Suzan Lori-Parks by David Seidner, 1994.

The quality of Suzan-Lori Parks’ imagination is unassailable. Her plays provide ample proof: Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Devotees in the Garden of Love, and The America Play. Through them she reaches an articulation she doesn’t quite approximate in real life, a great horn sound, drunken and lucid at the same time, and they in turn speak very well of her.

There is nothing like reading Suzan-Lori’s work. Actually there is nothing like hearing Suzan-Lori read them. Picking at them for yourself, you hear horns. In her voice, the words take on the quality of bells, still low, but with an extra ping of recognition arching between phrases.

She sits somewhere in the fifth ring, all alone amongst her generation, peerless. Her back is ramrod straight. She is alone. She is always alone, although, intermittently, critical Christmas lights snake their way to her feet, knowing someone for whom to illuminate, to gift with the company of praise.

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Issue 47 Spring 1994