The Invisible Pantheon

© Todd France/Corbis

Suzan-Lori Parks, a Pulitzer-winning playwright, usually watches her productions from the back of the house. But on Friday, September 14, she was center stage with a microphone and guitar, dressed from beanie to boot in all black, belting out songs. Parks, a recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in Drama, was performing in the Enormous Room of the Afro-American Cultural Center as part of an event called “Writing Songs with Suzan-Lori Parks” — a rare moment of celebrating songwriting during a weekend dedicated to highlighting outstanding literary writers.

Performing songs both from her plays and from her band, Suzan-Lori Parks and the Band (they went through a lot of names, but she couldn’t remember any of them, she explained. The band is currently comprised of Parks, her husband, and a computer), Parks offered insight into her songwriting process, the musicians and people that inspire her, and the experience of leaving her comfort zone of playwriting for other musical forms. After the performance, Parks fielded a series of questions from the audience. Here are some of the most memorable moments from the night:

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After her first song, Parks briefly addressed the fact that it has taken her the majority of her adult life to come back around to playing the guitar, for the most part because of how her aspiration was treated when she was younger. “When I was a kid, I really, really wanted to play the guitar. I think I’d seen someone in church playing the guitar,” she said. “Some of my white friends played the guitar, and I went up to them like, ‘I want to play the guitar, too!’ And they were like, ‘uh, black people don’t play the guitar!’ No better were my black friends, because I went to them and was like ‘I’m going to play the guitar,’ and they said, ‘what, you trying to be white?’ So there was a misunderstanding about what kind of folks played the guitar.”

This misunderstanding, Parks explained, was caused in part by a pre-Internet age popular culture that overrepresented white guitarists and underrepresented everyone else. “I didn’t have access to the pantheon of great guitar players: black men, black women, righteous white folks, folks of all colors and stripes,” she said. To remedy this, Parks spent two minutes listing this pantheon.

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Parks spoke about the disparate roles that songs play in musicals and in her plays. “I believe in two kinds of motion for a plot,” she said. “You have horizontal motion — moving along — and I also believe in vertical plot development, like going deeper.”

Parks used the example of “The Making of a Monster,” sung by Monster, a character in her play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, to illustrate this point. “He runs into his mother’s house, she realizes it’s him, and he has to explain himself to him,” Parks said. “It’s not forwarding of the plot; it’s an opening of the soul. My songs usually do that — they employ vertical development.”

Parks also described the artistic and musical genres that have heavily influenced her playwriting styles, including types of music she was exposed to from a young age. “My dad loved opera. He was a six-foot-four black guy, army guy, he would turn on the opera music really loud and walk around the house and sing La Traviata, Wagner, Puccini, you name it,” she said. “My mom loved jazz — especially bebop. She would turn on the jazz music and we’d dance and she’d teach us how to jitterbug. One day I realized that my structures of my plays are very opera, and the people inside of it are jazz.”

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Right before her encore performance, Parks reminded the audience that while she is usually lauded for her playwriting, this event centered her singing-songwriting skills — and it took her time to arrive at a point where she was comfortable oscillating between genres. “[The change] is not so much in the writing — it’s in the presentation. Here I am. I am sitting here in front of you,” Parks said. “In a couple hours, there will be a presentation of my work. I’m gonna be sitting in the audience and actors will be performing. I decided several years ago to cross the line and put myself in a place where I could give and receive energy to people.”

For Parks, it is important to continue to experiment, fail, and succeed. “You see, Suzan-Lori Parks has a substantial amount of laurels that she could sit on, and I choose to continue to grow,” she said. “There’s less risk [writing plays]. There’s more risk if I’m like, ‘I’m going to pick up a guitar and go to Yale and sing songs. And let’s see what happens.”

The Set List

1. After pulling her phone out of her right boot and switching it to silent, Parks first played “Bronze Star,” a song she wrote for her father, who served overseas in the military. This song was the basis for her 2015 play Father Comes Home From the War, Parts I, II, and III, which played at the Yale Rep last spring.
2. Next, she played an unnamed protest song, which she said she would play if she ever got invited to the White House. “I am gonna be colored all my life/we don’t got time to take no mess from you,” Parks sang in the first and last verse. On its writing: “I think a good protest song invites the good folks to have a little time for introspection.”
3. Parks wrote her third song after reading the news about the murder of Walter Scott, who was shot in the back running from a cop at a traffic stop. “If we say ‘why is this happening again,’ then we do not know how well we have been trained,” Parks sings on the chorus. In the song she also criticized newspapers sensationalizing black sorrow and death.
4. The fourth song she wrote specifically for her play Fucking A, which is a riff on The Scarlet Letter. The song, “The Making of a Monster,” arrives at the plot’s climax, when Monster, who has been incarcerated since a young age, explains himself to his mother, with whom he has recently been reunited. “You think it’d be hard to make something horrid, it’s easy/You think it would take so much work to create the devil incarnate, but it’s easy/Cause the smallest seed grows into a tree, and a grain of sand pearls in the oyster,” Parks/Monster sings.
5. She ended the main portion of her performance with “Your Love To Love Me,” which she first wrote for her band. Then, her most recent play, White Noise — a portion of which premiered later that night at the YUAG, and will open at the Public Theatre in January — follows a group of college friends “who had a band named Clover and had one song in particular that always took them to their happy place.” She needed that one song, and ended up picking “Your Love To Love Me,” an optimistic love song. “It’s weird to do it without my band,” Parks said.
6. As an encore, Parks played a song from Father Comes Home From the Wars. The song, “I Have Misplaced Myself,” is sung by a talking dog character, and, according to Parks, was inspired by the fact that when a slave escaped, his master would announce that he had misplaced himself. Triumphantly, she sang, “You got everything to lose/I got everything to gain/I’m long gone, I ain’t drinkin’ to your health/I have misplaced myself.”

A list of black guitarists (and righteous white folks) Parks recommends, because she didn’t have access to them when she was growing up:

• Memphis Minnie
• Libba Cotten
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe
• Muddy Waters
• Jimi Hendrix
• Prince
• Robert Johnson
• Howlin’ Wolf
• Buddy Guy
• Albert King, B.B. King, and Freddie King (“They’re not brothers!”)
• John Lee Hooker
• Honeyboy Edwards.
• Jessie Mae Hemphill
• Mother Maybelle Carter (“A very righteous player”)
• Chuck Berry
• Charlie Christian
• Django Reinhardt
• Badi Assad
• T-Bone Walker
• and 20 more!