May 15, 2026
Suzan-Lori Parks has fascinated me for years. I first encountered her work in my History of World Drama course in college, when I was just beginning to understand the power of adaptation. Reading In the Blood and Fking A cracked something open in me. Her transformation of The Scarlet Letter into these bold, unique plays shook me— she didn’t simply retell it. She absolutely detonated it. Reshaping it into urgent contemporary conversation. It made my brain quake in the best possible way. I was hooked instantly.
SLP is, in every sense, a trailblazer. She was the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She’s a MacArthur “Genius,” a Guggenheim Fellow, an Obie and Tony Award winner — the list goes on. But beyond the accolades, she carved out a new dramaturgical space: one that reclaims and reframes Black life and history. She invites audiences to encounter it through a lens that is mythical, imaginative, and expansive. Because of her, playwrights and plays like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and An Octoroon, Aleshea Harris and Is God Is, James Ijames and Miz Martha have a lineage to stand on — artists who also bend form, interrogate history, and insist on the complexity of Black experience. And all of these plays and playwrights fit seamlessly into the Wilma World.
Last year, I visited Winterthur Museum and Garden and spent time in their exhibit The Afric-American Picture Gallery. Walking through that space — a reimagining of a fictional 19th-century gallery dedicated to Black history — I felt the same spark I felt reading Parks for the first time. When Lindsay asked me to join this project as dramaturg, that memory came rushing back. In the short story that inspired the exhibit, the author constructs a museum that never existed, filling it with artifacts that should have been preserved, honored, and displayed. It is an act of imaginative restoration.
In many ways, Suzan-Lori Parks has done this through her writing. She has built an imaginative archive — a gallery of Black histories, myths, wounds, and triumphs — not as a linear timeline, but as a living, breathing constellation. And The America Play does just that. This play refuses to flatten history into something tidy or easily digestible, but instead asks us to sit in the rests, the spells, the echoes.
So if you’re looking to this dramaturgy page for a straightforward historical timeline to help you follow the play, you won’t find it here. If you’re looking for a single, definitive explanation of what it all “means,” you won’t find that either.
But if you’re willing to search — to follow the threads, to sit with the questions, to let the play work on you — then I encourage you to do exactly what Lucy tells Brazil:
Dig.
Hello! As you’re about to embark on the journey that is The America Play, I’ve gathered some resources to help guide you into this wild world.
I think the best way to bring you into the world of this play is to explore some background and interviews of Suzan-Lori Parks. I find these helpful especially for understanding the viewpoint we’re dropped into for this play.
And to help get you into the vibe of the story, here is some media to explore!
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the other side of The America Play! What did you think? I hope that as you continue back to your everyday lives, you can take a bit of this play with you. Continue to “dig” into the world around you, question its “historicities,” and unearth your own “wonders.”
Also, this interactive Milanote features many resources, images, and just fun stories I came across while working on this piece. Give it a visit!!
As Mr. Sir says to Stanley Yelnats III in the ever iconic novel and film, Holes, “You’re not looking for anything. You’re digging to build character.” (I wonder if he had read this play?? He sure was onto something.) Now it’s time for YOU to dig and build some character. (Too many “dig” puns? Have I gone too far? Or “dug too deep?!” Alright. I’ll just see myself out….)
