First question to Suzan-Lori Parks: Why give your new play a title that no mainstream newspaper is ever going to print? "The title fits the play," Ms. Parks says with a shrug. "It's what led me to the play." She adds, defiantly: "If they don't print it, that's O.K. So what? Big deal." Typical Parks — independent, confident, won't be pinned down. So here, as in other newspapers, the title will be simply ". . . A." Where the blank is, you can supply a term for sexual intercourse if you want. Ms. Parks was in town last month from Los Angeles, where she lives, for rehearsals of ". . . A." The play, set in a dystopia of the future, a former colony, is about an abortionist, Hester, portrayed

"I'm deep into deep transgression," Ms. Parks explained, referring to her unprintable title and her dark subject matter. As she sat in a coffee shop near the Public Theater, she leaned forward and gently touched her interlocutor's arm, as if to apologize for being so tough-minded.

Let it be said that Ms. Parks, 39, is also amiable, considerate, a combination of girlish ebullience and rigor. Her dreadlocks hang nearly to her waist. Slender, narrow hipped, she wears the same outfit nearly every day — pointed wool hat, T-shirt, blue jeans.

And Ms. Parks has reason to be confident. Last year she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama for "Topdog/Underdog," about two brothers, Booth and Lincoln. Booth is a would-be three-card monte artist. Lincoln, who has retired from the game, is a sideshow performer who impersonates Abraham Lincoln in whiteface so spectators can pretend to assassinate him. On May 6, Random House will publish her first novel, "Getting Mother's Body," about a family's quest to dig up the jewelry supposedly buried in the grave of one of its members. The first printing is 100,000 copies.

None of this came easily, Ms. Parks said. It took nearly four years to finish ". . . A." At one point she decided to throw the play out and put the character Hester in a new play, "In the Blood," which was produced in 1999 at the Public Theater. There, Hester was a homeless woman living under a bridge and struggling to support five children while being exploited by everyone she meets. (Ms. Parks has a penchant for revisiting themes. "The America Play," produced in 1994, is, like "Topdog/Underdog," about a black man, Lincoln, who impersonates President Lincoln in an arcade shooting gallery as customers fire at him with blanks.)

After Ms. Parks finished "In the Blood," she was still haunted by the play she had discarded. So she resumed writing it. "I thought, `I've grown as a writer; I don't have to struggle,' " she said. "Oh, man!" It took another year to finish it.

In ". . . A" as in "In the Blood," Hester is an allusion to Hawthorne's Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter." Like Hawthorne's Hester, Ms. Parks's Hester is an outsider, heroic, indomitable. In ". . . A" she is branded with an "A" because she undertakes a task regarded as vile by the community — she performs abortions. But it is a necessary task, and the "A" marks her so that clients can find her. Still, Ms. Parks dismisses the Hawthorne reference. "I only read the book once, just so I could riff on it," she said.

Under the repressive government in ". . . A," Hester's son has been imprisoned for 20 years, since he was 5, for stealing a piece of meat from a rich family. He was betrayed by a little girl who grows up to be The First Lady (played by Michole Briana White), wife of the The Mayor (Bobby Cannavale). Hester pays her earnings to a freedom fund, hoping to purchase the right to have a picnic with her son. She is aided by Canary Mary (Daphne Rubin-Vega), The Mayor's disgruntled mistress.

Ms. Parks calls ". . . A" a Jacobean revenge tragedy. It's a bloody work, with Hester onstage sometimes covered in her patients' blood, as is her suitor, known only as Butcher (Peter Gerety), his clothes stained with the blood of slaughtered animals.

"This play takes place in a former colony," Ms. Parks explained. She created a language for the play, Talk, which the actors speak intermittently. (Supertitles translate it for the audience.) "It's mostly when they are talking about vaginas," Ms. Parks said. "Die Aban-nazip" means "abortion." "Grope say basket shreck eey grope say winduptrala!" means "May your womb dry up and shrivel!"

The play also incorporates songs composed by Ms. Parks. The music, which is a cross between Kurt Weill and the blues, is performed by a five-piece band. Ms. Parks, who also wrote music for "In the Blood," lives in a musical world now, having married Paul Oscher, 55, a blues musician.

As in Brecht and Weill's "Threepenny Opera," the songs in ". . . A" are wry comments on the action — about the unfairness of life, being a kept woman, the joys of a manhunt. And as in "The Threepenny Opera," the action stops when the songs begin, with the characters stepping to the front of the stage and facing the audience. Two songs are sung by Mos Def in a plaintive wail. As Monster, he is both menacing and vulnerable, his thin shoulders hunched.

Mos Def is still evolving from rapper to actor. During a rehearsal, when Ms. Parks was giving notes to the cast, she said: "Just one bitchy playwright thing. If you develop the habit of dropping your consonants, if people don't know what you're saying. . . ."

Mos Def buried his head in his hands, as if she were referring to him because he was still talking like a rapper. Ms. Parks reached over and gave him a hug.

Mos Def, who starred with Jeffrey Wright in "Topdog/Underdog" on Broadway, is a passionate advocate of Ms. Parks's plays. "It's fortunate to do work like this," he said during a break. "I thought, `They can't give this part to anyone else.' "

". . . A" is a play of metaphors, but Ms. Parks's novel is grounded in the dusty earth of West Texas in the early 1960's, filled with details about poor blacks of that era, when the richest person in town was often the funeral director and the beauty parlor was the center for gossip.

Still, there are similarities between play and novel. Both have abortion as a subject. In the novel, one character, Willa Mae, dies in a pool of blood after a self-inflicted abortion. Billy Beede, Willa Mae's daughter, is pregnant with an illegitimate child and desperate for an abortion. Is Ms. Parks conveying a message? No message, she said. "It happens," she said of abortion; it's "something women deal with."

To obtain money for an abortion, Billy Beede wants to sell the jewelry said to be buried with her mother's body. Dill, Willa Mae's rather mysterious lover, opposes her. So Billy steals Dill's truck and, with her aunt and uncle, a cousin and a young man, Laz, who loves her, heads for Arizona, where the body is. Along the way, they have various adventures, including an encounter with a racist sheriff, who jails them overnight.

The novel is written in its characters' different voices. Ms. Parks said she was inspired by Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," also written in different voices, about a family's quest to give their dead matriarch a proper burial.

She said she began the novel after being possessed "with an energy, like spinning balls of light."

"Getting Mother's Body" is a road story. Ms. Parks's earliest memories, she said, are of traveling. Her father, Donald, was a career Army officer, and the family moved frequently. She remembers sitting in the car in her baby seat, "the sky going by, lying with my head facing the window."

Her maternal grandparents lived in Odessa, Tex. While Donald Parks, who eventually rose to lieutenant colonel, served two tours in Vietnam, Ms. Parks, her mother, her brother and her sister lived nearby.

To be a writer, Ms. Parks said, she needed a sense of belonging somewhere. "I don't have a connectedness to any special landscape," she said. So she chose to be from West Texas, her grandparents' home, and set her novel there.

Ms. Parks began writing stories in the third grade. Her mother, Frances, who runs a community service program at Syracuse University, gave her a copy of the classic children's text "D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths," which began her fascination with the Greeks and Greek tragedy; both have heavily influenced her work. (Ms. Parks's father retired from the Army and became a professor of education at the University of Vermont.)

When Ms. Parks was in middle school, the family moved to Germany, where Colonel Parks was stationed, and she became fluent in German. She went to Mount Holyoke, where she majored in English and German literature, and took a writing course with James Baldwin at Hampshire College nearby. The voices in her stories were so alive, he told her, she should write plays.

Altogether, she acknowledged, she had a relatively privileged childhood. But when her interviewer suggested that she had been somewhat shielded from racism, she grew angry. "That's a pathetic assumption," she said heatedly. "Do you have any idea what it's like to be the only black person in town?" — as she was in Germany. "People stare at you, touch your hair: `Is it a wig?' "

" `Shielded' — yeah," Ms. Parks continued. "They call you names." She was also Roman Catholic. "You go to Mass. You're the only black people in the Mass."

In high school, she said, "everybody looks at you like you're an authority on slavery. `Shielded?' From what? What do they think? `Oh, we didn't go shoeless in the winter.' As if that is the only African-American experience." Even today, she said, she has trouble getting a cab in front of the Public Theater and has given up trying.

After graduating from Mount Holyoke in 1985, she studied in England at the Drama Studio in Ealing. She returned to the United States, to New York, and worked as a temp, getting up at 6 a.m. to write plays. At night, she frequented the downtown theater scene.

Her first produced play was "Betting on the Dust Commander," presented in 1987 in an East Village bar. She paid for the production herself, providing the lights and operating them. In 1989, another play, "Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom," had a production at BACA Downtown in Brooklyn. It won an Obie, and she was on her way. Other plays followed: "The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World" (1990), her 1994 work "The America Play" and "Venus" (1996), which also won an Obie. She wrote Spike Lee's 1996 movie "Girl 6," about phone sex, having researched it by briefly doing the job. In 2001, she won a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

In 1998, through her doctor, Ms. Parks met Mr. Oscher, who had played in Muddy Waters's band. The doctor was Mr. Oscher's harmonica student and told him he had a patient who wanted to learn. Mr. Oscher invited her to see him perform in a club. "He was tuning his guitar. I said, `That's my guy!' It was love at first sight," she remembered. While on the so-called chitlin circuit with Muddy Waters, Mr. Oscher learned three-card monte, and the game became integral to "Topdog/Underdog." The couple married in 2001, two days after the play opened. They live in a three-bedroom stucco house in Venice, Calif.

At the moment, Ms. Parks is adapting Toni Morrison's novel "Paradise" for Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films. She is writing a musical about basketball, "Hoopz," for Disney. She is also laboring over another novel. All she will say is that it takes place in Texas.

For Ms. Parks, writing is "a mystical journey."

Sometimes, she said, it's a little like "wandering in the wilderness and getting totally lost.

"Some writers are haunted by things," she said. "They write them down to set themselves free."

Fuente: The New York Times
Marzo 2003