Parks, Suzan-Lori - Shawn-Marie Garrett (essay date October 2000)
Shawn-Marie Garrett (essay date October 2000)
SOURCE: Garrett, Shawn-Marie. “The Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks.” American Theatre 17, no. 8 (October 2000): 22-6.
[In the following essay, Garrett explores recurrent themes in Parks's plays and illustrates Parks's use of repetition, lampooning, language, and visual cues to highlight political, historical, and racial inaccuracies.]
1. VOICES
Suzan-Lori Parks began writing novels at the age of five. But it wasn't until she first heard voices that she realized she might be cursed and blessed with a case of possession—in both senses of that word. Parks knew that she possessed something, but she also knew that it possessed her.
It was 1983. She was working on a short story called “The Wedding Pig” for a writing class she was taking with James Baldwin at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. Suddenly she had the sense that the people she was writing...
[The entire page is 6360 words long]
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