.]
The poetic imagination, while not entirely absent from the American stage in recent years, makes its appearance fitfully. Most often, it appears either in that watered-down version of Romanticism called lyric realism, where simile rather than metaphor rules, or in the guise of a North American magic realism, a pale version of its Latin cousin, with just enough strangeness to arouse our imaginations before drying up and leaving us parched as before. But in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, poetry, the radical condensation of meaning in form, is everywhere present. From the intimate, ironic portrait of a marriage in Betting on...
[The entire page is 1097 words long]
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