Collaboraction's week of Suzan-Lori Parks' 365 Days/365 Plays

"To an absurd mind, reason is useless, and yet there is only reason."
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

"Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears."
America, the Beautiful

"All of my plays are about love and distance."
Suzan-Lori Parks


Today, February 2, 2007, Barack Obama seems like a man of destiny. Everyone is talking about him, and more importantly, everyone believes that he is going to win and do right. Forget Biden's comparison of his articulateness compared to other African-American presidential candidates. Barack Obama is erudite by the standards of any American politician in the 20th or 21st century, period. By entering the presidential race, he is initiating a serious racial discussion in our country that has not been undertaken on a widespread level since the 1970s.

Now, of course, I live in Chicago, so my sense of this "destiny" is probably a bit overstated. Obama is a Chicago politician, and I went to the University of Chicago, while he and his wife were living and working down there. I met her a few times and she is a really interesting, charming woman. But aside from the pro-Obama-destiny bias stemming from my time in Hyde Park, and aside from the exuberance that Chicagoans feel at a hometown politician entering such a stage, there are other rational reasons to feel skeptical about this sense of destiny. The right-wing has not yet unloaded on him yet--indeed, no one, save for a totally ineffectual Keyes campaign (and a by-the-book Bobby Rush for congress campaign before that, which I also witnessed on the south side). And, of course, he's only been in the Senate for two years. And there are several other facts, that without turning this article into a New Republic submission, could still very seriously hinder his candidacy.

But we feel it, this sense of destiny, and I have come to believe that it is because of, and not in spite of, the very obstacles that we see between Obama and the presidency that we believe in him. Americans love their ideals, and the mood in the country is deeply pessimistic. Barack Obama's candidacy represents the coming-of-age of the ideals of 60s liberalism. This is America, the multi-cultural America, in which anyone, of any background, given a decent opportunity can do anything. This is the America that we learned about in elementary school in the 80s as the inheritance from Martin Luther King's martyrdom.

This sense of idealism in darkness fueled the enthusiasm behind Carter and Reagan, two deeply idealistic candidates entering the stage at profoundly difficult national moments. We need to feel good about America right now, and we need to make that which we believe to be the best and most lovable thing about America come true.

Barack Obama, for many on both the left and right, is an abstraction onto which they can project their fantasies about this American ideal coming true, and the more difficult it appears for Obama, the more they love his candidacy, because it is a miraculous awakening of a wellspring of patriotic feeling. It feels, for those who believe in the ideals to which Obama's candidacy appeals, like a miraculous destiny for a man of his skin color to be president right now. And Obama senses this--his campaign is the definitely shaping the contest to come as one between idealistic optimism that is going somewhere, and pessimistic pragmatism, that has gone nowhere.

Suzan-Lori Parks says that all her plays "are about love and distance." This is certainly true on the domestic level, especially in The America Play. But this love/distance obsession translates most profoundly, in my view, on the political level--in the expression of our political ideals. This is one reason why I believe the the recent 365 Days/365 Plays project in Chicago has been so resonant. Parks feels, in the air, the most recent incarnation of the American ideal shattered, and shows us the responses.

The 365/365 project is the result of a year in which Parks wrote one play a day. Jason Loewith at Next Theatre, whom I met when I was in Hyde Park, when he was casting at Court Theatre, is leading the project to produce this work, week-by-week, in Chicago's theaters. Actually, one wanting to survey the methods of Chicago theater could simply attend each of these performances to get a sense for how each ensemble presents a single playwright's vision.

Parks' vision is of a world in which we are conscious of the futility of action in the service of our ideals. In Chekhov, in Uncle Vanya, the inability to accept this reality amounts to despair for his characters. Parks' characters know that the ideals for which they strive can never be attained, that they enable exploitation and participation in political horrors, and yet, they cannot resist these ideals.

This is the world of Parks' best-known allegory, from both The America Play and TopDog/UnderDog, which both concern a similar principal character, a black man who plays the role of Abraham Lincoln in a carnival attraction in which patrons can act out assassinating him for kicks. In The America Play, we are invited into his nuclear family--which he abandons to go west and make his fortune (ie realize his ideal).

In TopDog/UnderDog, the Black Lincoln character is shown in a different situation--living with his brother, a ne'er do well, ironically named Booth by their father. Lincoln (that is his given name in the play this time) is portrayed as a reformed 3-card-monty shark. He has mastered the magical ideal that has the power to seduce, in spite of its clear fraudulence. His brother is a small-time shoplifter. Booth envies his brothers talent and demands instruction and initiation into the art.

Lincoln is presented to us as a shaman who has traversed the boundaries of his black community, and returned as master of the magic through which the community is ruled. As a card shark, he is a celebrity, a genius, and a hero. But he is not content with this status in the community, as his journey prior to the action of the play has conferred a certain wisdom. Lincoln has exceeded the need for adulation stemming from his mastery of the art. Moreover, he is aware of the dangers of this type of magic--he believes it would get him shot. He refuses to share the wisdom with his brother. He doubts his brother's ability to assimilate that wisdom and he fears for his brother's life should he attain the ability to master the magic without the life-expanding consciousness through which he (Lincoln) has managed to attain desirelessness at the top of the play.

Inscribed in these stories and characters is a radical reading of black and American identity, as well as a living metaphorical depiction of the relationship between Americans and their ideals. Three-card-monty is the metaphor for our impossible, and yet impossibly seductive ideals. We are aware of its fraudulence. But we cannot resist. How do we win our bread, if we are not in the game? By assuming a role and willingly submitting to our own humiliation. In Lincoln's case, he assumes the role of the white foreign patriarch undergoing martyrdom in the service of his ideal. But this is, for Parks, the essence of American life. We assume the role of another's ideal--and then we actively submit to it. But all the while, we are dreaming of mastering the impossible game.

Collaboraction's portion of 365/365 is a depiction of the responses to characters across a broad spectrum of backgrounds to a consciousness of this world. And through a highly audience-interactive style, they depict our own responses to this perverse awareness, too. For the plays produced by Collaboraction in their portion of 365/365 transpire in a world similar to that of Parks' other works.

I was expecting a more or less standard theatrical experience, a seat, a program, house music, and then the show. That is not how it worked. The audience climbed three flights of stairs, at the landings of which we were presented with signs with Parks' quotations--from which the quote at the top was taken. After milling about in the hall, checking in, getting tickets, briefly greeting those we knew, we entered a huge loft space, in which a monolithic DJ stand was built--above which hovered a living space/office from which tech was being run, and in which two giant loosely interlocking platforms ran across the floor. The feel was of an elaborate cocktail party at a club. There were photographic projections of post-industrial and other scenes, and a light show, consisting of light blue and green. There was also a glowing blacklight in the room, reflecting off of large cutouts posted on one of the huge walls of the space.

There was a free bar, and a table at which we could buy Collaboraction stuff. I saw several friends from the show milling about in costume, in character. I saw and chatted with several other friends, and it suddenly occurred to me that this experience of artists meeting and greeting was park of the experience. My isolation, taking notes in the corner, felt foreign. So I mingled.

Thus, the first portion of Collaboraction's presentation gave a representational presentation to the act of socializing. The plays would emerge from the social flux. But we, in our conversations, are shoulder-surfing, checking out to see who's doing what, considering ourselves in the same light. We objectify our peers, measuring ourselves against them in this foreign environment, and we feel ourselves being measured, too.

The stage manager toured the room, quietly giving places calls. The lights calm, and we hear the THX sound-intro. We hear melodramatic strings. The DJ starts talking and rapping over pounding beats. We start moving our bodies, unconsciously to the rhythms. This compounds the club/party atmosphere. Suddenly, we see Sienna Harris running, fast, up the right platform, then ducking and hiding from an imposing bolt of thunder. She is playing a small girl, wearing a depression era girl's dress. She calls out that there's "nothing here." A muscular man, Beethoven Oden, in dreadlocks, enters and tends to her. He is in a child's depression-era garb as well. Interestingly, Margot Bordenton, the director of the piece, chose not to cast actors with skinny, child-like bodies in this piece that features two anachronistically costumed children.

This is a choice. The underlying suggestion, from the top, is that this child's play is an allegorical restatement of the action in adult lives. In silence, watching the two actors, Oden and Harris looking for something, we feel an excruciating tension. From the precipice of the edge of the platform, Harris' character drops a belt and watches it fall. In a moment of physical play that was beautiful, Oden restrains her as she appears to want to jump from the edge of the precipice. As he restrains her, the tension that we felt underlying the action at the top of the scene explodes, as she recounts the horrors of nuclear devastation, and the sense of her own hypothetical and conditional culpability in the the US' dropping of the bomb, had she or other African-Americans been in power at the time.

Oden's character urges the girl to "come inside" with an contrasting, soothing authority and presence. The two characters hear a dog's bark in the distance, and the immediate action of the piece is clear: these two, the boy and girl, have been looking for their dog. We see them share a focus, out toward the dog. They celebrate the dog's return together.

As children, these characters bespeak innocence. But as black children in the garb of the Jim Crow era, they take on a special quality of innocence. This piece suggests an era when blacks in the south lacked virtually any influence on the political process. Harris' character, in this millieu, conjures the images of the bad choices that history leads us to, politically, and the attendant sense of culpability, even amidst the most innocent.

Further, as a mutual friend of Harris' and mine pointed out following the production (a by product of Collaboraction's choice of staging was to encourage this sort of reflection), there is the question of image. The only time the two characters share a point of focus is when the dog is discovered offstage. The larger question of culpability in the horror of Hiroshima is subsumed by the mundane, but shared and simple task of finding the dog, just as the question of the fraudulent appeal of the three-card monty game is subsumed by the everyday tasks of most characters in TopDog. Just as the game is a point of obsession, so is the political world and conditions that underpin the decision to drop the bomb. Just as the game feels inescapably appealing, so one's participation in large political decisions feels inescapable.

This ineluctable reduction of the individual's will to an ideal is then presented from an alternate perspective. We are presented another DJ'ed interlude, in which Anacron Allen refers to Chicago as a "town outside Gary" and plays sax to an infectious beat. The interludes set a baseline rhythm for normalcy for the evening, and the performers either consciously or unconsciously feed off of or play against this rhythm. The cool blue light sets the tone as we enter "The Palace at 4 AM", according to the play's title.

We shift our attention from utterly powerless characters, to the putatively powerful. There is a trill of stately medieval music. We see a woman in royal looking robes (Kay Schmidt), then a man (Len Bajenski), in similar robes, enter, entreating her to "come back to bed" at a similar rhythm to that set by DJ Anacron at the top of the scene. The woman, a mother and a queen, we learn, laments her son's estrangement at a contrastingly slow pace. The son, she says threw his crown in the dirt. We feel her persuade her husband to share the lament. The sun rises, brilliantly. We hear the sound of light string music. They contemplate who will rule. According to the scuttlebutt, it will be the servants. The king vows to protect her at the end.

The theme of a ruling class being supplanted by their servants resonates with the Cherry Orchard, and here, as in the Cherry Orchard, nature's action is a metaphor for the onstage action. The event of the sun's rising adds a nice metaphysical touch. Nature is moving from now to the future, and the social order is changing in just such a way. The mystery by which our community and world is ruled does not, in Parks' world, flow from human beings individually, but something higher, either people collectively or something even more mysterious than that. In Parks' world it is the awareness of one's powerlessness over that mystery that provokes a sense of despair. We are aware of how deeply we are subject to powers greater than our own, and yet we are forced to look for the dog, and we are powerless over our desire to hand the kingdom over to our son. There is this deeply felt distance between us and what we love and want.

Following another interlude from Anacron, we then move back to the other platform, to join a young man (Brad Smith) and woman (Sarah Gitenstein). They climb, with some effort, the platform, suggesting a Sisyphean struggle. The man asks the woman where she's taking him, again at what felt to be the baseline rhythm of the piece, stemming from Anacron's interlude. "Are you taking me to my parents? To the cemetery?", he asks. (I'm paraphrasing here). And at the suggestion of parents, I linked this young man to the preceding piece. The long backpacking trip or encounter with nature feels like a rite of passage, and I inferred from the preceding scene that that's is precisely what the son of the Royal couple was longing for. We have shifted from the cool light of the castle to the warm bucolic tones of nature. The two of them are in crunchy, earthy-looking costumes.

His subsequent question, and her reply are illustrative: "I'm not dead yet!" he asks--and she says "You will be!" The sense here of impending doom transitions from the first scene. The young man is seeking to escape his status as a putative member of the ruling class, and senses his powerlessness to do so. The humor in despair here is glorious: "I can dig the hole!" he replies.

He offers to give her a ride on his back. When he falls, and she grows scared, we sense the underlying fear and despair in the piece, and the pace slackens. After removing his backpack, he re-offers to give her a ride on his back, claiming that he's "still a man." "Sure you are," she replies, as the scene closes.

Following another infectiously scored interlude from Anacron, the same platform is the venue for the following piece, "Space Invaders," a meditation on fundamentalism and nihilistic secularism as a response to Parks' Sisyphean atmosphere of impossibly distant and impossibly seductive ideals. A man pointing "finger guns" with both hands follows sounds of wildlife and shoots. The lights remain in warm tones. Scooter, played by Brad Akin, wearing a mustache and a bathrobe enters, demanding skeptically "What are you doing?!" When Shooter (the other character, played by Max Lesser) responds that he's engaged in target practice, Akin responds, hilariously, in a wonderfully contrary tone and rhythm that he "doesn't see shit." Shooter warns that there are aliens and that Scooter, a non-believer is in danger. Scooter walks off, replying: "I'm gonna watch TV and jerk off." Shooter responds that Scooter can "suit yourself."

Thus Parks links the atmosphere of despair underlying the prior few pieces with the surge in eschatological expectations following from the aftermath of September 11. The fundamentalist response is to focus on the movement of supernatural ideals, and in seeing Shooter preparing for the aliens, we see a represented picture of the war-like mentality of those readers of Revelations who are preparing for the Last Days. We despair of our powerlessness, and we find comfort, on the one hand, from the eschatological expectations and preparations found in fundamentalism.

On the other hand is Scooter, who looks to television and cheap masturbatory titillation as a balm against the atmosphere of despair and insecurity, and as a response to the seeming senselessness of the Shooter. Here, form and content are married: Scooter is radically secular in response to Shooter's radical fundamentalism. But the form, the contrapuntal tone, is the vessel by which we see this response, and the piece succeeds brilliantly because of it.

Then, to complement the rural setting of the previous two pieces, we hear banjo music mixed with hip-hop. Our focus shifts back to the opposite platform. We see rich, green light, and a young man, David Dastmalchian, alone. He is meditating, out loud, on his ability to "barn burn." This is literal. He can "make himself known" by burning his uncle's barn. The title of the piece is "Hamlet/The Hamlet," which is perhaps a suggestion of the melancholy prince in a rural village. That is how the piece is presented by Collaboraction. The young man resents his status as poor, his dead father who is more useful dead than alive, he claims. He begs God for help, and as he does, a woman invites him in to eat. Here is an inversion of the previous form--a young man's torments interrupted by his mother (Gertrude, we presume), where previously in "There's Nothing Here" and "The Palace at 4am," the man consoles and invites inside the tormented woman.

The mother, Morgan McCabe, stands arm in arm with her son, in what we presume is a purposely romantically suggestive pose. She asks if he'll come into eat or simply stare at the barn. She demands at a challenging tone, "They say you're a barn-burner. Are they liars?" He returns inside, and the mother is alone on the porch. "God help us, every one," she prays fervently.

This linkage of the fundamentalist posture with the Hamlet "futility of action" conundrum is key, as they both seem understandable responses to the atmosphere created by the piece. We then hear a mix of 40s music with hip-hop beats, and see a sharply dressed woman strewing the opposite platform with belongings, and Eagan Reich (who recently appeared as Judas Iscariot in Steep's production of the Stephen Adly Guirgis' Last Days of Judas Iscariot) sitting nonchalantly. We see books, shoes and other belongings scatter. The formal action of the scene then starts, and we see the man playing a video game to antiquated "Atari" sounds. The woman is dressing and packing her purse. There is a yellow light on the stage. He loses his game, and at an even tone asks her what she's doing. She replies that that she has a meeting later that day with Brad Pitt (Hence the name of the piece, "Meeting Brad Pitt"). The man is clearly drunk from the bottle of Jim Beam on stage. He tries to make conversation about her life--and is so divorced from her reality that he cannot. The piece closes with his advice to her: "don't pay that guy top dollar!", which had the audience in hysterics.

There is a great link between Hamlet's struggles for meaningful action and Reich's character's prolonged, sodden, adolescence. He and the woman, played by Kristala Pouncy, remain a relationship which, we might infer, has seen her grow into the role of a professional and him remain an adolescent. We might also infer that they have met and fallen in love just as they are. But however we read their relationship, it is clear that Parks is offering us a vision of two sides of a coin in this relationship. His response to the futility of action is to retreat. Hers is to race forward in action. But they are essentially opposites that revolve around the same center. That such a match is absurd and hilarious highlights the absurdity of extremes around which characters in Parks' world settle their lives.

The final response of the evening is suicide, in "Trust Life," which features Merci Oni, doing really stunning work. The scene opens to the cast, in hospital gowns, moving through the space as we hear piano music slow. The lights go out. We see Merci in the center of the space beneath an intense special light. She looks frightened. We hear a clap of thunder. The rest of the hospital people emerge. We hear them whispering something out of sync, indistinguishable at first, that builds to an intense hiss at a high rhythm. "Trust life," they are saying. Merci balances on one foot. We hear another clap of thunder. She gasps. "Trust life," the cast says together. In a beautifully executed move, Merci flips her hand up and pantomimes slitting her throat.

Camus calls suicide the ultimate philosophical question, and as such, it is fitting that Parks' deeply philosophically-themed work ends here. Parks presents us a world in which we rely, rather than on the absurd mind's reason, on ideals to which we are inextricably linked by virtue of the circumstances of our birth. The responses to the impossibility of these ideals compose the theme of much of her work, and a prism through which Collaboraction helps us understand our political and social reality.