Adapting Ambiguous America; or, per-Forming a More Perfect Union in the Plays of Caridad Svich and Suzan-Lori Parks

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 29 (2009): 99-112 Adapting Ambiguous America: or, per-Forming a More Perfect Union in the Plays of Caridad Svich and Suzan-Lori Parks1 Jodi VanDerHorn-Gibson Introduction From the inception of the United States, race has been a supremely defining characteristic for both the inhabitants of the colonies, and for the face of the nation itself. Those who were white, male, and Western European wrote: “We the People, in order to form a more perfect union . . .” while those who were indigenous were “Americanized” or simply annihilated, and while those who were black were imported and exported along with the sugar and the tobacco. In these supposedly “post-race” days, the United States continues to grapple with the “race line” as Dr. Du Bois called it—as evidenced through the focus on race in the 2008 Presidential Election. In as late as October, political pundits were claiming that President-elect Obama’s mixed racial heritage would ultimately provide him with a second place finish on November 4th, indicating that a vast number of the people of the United States would be unable, even in this 21st century world, to look beyond “race” as it has been traditionally drawn and invented. Through Alchemy of Desire/Dead Man’s Blues by Caridad Svich and The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks, I look at linguistic negotiation in the reinvention of US American history and culture. These plays speak to a larger framework of cultural identification, longing, and searching through a disruption of commonly held and traditionally accepted forms. I explore ways in which Svich and Parks use and manipulate language to point to an exiling of, and search for, an authentic self in an increasingly culturally ambiguous and transforming world. These texts act as sites of transfer, transmitting knowledge while smudging historically and traditionally defined distinction (Taylor 2; 11; 25). While doing so, they ask the audience to consider “flexible definitions” of cultural knowledge, memory, and identity. They blur distinct racial/geographical/cultural boundaries, and challenge audiences to move beyond a traditionally identified landscape through 1 This article is the revised version of the talk delivered at the conference organized by American Studies Association of Turkey (Boğaziçi University, 8-10 October 2008). Jodi VanDerHorn-Gibson the words of a Black Abraham Lincoln, and the culture and mysticism of a racially ambiguous Bayou. I invite readers to explore history and present day in order to see more clearly the ambiguities and contradictions still at work while searching for the People’s “more perfect union;” and in an increasingly multi/trans/inter-and intra-cultural world, I present a challenge to investigate the space between Suzan-Lori Parks’ “America,” Caridad Svich’s “America,” and your own “America.” In the 2006-2007 academic year I placed Alchemy of Desire/Dead Man’s Blues and The America Play on the required reading lists for two of my classes—History of the Theatre, and Acting. With obviously different content and focus between the two courses, I was very interested in the students’ radically similar responses to these two plays. Both plays blew apart my students’ traditionally held beliefs in theatre, dramatic structure, and performance. For my history students, it was evident that cultural memory and identity remains strongly grounded in white/ Anglo-phone notions of identity which is why some vehemently disliked The America Play. They dismissed Parks’ play as “just another play talking about the oppression of blacks.” My acting students were thrown more by the organization of Alchemy of Desire/Dead Man’s Blues and conveyed a sense of alienation from the play—that they were unable to understand what was going on with the characters’ needs and wants. Many of them admitted that they could not get past the organization at all and that the story was completely lost on them. Here the well-made play was being made foreign. In response, the students in both courses were desperately trying to continue in a Realistic notion of dramatic literature by shoving these plays into an Aristotealian box of “structure.” Both texts deal with memory—cultural and collective—and were being decoded by my mostly white, middle-to-upper class students from Long Island, New York. But in both Alchemy of Desire and The America Play, the playwrights do more than just encode an interesting message in the DNA of each play. Both Svich and Parks create worlds where the students reacted to not just the organization, but to the ideas presented to them in these “alternate universes.” The musicality of Alchemy gave them unsure footing of how to interpret the text which sounds more like the heightened language and poetry of a writer from an earlier century. The America Play disrupts commonly held ideas about US American history through a Black Abraham Lincoln living in the “Great Hole of History.” Parks expresses concern that in a general sense, the “history of History is in question” and that a play is a way of rewriting the history that has been “unrecorded, dismembered, [and] washed out” (Parks Possession 4). Alchemy of Desire and The America Play dissect “American identity” and spotlight the 100 Adapting Ambiguous America opacity of history itself. Both Parks and Svich are part of a generation of writers who “seek to deconstruct and reconstruct not only theatrical forms but also the boundaries by which those forms have been created” (Svich Out of the Fringe ix). Their manipulation of form and language are at work in the undoing of strict center/margin delineations as they comment and critique theatre and culture in the United States. The Plays Alchemy of Desire/Dead Man’s Blues, described as eerie and lyrical, metaphysical and emotive; challenging and provocative, elusive and strange (Svich Out of the Fringe xii-xiv) centers around a small community marked by and living with the effects of war and death. Simone mourns Jamie, her husband of one-month who died in a war in a country no one has ever heard of. Alchemy is a haunting story with two titles and two story-lines. Simone grieves Jamie, and the scenes shift back and forth between Simone and her neighbors and Jamie’s search, caught somewhere between two worlds wandering the earth. The play begins with Simone sitting alone on stage, surrounded by buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The four women in the neighborhood, like a Greek chorus, are the alchemists of the play. Tirasol, Caroline, Selah, and Miranda appear and disappear like the mist of the Bayou. At times they are cutting up vegetables, other times Selah is hunting stones and talking about ghosts; Tirasol sings a haunting song of death and loss, reminiscent of Greek choral odes of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschelyus: Take me to the flood, Lilah. Take me to the flood. I wanna see the moon winkin through river of blood, through river of blood … Take me in a flood, Lilah (...truncated)