SOURCE: Garrett, Shawn-Marie. “The Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks.” American Theatre 17, no. 8 (October 2000): 22-6.

In the following essay, Garrett explores recurrent themes in Parks's plays and illustrates Parks's use of repetition, lampooning, language, and visual cues to highlight political, historical, and racial inaccuracies.

1. Voices

Suzan-Lori Parks began writing novels at the age of five. But it wasn't until she first heard voices that she realized she might be cursed and blessed with a case of possession—in both senses of that word. Parks knew that she possessed something, but she also knew that it possessed her.

It was 1983. She was working on a short story called “The Wedding Pig” for a writing class she was taking with James Baldwin at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. Suddenly she had the sense that the people she was writing about were in the room with her, “standing right behind me...