Well, Suzan-Lori Parks doesn't fail to confuse with her OBIE and Best New American Play award-winning play, The America Play. You only thought Top Dog/Under Dog was weird...I am not entirely sure what Parks was trying to say with this play, but because of its avant garde nature, perhaps its take-away meaning is unique to the audience member. In this story, parks creates a somewhat disconnected dreamlike state where characters come to find themselves in their setting without explanation.
Again, we have the image of a black man impersonating Abraham Lincoln for money, only this time he is in a "Great Hole of History", a theme park of sorts. He was previously a grave digger, who worked with his wife, Lucy, who keeps secrets for the dead, and their son, Brazil, a skilled "weeper". He goes by the name "The Founding Father" and has run away from his family to become said impersonator. He dies at the end of act I, so act II consists of Lucy and Brazil's search for his body by listening to random noises through a special horn. Lo and behold, they find him alive, but still feel the need to bury him. The play ends with Brazil attempting to climb a ladder out of the hole while The Founding Father refuses to be buried.
WHAT ON EARTH?
Hahaha! What on Earth is right! SLP was quoted as saying she was all about "collective raising of the collective unconscious". If that doesn't tell you right there what type of person she is, well… I read a SLP play for my first show and tell post, and it was a doozy. For Jim's stagecraft class this semester, I did a project on her, and not only is she obsessed with the Lincoln/Booth idea, she loves making her audiences question history. She often creates situations, similar to Donnie Darko's tangent universe philosophy, where a world similar to the actual world is running tangent to the real world, like a worm-hole. It's kinda like a "What if..?" scenario. I didn't read The America Play, but judging from your post, The Founding Father doesn't want to die. History/Origin doesn't want to die, even though he was dead at the end of Act I. Coincidence? I think not! In the play I read, Black Man with Watermelon dies over and over again. Death doesn't mean for SLP what it means for us. For her, Death is like hitting the reset button. It's the antithesis of final, and in a theatrical world, why not? Kudos for even reading SLP, because it's frustrating and stressful. Nice job!
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