[When New York City Mayor Bill DiBlasio declared New York City the “epicenter” of the pandemic on Thursday, 19 March 2020, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks gave herself an assignment: write a play a day during the first year of the crisis.
[That project became Plays for the Plague Year, a chronological depiction
of the life of Americans during a health emergency. The program is an assemblage of short plays,
scenes, monologues, and songs, covering whatever people got up to between that
March date three years ago to 13 April 2021.] “PLAYWRIGHT
EXPLORES PANDEMIC IN ‘PLAYS FOR THE PLAGUE YEAR’”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne
Azzi Davenport
[Jeffrey Brown’s interview with playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (b. 1963) was aired on the PBS NewsHour on 21 April 2023 (Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks explores the pandemic in ‘Plays for the Plague Year’ | PBS NewsHour). It was prompted by the production of Parks’s performance piece Plays for the Plague Year, composed during the enforced isolation of the COVID pandemic.
[A note on the text below: for some reason, PBS didn't publish the usual NewsHour site with a transcribed text of the interview formatted and superficially copy-edited. I've had to use another site with a transcription of the video text, but it's in all-caps, has no paragraphing (each sentence is its own paragraph), and sparse identification of the speakers, so I had to use the video itself as a trot.
[As if was doing this, I also found that some passages were omitted from the online transcript entirely, and one passage in the transcription didn’t exist on the video. (Almost all the scenes from performances, that were seen as background sequences in the video, were excluded. I inserted them here.) I’ve done my best to remedy these oversights (so the text in this post is partly PBS’s and partly mine).]
Geoff Bennett (“NewsHour” anchor): Is it too soon to explore the pandemic through art?
Not if you’re Suzan-Lori Parks, who wrote a short ‘play a day’ while sitting at home for 13 months and has now turned those into a full-length performance [3 hours] at New York’s Public Theater [Joe’s Pub, 18 April-30 April 2023].
It’s part of a “very big year” for one of the country’s most acclaimed playwrights. Jeffrey Brown has the story for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Actors in Scene (singing): “I play the writer” [Suzan-Lori Parks] / “I play the hubby” [Greg Keller] / “I play the kid” [Leland Fowler] . . .
Jeffrey Brown: Suzan-Lori Parks both plays and is the writer of “Plays for the Plague Year” . . .
Actors in Scene (singing): . . . “I play the muse” / “I play the stalker” / “I play the principal in the school” . . . .
Brown: . . . a series of songs and scenes.
Actor: “Sit down, catch your breath . . . .”
Brown: Small personal moments . . .
Actor: “I’ll make you some tea and I’ll put some honey in it.”
Brown: . . . and big collective traumas . . .
Actor: “I was just wanting to alert people because I’m a doctor . . .”
Brown: . . . that take us through the first year of the COVID pandemic.
Actor: “. . . and then, I got sick from the virus.”
Actor (Keller): “She says that you probably have it, too.”
Actor (Parks): “Oh, great.”
Brown: It’s based on an assignment Parks gave herself in real time: be present, observe, write every day.
Suzan-Lori Parks: It’s a way to . . . keep watch, if you will. You know, it’s a way to bear witness. It’s a way to say, ‘Yes, this happened. I’m watching and I’m going to write it down.’
Parks (walking through stage set with Brown): I have a bookshelf very much like this . . .”
Brown: It’s also about the roles we all play every day.
Parks (in the set): I have a typewriter, the Olivetti Valentine . . . .”
Brown: And for Parks – who often writes on an old red typewriter – it really is a new role . . .
Parks (singing and playing guitar): “I had a dream last nigh – it was gorgeous . . . .”
Brown: . . . for the first time she herself acts and sings and plays guitar in one of her plays.
Brown: Did you have any fear, trepidation, putting yourself into the story like this?
Parks: Yes. I have so much fear, so much trepidation. And I think a lot of us realized during the first year or so of the pandemic is that there were things we were afraid of, are afraid of, and that we had to really look at those things.
And so I looked at a lot of those things and one of them was, ‘Oh, I’m putting myself in the story.’
Actors (scene from “Topdog/Underdog”): “I’m gettin’ too old to be sleepin’ in that chair, man.” “It’s my place – you don’t got no place.”
Brown: Now 59, Parks is best known for her play, “Topdog/Underdog,” in which two brothers, named ‘Lincoln’ and ‘Booth,’ are bound by family ties and the burden of American history.
Actor (“Topdog/Underdog”): We put aside a hundred dollars for the rent. A hundred a week times four weeks makes the rent and we don’t want the rent spent.”
Brown: It won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making Parks the first African-American woman to receive that honor, and last fall had a 20th anniversary revival on Broadway [Golden Theatre, 20 October 2022-15 January 2023].
Actor (scene from “The Harder They Come”): “You stealin’ from me!” (Ensemble sings.)
Brown: Part of a busy, attention-getting year for Parks that included her theater adaptation of the 1972 hit reggae film, “The Harder They Come” [Public Theater, 15 March-9 April 2023], and a new play premiered at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater titled “Sally & Tom” [1 October-6 November 2022] – that’s Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson – set in both past and present.
“Plays for the Plague Year,” produced at New York’s Public Theater, is her most personal yet and includes experiences at home with her real-life husband, Christian Konopka and their son, now-11-year-old Durham, who’s suddenly as tall as his mother.
Actor (singing in “Plays for the Plague Year”): “I play the guy named Paul.”
They and many other actual people are portrayed onstage by a group of actors who take a variety of roles in short ‘plays’ . . .
Actor (Parks): “I’m scared. I’m sorry.”
Brown: . . . that unfold chronologically.
Actor (Keller): “I’m sorry, too.”
Parks: It’s really a celebration of everyday things, whatever was happening.
My office is at the kitchen table in our one bedroom apartment, so I was writing at one end of the kitchen table, at the other end of the kitchen table there was our then eight-year-old son who was doing remote schooling like so many kids, and he was having his remote schooling things happen, you know, all that kind of glitching and all this stuff and trying to get used to it. So the play might be about that.
Actor: “I don’t got time to be dead. I have important work to do. I’m a principal . . . .”
Brown: Also given voice onstage: a number of those lost during the pandemic.
Actor: “. . . And I have kids looking up to me . . . .”
Brown: Parks has honored them with their own short scenes.
Actor: “. . . I’m their example. I can’t let them down.”
Brown: And the social justice protests after the killings of Breonna Taylor [March 2020, Louisville, KY] and George Floyd [May 2020, Minneapolis, MN].
Actors: “You see me lyin’ here? You see a knee on my neck?” “I see it. It’s real.”
Parks: A lot of people, in this country especially, we think that to grieve, you know, bad things, would bring us down. The opposite is true.
When we look with love and with interest and curiosity towards something that . . . something difficult that happened, we are released from its power to weigh us down.
Brown: But your way to do that as a playwright is to write them into the play and bring them onstage.
Parks: Well, yes. That’s the way the world works.
Brown: The way the world works or the theater world?
Parks: Well, all the world’s a stage. The writer writes them into the play.
That’s why we’re here. We’ve been written into a play. Isn’t it fun?
Brown: The two of us?
Parks: Sure.
Brown: This is a play, right?
Parks: Sure, yeah. (Laughs.)
Brown: But, is this the way you think about life?
Parks: Oh, yes, yes. That’s really what’s been going on. We’ve been written into a series of plays.
You know, that’s what “Plays for the Plague Year” really is looking at: how reality is made.
Brown: That feels like a good definition of all Parks’ work, in fact: exploring how our individual and collective reality is made.
One guide in shaping that approach: none other than James Baldwin [Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA; 1981-85], who first suggested to Parks, then in college and writing short stories, that she try writing a play.
Parks: I never would have gotten into playwriting had it not been for Mr. Baldwin
Brown: But, I mean, that is a high-level mandate.
Parks: He suggested that I might be good at what I do, and I didn’t have the heart to prove him wrong. Yeah.
I mean, someone has faith in me – it means a lot to me.
Brown: Parks, the daughter of a college professor and army officer, came to see her work as a calling.
Parks: My parents used to tell me – because we travel all around the world: ‘You are an ambassador of your race,’ meaning we travel to a lot of places where people hadn’t met black people before.
And as an adult, now I realize I’m an ambassador of . . . one of the ambassadors of the human race. And I’ll take that on.
Brown: One thing I was wondering about with this play is . . . is the question: is it too soon?
Parks: Maybe it’s too soon. Ummm . . . I don’t think so. The reactions we’re getting from the audience, it feels like it’s time.
Why stuff the stuff down? Why shove it down and not think about it? Until when?
That’s one of the reasons why I’m on stage. I’m not saying ‘yeah, go reflect on the pandemic,’ you know, ‘go over there’ - no, I’m like, ‘I’m here with you.’
Brown: And so “with you” that audience members are invited to reflect on their experience of lockdown by filling out cards about what they want to remember – or forget.
For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Public Theater in New York.
[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.
[As arts correspondent, Brown has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.
[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Coordinating Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.]
* *
* *
“A SOUNDTRACK OF
OUR PANDEMIC-ERA LIVES”
by Maya Phillips
[Plays for the Plague Year started previews in Manhattan’s East Village at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub on 5 April and opened on 18 April; it closed on 30 April. Maya Phillips’s New York Times review of the three-hour performance ran on 19 April 2023 (sec. C [“Arts”]).]
A work by Suzan-Lori Parks explores stories from more than a year of Covid.
Upon entering Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater for Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” audience members are handed a Playbill, a pencil and two yellow notecards, each with a question about the pandemic: “What would you like to remember?” “What would you like to forget?” The responses are placed in a basket from which they are picked and read during the show. At my performance, someone wrote that they’d like to forget “fear and worry, foreground and background.” People in the audience murmured in assent.
We’d all probably like to forget our own experiences of fear and worry during that first year of zealous hand-washing and ever-changing mask mandates. Parks, however, made a project of remembering: For that first pandemic year, she resolved to write a play a day about “whatever happens,” including the mundane goings-on in her apartment, the deaths of friends and strangers, and the Black Lives Matter protests.
Here, Parks performs a version of herself called the Writer, who creates plays each day while quarantining with her husband (played by Greg Keller) and their 8-year-old son (Leland Fowler) in their one-bedroom apartment.
What unfolds is some configuration of those plays, though “play” is too restrictive a word for these micro-performances, which take the forms of monologues, dialogues and songs. Parks, who also plays the guitar here, is joined onstage by seven other cast members in various roles and a band (Ric Molina, guitar; Graham Kozak, bass; Ray Marchica, percussion).
An accounting of each day — an electronic placard hanging above the stage flashes the date and title of each section, presented chronologically from March 19, 2020, to April 13, 2021 — provides the show with a built-in structure to link what often feels like a hodgepodge.
Parks wisely uses a series of shorthands to quickly bring us back to specific moments in those early pandemic days — an actor, for example, gliding past Parks in an ornate doublet and Tudor-style cap to signal theater closures, the cast hollering and clapping for a brief moment to signal the daily 7 p.m. cheer for frontline workers.
In the plays in which Parks isn’t writing or with her family, she’s talking to a dead Little Richard or negotiating with her Muse who, fed up with Covid, threatens to abandon her. In another, a character named Bob looks for a job. There’s one in which Earth, embodied by a woman wearing a crown of branches and holding a scepter, warns that the pandemic is only the beginning of the world’s disasters.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg appears, on the day of her death, as a triumphant Lady Liberty, and the virus, personified as a horror movie villainess named Corona, wheezes and stalks the stage in a black-gray-white ombré dress and virion headpiece with red “spikes.” The costume design, by Rodrigo Muñoz, is as imaginative and visually stunning as runway couture, especially the layered fabrics of the Muse’s handkerchief hem skirt, made to resemble scraps of paper with scribbled writings, and the 3-D elements, like the butterflies on Earth’s chiffon dress.
But not all days are created equal, and this three-hour production does feel as if we’re reliving a year’s worth of material. At least the variety in Parks’s script keeps things unpredictable enough to hold our attention.
The direction, by Niegel Smith, occasionally gets too darling, like the first scene, when the family members introduce themselves (“I am the writer. I am the hubby. I am the son.”) while passing a red paper heart to one another. But Smith, who also choreographed the show, does make organized chaos in the intimate space (design by Peter Nigrini), rotating characters on a tiny stage adorned with a few pieces of low-sitting furniture — table, armchair, dresser, lamp, rack covered in books.
The show’s music is as eclectic as the storytelling; the songs are short, plucky, with hints of folk, jazz and R&B. The surprising mash-up of genres include the doo-wop style of “Bob Needs a Job,” and the bluesy “Praying Now” soon picks up tempo, turning into an upbeat clap-and-stomp. Most aren’t particularly memorable, but the strongest songs — “RIP the King” and “Whichaway the World” — build with an alternating mix of spoken word/rap and soulful crooning from two performers in particular, Fowler and Danyel Fulton.
Sometimes it seems as if Parks is overreaching, as when she speaks to her former mentor, James Baldwin (perfectly embodied by Fowler, who replicates his posture and cadence of speech), so he can muse about American history. Or in a long ceremony during which the cast hands flowers to the audience at the end of a section about Breonna Taylor, played by Fulton; but Fulton’s performance is poignant enough on its own.
The playwright’s conversations with the dead, however, many of whom begin their scenes unaware or in denial of their demise, is the show’s most compelling motif. She speaks to several who are Black, especially those lost to Covid and those to police brutality. Through these post-mortems, Parks is asking trenchant questions about how we memorialize Black bodies. What would the dead say? How would they want to be remembered, if at all? So the Brooklyn educator Dez-Ann Romain, who died from complications of the coronavirus, snapping “Don’t make me speak of myself in the past tense,” and George Floyd asking, “Would I be safe if Harriet Tubman was on the 20?” become tragic self-written elegies. We’re watching the dead mourn themselves.
Then there’s Parks, who, even playing this version of herself, always feels earnest, as when she listens to the speeches of her characters, while sitting off to one side of the stage, leaning forward attentively. You can easily imagine this being the way Parks sees the world refracted back to her, conversing with the dead, building abstractions.
Unfortunately, her own domestic narrative feels flat by comparison. So “What’s the takeaway? What’s the concept? What’s the tone,” as the Writer’s TV producer asks her at one point during a conversation about the Writer’s plays project.
“Plague Year” never answers these questions; the Writer ultimately discovers that the plays “didn’t save us.” But this isn’t Parks renouncing her ambitious undertaking. She’s offering another way to think about the production, which isn’t always a cohesive work of theater: Perhaps it doesn’t have to.
Theater doesn’t save us, the Writer says, “but it does preserve us somehow,” so this piece still is a record. This is catharsis. It’s preservation.
[The question of what I’d like to remember or forget about the pandemic has intrigued me since I learned about it in the NewsHour segment and then again in the Times review. Here’s my dilemma: I know what I’d want to write on the cards, but I don’t know in what category—remember or forget—to put my answer.
[I have two responses. One is the complete and total selfishness of some (many? most?) of my fellow Americans when it came to following some simple guidelines (and, yes, mandates) to keep others, including the most vulnerable and at-risk, safe from infection. I don’t know if I just want to forget those self-centered people I apparently live among, or to remember that indelible streak of total lack of care and concern for their fellows.
[The other answer I’d offer is the ridiculous—and apparently political—divisiveness that people subscribed to when it came to listening to the experts, scientists, doctors, and epidemiologists as they disseminated what they were learning about the virus. This included the leaders—governors, mayors, and lawmakers—who took public stands against following any advice calculated to lower the likelihood of catching or spreading the disease. They all seemed to want to make this a Red-Blue competition.
[#1 or #2? Remember or forget? Is a puzzlement—as someone once said.
[I
saw several of Parks’s plays before I started writing reports on performances
I’d seen. After I started Rick On Theater in 2009,
I’ve published a number of posts on her and her work (not all of them written
by me). Among them are:
• “How America Eats: Food and Eating Habits in the Plays of Suzan-Lori
Parks” by Kirk Woodward (5 October 2009)
• “A Playwright of Importance” by Kirk Woodward (31 January 2011)
• “On ‘Re-Imagining’ Porgy And Bess” (14 January 2012)
• “The
Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World” (1 December 2016)
• “The Red Letter Plays: In the Blood” (12 October 2017)
• “The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A” (17 October 2017)
• “The Red Letter Plays, Continued” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2017)
[Maya Phillips is a New York Times critic at large. She’s the author of the essay collection NERD: Adventures in Fandom From This Universe to the Multiverse (Atria Books, 2022) and the poetry collection Erou (Four Way Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and winner of the 2019 Balcones Poetry Prize and 2020 Poetry by the Sea book award. She’s the recipient of a Hodder Grant from Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts and the 2020-2021 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
[She has a bachelor’s degree from Emerson College and her master's from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. Her poetry has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Missouri Review, the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, among others, and her arts and entertainment journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, Vulture, Slate, The Week, American Theatre, Mashable, Polygon, and more.
[Phillips was the inaugural arts critic fellow at the Times. She writes about theater, movies, TV, books, and nerd culture. She lives in Brooklyn.]
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