As a child, Suzan-Lori Parks’ parents gave her a big book of Greek myths. She was drawn to the mythic characters and became similarly fascinated with iconic historic figures. For Parks, it’s a negligible leap from Greek myth to American myth. She explains, “Lincoln and Booth, Cyclops – it’s the same thing.”
Parks’ fascination with history is less interested in linear narratives of singular moments, but rather its cyclical nature and the weight of the past on the present. A central element to her work is the concept of “rep and rev,” or repetition and revision. She likens it to the jazz practice of introducing a musical phrase, and then repeating it, but with an illuminating twist. In her work, not only does history go through “rep and rev,” but words, phrases, gestures, and even costumes are being continuously reconfigured. In this play, a Black man performs in whiteface as Abraham Lincoln as arcade patrons take on the role of John Wilkes Booth, who famously shouted “Sic semper tyrannis! (Thus always to tyrants!) The South is avenged!” after assassinating “The Great Emancipator.” Kids in school uniforms, tourists, businessmen, and housewives pay to shoot Linc-as-Lincoln over and over and over.
It is easy to link it to the cycle of broken promises in Black American history – 40 acres given to newly freed Black families by Sherman’s Field Order in 1865 only to be re-possessed months later and given to former Confederate landowners. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, only for the loophole “except as punishment for a crime” to send thousands into virtual re-enslavement via convict leasing. $75 million entrusted by formerly enslaved individuals to Freedman’s Savings Bank from 1865, only to be lost after speculative loans to the white owners’ business partners defaulted. The 14th and 15th Amendment granting birthright citizenship and voting rights, leading to violent mob intimidation so Black voter turnout dropped from 90% to 2% in 1 election cycle. A withdraw of federal troops from the South, making way for Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. A G.I. Bill promising college tuition and job training, only to be denied to returning Black WWII servicepersons. And over and over.
But ultimately for Parks, this play is about two Black brothers. When pressed about what “statement” the play is making, she simply responds, “There are two men in the room. Just take it for that… Lincoln says, when he’s teaching Booth cards, ‘Don’t think about the cards! Don’t think about anything. Just watch. Just look. Just take it in.’
Parks’ characters are neither victims nor saviors, but complex, resilient, loving, and passionate humans, simply worthy of mythic attention if we “watch [them] close now.” It is the kind of attention that can only happen in the theater. Parks explains, "Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history—that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as playwright is to - through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real life - locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, hear the bones sing, write it down." She goes on to say that creating “'new' historical events are thus ripe for inclusion in the canon of history." For Parks, humanity can be found in the mythical, and the mythical can be found in humanity. For all of us. She offers, “This is a play about family wounds and healing. Welcome to the family.”
