Suzan-Lori Parks and Naomi Wallace in Relation: Playing the American Game for Real and Beyond

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Two American women whose writings for the theatre have been both nationally and internationally recognized, Suzan-Lori Parks and Naomi Wallace have drawn on the notion of game-playing to explore and undermine the inextricability of the power relations that govern their vision of America. Because theatre is about playing, games occupy a central position around which meaning revolves and multiplies on stage, infinitely magnified by Parks’s and Wallace’s poetic imagination. As far apart and unique as they are, their voices deeply resonate with the American landscape and beyond, echoing each other in ways that call for an examination of the correspondences that make their plays related, in the sense Edouard Glissant gave to the term, of a totality that does not exclude differences, of a meeting of pluralities, which is the stable/unstable ground of games, and of a place from where infinite beauty can spring. Parks’s The America Play and Wallace’s The War Boys, both written in the early 90s, evolved through a creative process that feeds on itself into the widely acclaimed Topdog/Underdog that earned Parks a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and The Breach, which was produced at the Avignon Theatre Festival in 2019, expanding Wallace’s popularity in France. Through a comparative analysis of the poetics at work in these four plays, the aim of this article is to bring these two women’s voices together, placing them in relation without erasing their particularities to delineate the contours of a “relational poetics,” to again use Glissant’s terminology, one that evokes rather than explains, one that resurrects the past to reinvent our present and divine the future: an art of divination.