The America Play

In her collection The America Play and Other Works, Suzan-Lori Parks includes three essays that supplement and contextualize her unusual and unique approach to playwriting. In the first essay, “Possession,” she describes the theater as a site for creating much of the African American history that has been lost, explaining that one of her jobs as a playwright is to “locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down” (12). Parks compares the process of theatrical mythmaking to artificial insemination, in which the resulting baby is still a human being. Throughout her body of work, Parks endeavors to uncover lost histories by constructing humans where only a few bones remain.

Parks cites philosopher John S. Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy to explain the conceptualization of the living dead in her work, the dead who continue to exist simultaneously in the past and the present. Parks’s plays are therefore works of spiritual possession or acts of mediumship that can bring the past into the present. Because the performances are events that actually occur and are embodied, they become new acts of history that are worthy of inclusion in the canonical mainstream