Suzan-Lori Parks on the Covid Pandemic

 

[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.]

The Red Letter Plays, Continued

by Kirk Woodward

[As Kirk says below, he and I saw the two Suzan-Lori Parks plays In the Blood and Fucking A in production at the Signature Theatre Company on, respectively, 19 September and 4 October.  Kirk had read almost all of Parks’s plays, but he confided that he’d never seen one on stage.  Since my usual theater partner had gone off Parks after last season’s STC productions of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and Venus (reported on Rick On Theater on 1 December 2016 and 7 June 2017), I invited Kirk to join me for the two final productions in the playwright’s Residency One tenure at Signature.  I’d never seen these plays before—they premièred in 1999 and 2000—but I felt they’d make a good introduction for Kirk to the dramatist’s work in production, given especially Signature’s customarily excellent productions and the writer’s participation in the presentations.  I think I can safely say, I judged rightly—and I think Kirk will agree.

[As he notes, Kirk’s written on Parks for ROT a couple of time before (the dates and titles of Kirk’s posts are noted below), based then on his close readings of the scripts.  Now, as a sort of companion/supplement to my usual performance reports, he’s contributed  an evaluation of the plays as he sees them fitting into Parks’s body of work.  (My recommendation, especially if you haven’t seen the STC productions, is to read my reports, referenced below, and then read “The Red Letter Plays, Continued.”)  He brings his habitually careful and perspicacious analytical skills to his discussion of the Red Letter Plays, based now on both his familiarity with the texts and the staging at the Signature Theatre Company.  He unquestionably makes several excellent, and important, points about both the plays and Parks’s dramaturgy.  ~Rick]

Rick has recently written in this blog about the two plays by Suzan-Lori Parks (b. 1963), In the Blood and F**king A, collectively known as the Red Letter Plays. The playwright writes the second play’s name as Fucking A, but I am using it as it appears in the program for the productions of the two plays at the Signature Theatre in New York City from August 22 through October 15, 2017. 

I saw both plays with Rick, and I agree with pretty much everything he writes about the plays and their productions. (See the reports on the two productions, posted on 12 and 17 October, respectively.) I want to say a few things looking at them from a slightly different angle: I have written about the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks in this blog before (see “How America Eats: Food and Eating Habits in the Plays Of Suzan-Lori Parks,” 5 October 2009, and “A Playwright of Importance,” 31 January 2011), and have expressed my opinion that she deserves to be considered among the great playwrights in the United States, alongside Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee.

A quick look at those four names shows ways in which Parks is not like those outstanding writers. She is a woman. She is also black, her plays are clearly written by a black playwright, and as she writes she uses the resources of theater very differently from her predecessors. (Tennessee Williams, in his work as a whole, is the one she resembles most.)

As to why she deserves a high rank as a playwright, I want to say more about that, using In the Blood and F**king A as exhibits of her qualities and skills, but not as examples of undeniably great plays, because to my mind they are not. However, in a culture where five star ratings, top ten lists, and One Hundred Greatest lists are familiar reviewing tools, it’s easy to forget that a play may be both flawed and still vital and important.

In the Blood (1999) and F**king A (2000) are “middle period” plays for Parks (so far), and may be examined both as works of art in themselves, and as steps in her growth as a playwright.

Because Rick has described the plays, their productions, and their reviewers’ responses with his usual thoroughness, I propose not to go over that territory again, but instead to offer a sort of “pro and con” evaluation of the plays, remembering that in art the same feature of a work can be both a “pro” and a “con.” The “con’s,” when it comes down to it, are not terribly negative.

One frequent fault of beginning playwrights is overwriting. Parks does not in my opinion do this in In the Blood and F**king A in the sense the word is often used – she is not flowery, she doesn’t show off, she doesn’t include passages that have no purpose but to demonstrate how brilliant she is (despite an apparent exception I will mention below). Her plays are thoroughly grounded in their characters and their situations.

Still, to be sure, she is an exuberant playwright, and language is particularly important to her. You can literally see this by opening one of her plays at random to any page – her very typography is different. In particular she goes further than almost any other playwright in “writing” the timing of words and phrases.

And she is capable of letting it rip when appropriate. The set piece of F**king A is the character Butcher’s glorious list of the offences his daughter Lulu (never seen in the play, to our everlasting regret) has committed. It is far too long to quote – it takes up almost two full pages in the published script – but here is a sample of what Lulu has done:

. . . fraternizing with known felons, copulating with said felons with the intent to reproduce, espionage, high treason, mutiny at sea, operating a dump truck without a license, having improper identification, slave trading, horse stealing, murder in the first degree, not knowing what time it is, talking too much, laughing out of turn, murder in the second degree, standing on one leg in a 2-legged zone, jumping the turnstile, jumping the turnstilee, burning down the house, murder in the nth degree. . . .

The actor Raphael Nash Thompson, who played the role in the Signature production, brought the house down with his understated, offhand, take-it-as-it-comes delivery of this tour de force. One would not want it to be a single word shorter.

But in my opinion overwriting occurs in these two plays in a different way: structurally. Parks uses theatrical devices throughout both In the Blood and F**king A to enrich and to startle – a number seem to be borrowed from Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), such as asides and choral speaking. But some seem to me to work against the plays instead of helping them.

For example, the invented language “Talk” in F**king A, translated for the audience in words projected above the actors’ heads, serves little purpose in the play that I can see, except once in a minor way (it does make one conversation unintelligible to other characters), and it takes attention away from the play rather than reconfiguring our attention. 

And two other major devices, to my mind, say too much. In In the Blood, five characters in turn deliver soliloquies, direct addresses to the audience, called “Confessions,” describing their sexual relations, of varied sorts, with the lead character, Hester.

We are familiar, to mention examples from another play, with the soliloquies in the play Hamlet by Shakespeare, who uses the device to share the inner workings of the minds of the characters. But Parks uses the Confessions more to tell the audience about events that have happened, and that is a weaker use of the device – in general, audiences would rather see something happen, than be told that it occurred.

But the Confessions weaken the play further because they make explicit sexual relations that are already inferred by the play. They give “backstory” that is already hinted at, and by spelling the backstories out, it seems to me,  they weaken the play, leaving us with no uncertainty, no mystery. Everything is revealed, and that is not a strong dramatic strategy.

Simply, I think In the Blood would be a more interesting play if the confessions were not in it. The relationships between the characters would be less clear – as they would likely be in life – but filled with more tension, and as audience members we have enough information to make the proper deductions.

I feel the same way about the songs (which Parks wrote, both music and lyrics) in F**king A. They tell us things we already understand the characters are thinking. No matter how good they are, they can’t help seeming redundant.

There are other strategies available for musical numbers in plays. Two of these are to write songs that move the story along, or to write songs that tell us something about the character that we didn’t know before. (Those are approaches frequently used in Broadway musicals.) Another, which Brecht often used, is to write songs with moods that contrast with the scenes they are in. Both are stronger than using songs to illustrate what we already know.

Parks does none of these things. As a result the songs are a matter of A + A = A, and that equation is not dramatically useful.

And I do not feel that the plots of In the Blood and F**king A work as well as they are intended to. In the Blood, a play depicting a poor, unmarried woman with five children, each with a different father who has never acknowledged them, is a story about sexuality run amok, and it is the sexual drives of all the characters that combine to leave Hester condemned at the end of the play, driven to distraction to do the last thing she would want to do.

But what stands out for me in the play is essentially a different story: the desperate efforts of a poor woman to keep her family intact. So for me the plot of In the Blood is insufficiently connected to this core meaning. 

Also, Rick points out in his posting on In the Blood that the device of five actors playing both the adults around Hester and the children they’ve fathered, has an exception in the case of one of the characters (Amiga Gringa), who couldn’t have “fathered” Beauty. (See the report, “The Red Letter Plays: In the Blood” on 12 October, for a fuller explanation of this matter.) This is not a crucial issue, but it does indicate either a too schematic approach to the plot, or else too little concern over its nature.

As for F**king A, its plot strikes me as too blatantly “well made,” with its characters driven by the plot, rather than driving it. Parks I imagine would say rather that the plot is driven by the characters’ needs for money, and this point is clearly made in the play, but it still strikes me as overly schematic.  Spoiler alert – here’s one plot point: Butcher tells Hester how to kill a pig painlessly (he hopes), by slitting its throat. A knife works its way into the story. When her son is about to be tracked down by savage bounty hunters, you know that knife is going to be used.

The plot of F**king A also strikes me as extremely reminiscent of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the 1979 musical written by Hugh Wheeler (book) and Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics), in its revenge plot, its lead character sent into practically mania at the end of the first act, and its half-sacrificial killing at the final curtain. 

Having said those things, I have run out of negatives about In the Blood and F**king A. After all, these “cons” are relatively few, and are far outweighed by the “pros,” which I will briefly recapitulate, and which make the plays, despite any possible shortcomings, important pieces, well worth seeing, both because of their technique and their content. On the most basic level, neither play, once you’ve seen it, will soon leave your mind. You will have plenty to think about. The characters (I’d say) remain vivid to us. The stories haunt us.

The points of the stories ought to haunt us – the fragility of family life; the ways society threatens marginal families, especially their children; the courage required to live in an urban world, especially as a member of a minority group (but not exclusively, and the Signature production of F**king A used “color blind” casting).

Then, Parks has a strong interest in United States history, and a vivid way of presenting it, as shown in the title of her play Father Comes Home From the Wars (in its various parts). She is always mindful of the African-American experience so central to our national story, and she is mindful of the rest of our history as well. When the central characters in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog (2001) are named Lincoln and Booth, that’s not a gag; that’s a lesson in American history in two names.

                  

And the African-American experience, with our historical legacy of slavery, is crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our world. Freedom, liberty, and personal security, as we see every day, are not issues restricted to one race or to one time.

And, as Rick has shown particularly well in his posting on F**king A, and as I have tried to indicate here too, Parks is brilliant in her use of the resources of theater, and equally brilliant in the sweep of her imagination.

That imagination reaches awe-inspiring heights in her 365 Plays/365 Days (2006), the results of her successful effort to write a play a day, which sometimes produces scenes like the following, the concluding stage direction from “August 20”:

The Man takes a bite from the cabbage.

The Woman continues to build the house of cards.

It gets quite grand. They lacquer it and live in it.

It survives the rains and the mudslides. It makes the cover

of House Beautiful. Their children sell it for a pretty penny.

In short, life goes on, and it goes on pretty well

when you compare the existence of the average American Joe

to the existence of the Average Joe in a less-fortunate country.

Still in all, the Woman’s worries, while mostly forgotten,

were very well-founded.

Although I haven’t seen Plays/Days professionally produced, I have seen acting classes use such scenes with remarkable results.

Parks continues to be a particularly active playwright, and her presence in our theater gives me great hope for its future.

[It’s no longer practical to list all of Kirk’s past contributions to Rick On Theater over that past 8½ years.  They’re far too numerous now—not least because the blog was in large part Kirk’s idea to start with.  I’ll just say that, in addition to his pieces on Suzan-Lori Parks (referenced above), my friend has also written for ROT on many various topics, including several kinds of music (jazz and rock ’n’ roll), the Beatles, stage directing, reviewing (on which he’s published a book, The Art of Writing Reviews), playwriting, and a whole host of other topics, including some very personal ones, on which I could never write.  If any readers find “The Red Letter Plays, Continued” interesting, I recommend using the blog’s search engine (in the upper left-hand corner of the site) to find other Woodward articles.  Whatever ones you select, I guarantee you’ll encounter something interesting—and edifying.]

The Red Letter Plays: 'Fucking A'

The second play in the Signature Theatre Company’s Red Letter Plays tandem productions was Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A, which began previews under the direction of Jo Bonney (see my reports on By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, 27 May 2011, and The Mound Builders, 27 March 2013) in the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, the company’s variable-space house, on 22 August 2017 and opened on 11 September.  Extended a week from its original closing date of 1 October, it had its last performance on 8 October; my friend Kirk (who went to In the Blood with me, too) and I saw it at the 7:30 performance on Wednesday evening, 4 October (after having been canceled out for 13 September due to an undefined “actor emergency”).  The Red Letter Plays were Parks’s final productions in her 2016-17 Residency One at STC; she will be followed in that slot for the 2017-18 season by Stephen Adly Guirgis.  (Guirgis will be presenting three plays at STC, starting with Jesus Hopped the 'A’ Train, which I’ll be seeing on 27 October; a report on that production will follow soon after.)

Fucking A premièred at the DiverseWorks Artspace in Houston, Texas, for Infernal Bridgegroom Productions on 24 February 2000; directed by Parks.  It was presented Off-Broadway at the Public Theatre, opening on 25 February 2003; directed by Michael Greif.  The Signature’s staging is the first New York revival since the Public’s production.  (It’s also the first time the two Red Letter Plays, which were written separately, have been staged in tandem.  For a brief description of Parks’s account of how she came to write the two plays, see my report on In the Blood, posted on 12 October.  There’s also a profile of the playwright in my report on The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World on 1 December 2016.) 

Like Parks’s In the Blood, which was composed and staged first, Fucking A is a riff on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter.  (As I said in my ITB report, it isn’t necessary to have read The Scarlet Letter to follow Fucking A.  You can look the novel up for yourself,  so for now, I’ll just say that it’s set in Puritan Boston in the 1640s where Hester Prynne, married to a man believed lost at sea, gives birth to a daughter whose father she refuses to name.  Cast out of the community, she’s forced to wear a red letter A for “Adulteress” embroidered on the bodice of her dress.)   Neither play is an adaptation of or sequel to Hawthorne’s novel; like its sister play, Fucking A, a tragedy with songs for which Parks wrote the music and lyrics (played in lofts  overlooking either side of the stage by cast members doubling as musicians directed by Todd Almond), uses elements of the novel to explore and examine modern-day issues Parks considers important to contemporary society: poverty, class structure, marginalization, systemic prejudice against women, motherhood, fatherhood, among others.

Set in an unspecified time and place, “a small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere,” Fucking A takes place in a dystopian world where towns are fiefdoms ruled by autocratic mayors.  Hester Smith (Christine Lahti) is an outcast living on the margins of her town’s society.  She bears the letter A branded into the skin above her left breast.  Unlike Hawthorne’s Hester, though, Parks’s isn’t being punished for adultery; her A is for “Abortionist.”  The brand bleeds afresh every time a customer comes, but her status is ambiguous: reviled in public for her trade, in private she’s sought out and employed by the same people who shun her.  The brand, which must by law always be visible, serves as both an indictment and an advertisement, bringing customers to her. 

As Fucking A opens, Hester is talking to her friend Canary Mary (Joaquina Kalukango) about the son Hester hasn’t seen for 20 years.  Boy Smith was sent to prison as a child for stealing a piece of meat from the wealthy family where Hester scrubbed floors, and Hester was forced to become an abortionist or join him behind bars.  The “little Rich Girl” who fingered Boy is now the wife of the despotic Mayor (Marc Kudisch), who runs the town like a tin-pot dictator. 

Hester tells Canary (who, incidentally, wears a bright yellow dress—which Ben Brantley of the New York Times called “curve-hugging,” and, man, is it ever!) that she writes to her son in prison and had been saving her fees to buy Boy’s freedom, but in the meantime, she’s paying installments into the Freedom Fund toward a “reunion picnic” with him.  (Some of Hester and Canary’s conversation, as well as other dialogue throughout the play, is in a language called TALK which only the women of the town speak—used principally when they talk about sex or women’s private parts.  The English translation of these passages is projected on the back wall of the set.  The projections are designed by Rocco Disant.)  The two women’s banter includes their calling each other “Whore” and “Babykiller.”  Hester and Canary sing the “Working Womans Song.”

Canary in turn reveals that she’s become the Mayor’s mistress and that the First Lady (Elizabeth Stanley) can’t give her husband “an heir or heiress.”  The Mayor’s planning to “bump  off” his wife and Canary thinks he’ll marry her.  Hester, who (like Hester, La Negrita in In the Blood) is illiterate, asks Canary to read her last letter from Boy and Canary gives her a gold coin she’s gotten from the Mayor.

Hester goes to the Freedom Fund to make another payment towards her reunion with her son.  The Freedom Fund Lady (Marlene Ginader), a figure certainly inspired by Kafka who keeps the payment records, tells Hester that Boy’s “picnic price” has doubled because he’s “committed a few crimes” since her last payment.  Later, Canary walks through a park “in the middle of nowhere,” where she meets an escaped convict from “up north,” Monster (Donovan Mitchell).  She notices a scar on his arm he says is “from a long time ago.”  After a few moments, she goes on her way.

In a tavern, three Hunters (J. Cameron Barnett, Peter Roman, Ginader), fresh off a successful capture of an escaped prisoner (from whose mutilated body they’ve kept souvenirs: his feet, a finger), lament that they won’t have a shot at catching the “famous convict” Monster for the bounty since he escaped “up north.”  They sing “The Hunters Creed.”  Hester comes in looking for Scribe (Kudisch) so he can write a new letter to her son.  She meets Butcher (Raphael Nash Thompson), who protects her from the abusive Hunters.  Following a confrontation with her husband and then encountering Hester on the street, a distraught First Lady meets Monster in the park.  They exchange some kind words and he remarks on the same scar Canary had noticed.  At the end of their conversation, the First Lady asks if she can kiss Monster.  He agrees, and they kiss.

Late at night in Hester’s house, she finds Butcher sitting in her front room; they’re both wearing bloody aprons from their respective jobs.  They talk about their children and we learn that Butcher, too, has a child, a daughter, in prison.  Hester learns that Butcher has been leaving fresh meat at her door and he confesses that he’s attracted to her.  He teaches her how to slaughter a pig by slitting its throat so that “it never hurts.”  The next morning, Hester comes in from her back room to find that Monster’s broken into her home and he threatens her and robs her of all her money except a gold coin she has hidden in her boot.  While he’s holding her, Monster sees the scar on her arm that matches his, but he doesn’t react.

Hester’s finally paid the Freedom Fund enough for her to have her reunion picnic with her son.  As she waits in the prison yard, she lays out the picnic spread and the guard brings out a prisoner called Jailbait (Roman), who Hester assumes is Boy.  She embraces him and tries to get him to show her his arm; earlier, Hester had told Bucher that when Boy was arrested, she bit him to leave a mark on her son and then bit herself to make an identical mark.  Jailbait’s more interested in the food, however, than he is in her, and Hester realizes he’s not her son.  Jailbait claims he killed her son in prison;  Hester stares at him in shock.  Jailbait finishes eating and assaults Hester sexually and rapes her; too stunned to resist, Hester lets him do what he wants.  She sings “My Vengeance.”

The First Lady has become pregnant by Monster and at first decides to abort the child, but changes her mind at the last minute and chooses to pass it off as the Mayor’s.  Hester’s at Butcher’s shop when the Mayor comes in for an order and announces that he and the First Lady are expecting a child.  Hester hatches a plan for revenge against the First Lady for putting Boy in prison so long ago and enlists Butcher and Canary to help her kidnap the First Lady and abort the baby so that the First Lady can echo the pain that she caused Hester all those years ago.  The next night, Canary and Butcher bring a drugged First Lady to Hester’s house, where Hester aborts the baby, not knowing that it’s her own grandchild. 

After Butcher and Canary leave, Monster runs into the house, trying to escape the Hunters.  Hester has begun to piece together the evidence and realizes that Monster is actually her son, but has trouble accepting that he’s no longer the “angel” she believed he was.  He sings “The Making of a Monster.”  The barking of the Hunters’ dogs gets louder and Monster tells Hester that when they catch him, they’ll torture him to a gruesome death.  He begs Hester to kill him; though at first she resists, she finally slits his throat like Butcher showed her.  The Hunters enter and although they are disappointed to find that Monster’s already dead, they drag his body away because there’s “plenty of fun still to be had.”  Hester sits alone in her house for a moment, reprising “Working Womans Song.”  Soon Hester’s back doorbell begins to ring insistently, but she ignores it and gets her abortion tools and goes into the other room to continue her work.  Even after all she’s suffered, life simply goes on for Hester as it has for 20 years.

(A few words about casting in Fucking A and the STC staging:  In In the Blood, Parks specifies the race of three of the characters, including Hester, La Negrita, leaving the rest open to the directors’ choices.  In Fucking A, the dramatist puts no restrictions on the racial make-up of the ensemble.  At Signature, for instance, Hester Smith is white, Canary is African American, and the First Lady is white; at the Public Theater in 2003, Hester was African American [S. Epatha Merkerson], Canary was Latina [Daphne Rubin Vega], and the First Lady was African American [Michole Briana White].  In Signature’s revival, Christine Lahti’s “son” is African American while the prisoner she thinks is her son, Jailbait, is Caucasian; in 2003, both men were black [Mos Def and Chandler Parker, respectively].  There’s nothing in the text to contradict any combination of actors’ backgrounds.

(In addition, when the production at STC was extended past 1 October, three members of the original cast left the show and their roles were recast.  Ruibo Qian, Brandon Victor Dixon, and Ben Horner were replaced by, respectively, Marlene Ginader, Donovan Mitchell, and Peter Roman.  Early press coverage of the production, including most reviews, will feature the first trio of actors.)

Signature’s Fucking A, which is composed in 19 scenes in two “parts” with an intermission after scene 12 and runs two hours and 15 minutes, is performed on a unit set (designed by Rachel Hauck and lit moodily by Jeff Croiter) that serves as all the play’s locales.  It’s a generally realistic two-story architectural wall with doors, staircases, and landings, but generalized so that it doesn’t represent any place in particular.  It could also be from nearly any period from the Renaissance (say, Hester Prynne’s 17th century) to today.  This confirms that Parks means us to be displaced in time and space—neither the program nor the published text makes any mention of the setting, not even in the vague terms of “Here” and “Now” as in In the Blood.  (There are several mentions of characters going to Europe, so the locale is probably not on that continent—but anywhere else is possible.)  Only Emilio Sosa’s costumes give us an occasional hint about the time; most could be of any period as well, but the First Lady’s scarlet dress and Canary’s yellow one are definitely contemporary.  Those costumes are also the only splashes of color in the otherwise bleak landscape of Hester’s homeland.  The set is painted a dull, institutional green—“puke green,” we  used to call it: the color of school hallways and hospital corridors in the ’50s.

Drawn from the same source  of inspiration, In the Blood and Fucking A couldn’t be more different.  Still, there are similarities, marks of Parks’s art and dramaturgy.  Like ITB, Fucking A is a contemporary tragedy, ending with a horrific act which Parks has rendered completely understandable, if no less shocking, by her storytelling.  I’ve noted above some of the topics Parks explores in the Red Letter Plays, but in the end, Fucking A is about the gap between the classes more than the races, which has been more familiar territory for Parks in the past.  In the Blood can be seen as the struggle of a poor black woman to survive and take care of her family in the face of systemic discrimination, but Fucking A depicts a struggle in a world controlled by those with power and wealth for those who have none to subsist.

Furthermore, both plays’ plots are astonishing in their unpredictability—one of Parks’s most noteworthy gifts is her boundless, and perhaps restless, imagination—while the plays remain absolutely logical.  As one writer has it, “We cannot predict the stories she’ll tell us or even how she’ll tell them”—but once the playwright spins her tale, I nod and think, ‘Well, it couldn’t happen any other way.’ 

Parks has also employed some distancing techniques as in In the Blood.  The race- and gender-blind casting (one of the Hunters is a woman and one of Hester’s waiting clients is played by a man) could be seen as a Brechtian application, though it’s no longer so striking as it once was on New York stages, but the Kurt Weill-like songs dropped into scenes that are largely naturalistic in style are definitely dissociative.  When the characters stop to sing, all other action ceases.  The ambiguity of the time and place, the character labels instead of names—Butcher, Freedom Fund Lady, Scribe—and the secret language of the women and the projection of the translations are other Brechtian touches.  Despite their theoretical origins, though, Parks makes her dramaturgical techniques entirely her own.

All that said, I found Fucking A less appealing as a theatrical experience than In the Blood. (I don’t want to say “enjoyable,” because neither play is intended to be an evening’s entertainment—despite considerable humor.)  It’s not that Fucking A wasn’t engrossing or intellectually stimulating—it was—but I found it much more set-up—constructed—than In the Blood, at least in the way the two plays were presented at Signature.  I didn’t see either play in its first New York production, so this response may be due to the two STC directors’ concepts—though I don’t think that’s so.  Both plays have been described as fables, but it may be that Fucking A is just enough more fable-like than ITB and therefore too much removed from my experience—too distanced, perhaps.  (I’ve read the dystopian novels of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Franz Kafka and been engrossed by them, but the films adapted from them have never been as engaging.  I confess, I didn’t see the recent stage version of 1984 that ran on Broadway this summer and fall, so I don’t know how well it was translated into performance.  I have seen Sidney Kingsley’s stage adaption of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and I recall that worked for me, but that was in the early 1960s and I was a teenager, which may account for its affect on me at the time.)  Whatever the reason, I found Fucking A considerably chillier than In the Blood.

One explanation for that may be my response to Christine Lahti as an actress.  I’ve always found her cold and hard (if you want to check me out, look back at my blog report on Adam Rapp’s Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling, posted on 6 November 2011).  As Hester Smith, she was the warmest, most sympathetic, and most relatable I’ve ever seen her on stage or on screen.  (This is also the first time I’ve seen her play a character outside the upper-middle social class.  Maybe that’s part of the explanation: get her out of her acting comfort zone, and she gets real.)  Lahti, however, is still her own Verfremdung Effekt.  I can imagine her being excellent in several true Brecht roles, such as Mother Courage or Jenny in The Threepenny Opera.  (Several reviews of the 2003 Public Theater production remarked on the warm and human qualities of S. Epatha Merkerson’s Hester; from her other work, I imagine she’d have been more empathetic—but that’s admittedly only in my mind’s eye.)

The other members of the ensemble were excellent, with stand-out turns by Joaquina Kalukango as Canary Mary and Raphael Nash Thompson as Butcher.  Kalukango played Canary as confident and unabashed—even when she acknowledges, “I am a whore”—and at the same time, sensible and charming, even breezy.  Her rendition of “Gilded Cage,” a ballad lamenting the loss of freedom, was wise and clear-eyed.  Thompson was easily the most ingratiating personality on the Linney stage, making Butcher not just a nice man (somewhat bizarrely when he teaches Hester how to slit a throat painlessly, though Thompson handles this almost sweetly), but a devoted protector and guardian.  He, too, revealed much in his solo, the tongue-twisting “A Meat Man Is a Good Man to Marry,” a proposal of marriage from a committed carnivore—but Thompson actually makes it sound endearing.  In her one scene as Freedom Fund Lady, Marlene Ginader (who also played one of the Hunters and one of Hester’s clients)  cut a disconcerting figure in Fucking A, a chatty, friendly personality that disguises a Kafkaesque soul.  Freedom Fund Lady has the mind of Joseph Heller’s Milo Minderbinder (from Catch 22) with the instincts of Dracula, and Ginader played her so coolly it sent a chill up my spine.

Based on 30 published reviews, Show-Score computed an average rating of 72 for Fucking A.  The highest-scoring review was a 92 for Reviews Off Broadway backed up by three 90’s (including New York magazine and Stage Buddy) and the lowest scores were two 40’s earned by Edge New York and Broadway Blog followed by three 45’s (The Hollywood Reporter, The Wrap, Lighting & Sound America); the breakdown was 66% positive notices, 17% mixed, and 17% negative.  My survey includes 18 reviews from the print and cyber media; some of the notices are the same ones I covered In the Blood because the reviewers wrote omnibus reviews of The Red Letter Plays.

In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, Max McGuinness asserted that Fucking A “tries to turn the story of a beleaguered small-town abortionist . . . into a universal parable of sexism and racism.”  He added that “Parks artfully exposes the hypocrisy of those who denounce Hester as a ‘baby killer’ one minute, then anxiously knock on her door the next.”  The second Red Letter Play, however, “becomes overstuffed as prostitution, lynching, mass incarceration and Homer’s Odyssey are all thrown into the mix,” complained the FT reviewer.  “Moreover,” he continued, “under Jo Bonney’s direction, the stylised dialogue, broadly sketched characters, and off-key musical interludes feel like Bertolt Brecht-by-numbers.”  While he praised Christine Lahti for Hester’s “sour wit and brittle dignity,” McGuinness posited that “Fucking A has a lot of points to make, but they’re a little too blunt.”

Matt Windman of am New York described Fucking A as “an explosive combination of gory 17th-century revenge tragedy, ‘Sweeney Todd,’ cabaret performance, confrontational direct address and class warfare.”  (Kirk and I both also glommed onto Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd as soon as the performance was over.)  Jo Bonney’s direction “gives the production an electrifying edge,” added Windman, “with the broad performances of the supporting players (including Marc Kudisch as the local mayor) played against the protagonists’ grim circumstances.”  Overall, the amNY reviewer affirmed, each of the Red Letter Play productions “is an outstanding staging of a bold, difficult and provocative work.  When viewed together, ‘The Red Letter Plays’ proves to be one of the most interesting and rewarding theater events of the fall.”  Barbara Schuler’s “Bottom Line” on Long Island’s Newsday read: “Suzan-Lori Parks delivers powerful riffs on ‘The Scarlet Letter.’”  In this second of two “powerful pieces,” Lahti played Hester “with a potent mix of strength and vulnerability.” 

In the Times, calling the Signature production of Fucking A “compelling revival” and a “vibrantly reincarnated work,” Brantley affirmed that the “forthright, comfortably uncomfortable” opening scene demonstrated that “those involved . . . know what they’re doing.”  The Timesman asserted that Fucking A “is a dark, didactic entertainment deliberately in the mode of Bertolt Brecht,” whom he affirmed is “difficult for American theater artists to get right.”  (Brantley quipped that this was “probably the best American production I’ve seen of a Brecht play that wasn’t written by Brecht.”)  He continued, “It would be all too easy for any interpreters of [Fucking A] to be overwhelmed by the play’s disparate influences and intellectual self-consciousness,” but the STC revival, which the review-writer described as “as harrowing as it is witty,” “is light on its feet—quick, sharp and perfectly paradoxical.”  The production “has the look of a noir fairy tale. It is steeped, visually and verbally, in Brothers Grimmsian images of slaughter and torture” and the “cast brings humanizing shades of pain, greed and longing to symbolic figures, without ever tearing the play’s somber folk-tale fabric.”  Brantley singled out Lahti for her “fierce portrait of ravaging maternal obsession” as Hester.  The Times reviewer summed up his assessment with:

Ms. Parks is best known for her dense, expressionistic studies of black lives trapped in the nightmare of American history.  [Fucking A], with its color- and gender-blind casting, is untethered by topical sociology.  But those looking for parallels to an angry contemporary world divided between rich and poor won’t have to strain.

The New Yorker’s Hilton Als characterized the play as a “story of romance-as-blight” in which there are “[s]o many frustrated dreams” even though “love or the dream of love won’t let anyone go.”  He praised Lahti for the way she “was able to use her body to show how Hester Smith’s slow manner was born out of necessity: her gruesome instruments are heavy in more ways than one, as is her letter ‘A.’”  The New Yorker reviewer’s further remarks concerned both plays and I summarized them in my report on In the Blood (http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-red-letter-plays-in-blood.html). 

Sara Holdren, noting that Fucking A “is closer kin to Brecht than to Hawthorne,” wrote for Vulture/New York magazine that the play is “a fiery, raw-throated shout in the face of hypocrisy, privilege, and injustice.”  It’s “an explicit . . . examination of the class struggle and its brutalities,” Holdren declared, “eschewing the colloquial and familiar for a mode of theatricality that calls attention to its own artifice.  It’s a heightened, dangerous world—and a gut-wrenching one.”  The dramatist “revels in stark, often crass language that cuts across the fourth wall,” she asserted.  “Her characters speak directly to us and, when impassioned, break into ragged bursts of song providing commentary on their actions and social positions.”  Holdren observed:

It takes the ear a moment to adjust at the play’s beginning, but Bonney and her actors handle the blunt, clipped rhythms of the text with confidence.  They don’t overplay the style, nor do they try to force it into naturalism.  They trust that we as an audience will listen and will learn the language.  And we do.

Holdren lauded Lahti for portraying Hester “with fearsome monomania and frighteningly dead eyes” and complimented Kalukango for a Canary who “is rich-voiced and winning, a striking contrast to the flinty, brooding Hester.”  In conclusion, she proclaimed:

Fucking A is a rare play in our contemporary landscape.  It reaches across genres and performance styles—musical, Jacobean revenge play, Brechtian epic theater—drawing on the gifts of a multitalented ensemble to touch something frighteningly prescient about a world twisted by inequity and disenfranchisement, a world in which resentment and hatred can bloom into a cancer.  The fiery Russian poet and playwright Mayakovsky, in defiance of Hamlet’s famous dictum to “hold a mirror up to nature,” once wrote: “The theatre is not a reflecting mirror, but a magnifying glass”—it can enlarge and, held at the right angle, it can burn.  In the hands of Jo Bonney and company, Fucking A both amplifies specific brutal aspects of the society it observes and leaves a smoldering mark.

In Time Out New York, Raven Snook affirmed that the “expressionistic and politically charged exploration of class, family and violence, studded with jarring bursts of humor and song” that is Fucking A “owes more to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera than to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel.”  The woman from TONY, cautioned theatergoers that director Bonney “struggles to establish a cohesive tone,” but reports that “Fucking A’s alternations between pain and entertainment are never boring.”  Snook concluded: “Like Hester’s bloodily branded A, the play leaves an indelible mark.”  Marilyn Stasio  of Variety deemed that Bonney “runs with the play’s sense of menace” and Lahti’s “fiercely drawn Hester is a survivor, but so consumed with equally balanced passions of love and hate you can’t tear your eyes away from her.”

Frank Scheck, in one of Show-Score’s low-rated notices, stated bluntly in his “Bottom Line” in the Hollywood Reporter: “F—ing no.”  (In case some readers hadn’t noticed, many publications, including the New York Times, TheaterMania, and Variety, among others, won’t print the vulgar participle that forms half of Parks’s title.  It’s somewhat amusing how the editors and publishers twist themselves into pretzels to come up with an alternative—amusing, that is, until you try to find the coverage in a search engine or database!)  Noting that the “elements of Jacobean revenge tragedy and the plays of Bertolt Brecht” Parks inserted in Fucking A “should be enough to create an engaging theatrical experience,“ Scheck felt however that the play “never manages to transcend its derivative, ersatz feel.”  He complained that “the work comes across like the thesis playwriting project of a zealous grad student.”  Though the production is “suitably visceral,” the HR reviewer contended, “It may occasionally succeed in its goal of shocking the audience, but for long stretches this play just never comes to theatrical life.”  The playwright, asserted Scheck, “occasionally delivers here the sort of virtuosic writing that rouses our attention[, . . . b]ut F—ing A becomes bogged down in borrowed stylistic devices.”  The reviewer continued that though “the play traffics in important, urgent themes, its affectations prove its undoing.”  Director Bonney “infuses the proceedings with intense theatricality,” while the actors “tear into their schematic roles with energy and conviction,” said Scheck, praising Lahti as “the standout with her fiercely commanding turn.” 

On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart called the STC production of Parks’s Hawthorne riff “a powerful revival” of a play that “asks if we've really progressed beyond the cruel puritan society of the early Massachusetts Bay Colony.”  Director Bonney “elicits a believable hunger from the cast” and Stewart reported that Lahti played Hester “with a motherly combination of vulnerability and ferocity.”  Carol Rocamora of Theater Pizzazz characterized the Red Letter Plays as “wildly original” and “provocative,” and labels Fucking A “compelling.”  Parks’s play, “with its rich characters and gripping plot,” presented Rocamora with a number of Brechtian references which she saw as aspects of the playwright’s “bold and fearless inventiveness.”  The Theater Pizzazz writer affirmed, “Under Jo Bonney’s masterful direction, the play is gripping and darkly entertaining despite its traumatic content” and she pronounced Lahti’s Hester “superb.” 

Joel Benjamin had quite a bit to say on TheaterScene.net about Parks’s writing and the Red Letter Plays as a pair, which I reported in my ITB write-up and won’t repeat here.  Of Fucking A, Benjamin said that Bonney “turns it into a blood and guts oversized verismo opera in which passions and revenge drive the plot.”  (According to The American Heritage Dictionary, verismo is “an artistic movement of the late 19th century, originating in Italy and influential especially in grand opera, marked by the use of common, everyday themes often treated in a melodramatic manner.”  I had to look it up, too.)  On Broadway World, Michael Dale called the play “sardonically abstract” and Bonney’s production “chilling.”  Lahti played Hester “with determined grit,” Kalukango is “wryly humored” as Canary, and Kudisch‘s Mayor is “grandly hammy.”  Rocamora particularly relished the “lengthy, crazily off-beat” speech of Butcher in which he lists all his daughters crimes, delivered “beautifully” by Thompson.

“Fucking A is a dystopian fable,” declared Elyse Sommer on CurtainUp.  Though “relentlessly downbeat and bloody as any Greek tragedy,” STC’s Fucking A “has been given a production that works well on all levels.”  The CU review-writer reported that Bonney directed “with a sense for the rhythm to keeps it flowing” and the “cast, top to bottom, is up to giving fresh, meaningful life to” the play.  Like other reviewers, Sommer singled out Lahti as “gut-stirring” and Kalukango for “a lovely, bouncy performance.” In the lowest-scored review (40), Samuel L. Leiter bluntly proclaimed on The Broadway Blog:

Barely any of the show works and, while the play and production, energetically directed by Jo Bonney, have their fervent admirers, I found Fucking A’s two hours and fifteen minutes hard to sit through: pretension, illogicality, artificiality, exaggeration, and banality will do that to you. 

Leiter complained that “the goal of creating a ‘this is theatre, not life’ atmosphere succeeds only in underlining the dialogue’s affectation” and he contended, “A feminist subtext is ticking beneath the surface but the play’s embellishments prevent it from exploding.”  In addition, the BB reviewer charged that “the score is as dully ersatz as the writing and contributes little to the narrative or thematic continuity.”  He called the plot “clumsy,” the characters “stereotypical,” and accused he actors of “overacting.”  The Broadway Blogger protested (“for literal-minded people like me”) Bonney’s alogical interracial casting (particularly Hester’s confusing the white Jailbait for her black son).   “Colorblind casting is commendable,” Leiter acknowledged; “in this case, it’s a distraction.”  His “big regret,” though, was “that Christine Lahti, unattractively bewigged, made up, and costumed . . . in Mother Courage-like basic drab, retains an aura of speech and sophistication that suggests she’s playacting rather than fitting seamlessly into Hester’s more life-battered skin.”  Leiter concluded, “Without a Hester to believe in, there’s no way one can grasp just what Parks wants to say about class, gender, sex, and motherhood, much less believe she’s said it in Fucking A.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, Howard Miller reported that STC’s Fucking A “unfolds with the inevitab[ility] of a Greek myth, with a low-key style of performance that would seem to be intentional on the part of director Jo Bonney.”  Miller complained that for this reason, “and after so much set-up, the act of revenge is rather anti-climactic.  There is no catharsis for Hester or for us.”  Kathryn Kelly warned us on Stage Buddy, “If you are convinced society has progressed beyond Nathaniel Hawthorne’s vision in The Scarlet Letter, Suzan-Lori Parks has an offering to prove otherwise.”  Of course, she was referring to Fucking A, “a staggering work of expert storytelling and captivating performances brought to life by Jo Bonney’s direction.”  The cast is “exemplary,” most “seamlessly” playing several roles as well as performing the music.  Kelly pointed out, “The journey to knowledge is difficult and ends in a heartbreaking climax, comparable to the most searing of Greek tragedies, but the lessons are necessary.”  She ended by urging, “Don’t miss this experience.”

The top-scorer among Show-Score’s review assembly was Scott Mitchell’s notice on Reviews Off Broadway (92).  In it, he insisted that Fucking A “honors Nathanial Hawthorne’s work” and that Bonney “gets great performances from the cast, and the pacing of this piece works beautifully.”  Mitchell felt that Lahti “does a remarkable turn bring[ing] Hester Smith to life.”  (On Show-Score’s website, the quotation for this entry didn’t match the ROB website, so I went in search of the source.  It turns out, Mitchell also uses Facebook to post some of his opinions, and the single paragraph on Fucking A is a little more specific: “Christine Lahti and Brandon Victor Dixon [replaced at the performance I saw by Donovan Mitchell] stand out in an excellent cast in ‘F**king A’, a searing play based on the themes found in ‘The Scarlet Letter.’”)