May
24, 2002
On
Broadway with Suzan-Lori Parks '85
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Suzan-Lori
Parks '85 (front, third from right) in New York City with
MHC friends and Topdog/Underdog cast members
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By John Lemly,
professor of English
During the intermission
of Suzan-Lori Parks's '85 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Topdog/Underdog,
a familiar figure waved at me unsubtly across the theater. Elegant
in a creamy long leather coat, it was the person I was looking
for—the playwright herself, who was in New York briefly from
her teaching job at CalArts. The week before she had agreed to
meet me and my modern drama class after the show and “hang
out.” We hugged, then she introduced me to her producer,
Carole Shorenstein Hays, who invited all twenty-four of us to
join her later at a nearby bistro.
Although the show
was just days before finals, students had snapped up the tickets
to the play, some having studied Suzan-Lori's works with me, others
having heard her at commencement last year, and everyone eager
for a night on Broadway. The office of the playwright's classmate
Rochelle Calhoun, sometime actor and acting dean of the College,
along with MHC's English and African American and African studies
departments, had generously subsidized the trip. A few faculty
members—an ad hoc fan club calling themselves Devotees in
the Garden of South Hadley (after the early play Suzan-Lori directed
on campus in 1996)—filled out two vans. Now we were all mesmerized
by Suzan-Lori's story of the intense family struggle of love and
hate between two brothers named Lincoln and Booth.
By play's end, we
caught our breath, bunched our way out into the soft evening,
and strolled down 46th Street, led by our hosts, two of the most
creative women in theatre today. (Hays, with a couple of Tony
Awards to her credit, is currently producing four of Broadway's
new plays.) Arm-in-arm, two students—from rival campus a
cappella groups—improvised rap songs to the May night. But
the magic was just beginning.
We were ushered into
trendy B. Smith's, told to make ourselves comfortable and to order
what we liked, as
guests of Hays. In a few minutes, legendary bluesman Paul Oscher
(Parks's husband) showed up with the entire cast in tow. Both
Lincoln, Jeffrey Wright (Amherst College '87), and Booth, rapster
Mos Def, joined us. Unwinding after their exhausting performance,
they started chatting with students, who soon were acting like
they did this every night. Talk ranged widely—how the play
had grown since last summer's production at Public Theatre; Wright's
student days at Amherst; what Suzan-Lori would wear to the Tony
awards; her abiding love for Mount Holyoke; and Oscher's and Hays's
own extraordinary careers.
Hours passed until
midnight's thoughts of pumpkins and unfinished papers finally
tore us away. On the street outside the bistro, Paul Oscher played
blues harmonica, serenading an enchanted group, reluctant but
almost content to head back to South Hadley. Robins were greeting
the dawn as we rolled into town, still dreaming of the kindness
of strangers.
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