Alum Suzan-Lori Parks’ new play reimagines America
As the Public Theater prepares to stage Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ newest play, the New York Times caught up with the Mount Holyoke College alum to talk about her overall body of work and how she got to where she is today.
Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks ’85 knew she wanted to be a writer when she was in elementary school. She’d often sit under the family piano writing songs and plays.
When she shared that dream with a teacher at her high school, it was suggested that Parks not be a writer as her spelling was very poor. Rather than casting her dreams aside, she used the discouraging comments as fuel, determined to make sure she could spell.
Since then, Parks has become a recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant,” a Guggenheim fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize.
As the Public Theater prepares to stage Suzan-Lori Parks’ newest play, the New York Times caught up with the Mount Holyoke College alum to talk about her overall body of work and how she got to where she is today.
The play, “Sally & Tom,” takes up the “relationship” between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore him seven children and was 14 years old when Jefferson began a sexual relationship with her. The play tells the story of a Black female playwright named Luce and her white director husband, Mike. As veterans of an outsider theater troupe called Good Company, they try to break into the mainstream with a production about Hemings and Jefferson. Mike pushes for a simple story about forgiveness and reconciliation, while Luce struggles with how to portray a more complicated version of Hemings and Jefferson’s entanglement as slave and master, girl and adult male as well as lovers. Luce’s depiction isn’t a love story but also isn’t that of basic violence.
The article also touches on Parks’ time at Mount Holyoke College. The Kentucky native settled on the South Hadley institution after falling in love with the campus’ 1,200 trees. During her junior year, she was admitted to a 15-person seminar taught by James Baldwin, who was then on faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Each week, students would have their writing workshopped. When Parks brought her stories to class, she would stand up and perform them as if they were meant for the stage.
“I’m acting out these stories, and Mr. Baldwin suggested I try writing for the theater. He told me I could be good,” said Parks.
She also noted that the most important lesson she learned from Baldwin’s seminar was how to show up as a writer and a human being.
“What I received was how to conduct myself in the presence of spirit,” she said. “You have to wrestle, tussle with the angels. I like writing because you get to hold the hand of the spirit.”
And, of special note, the author of the piece is last year's Commencement speaker, Imani Perry, a professor in studies of women, gender, and sexuality, and in African and African American studies at Harvard University.