SOURCE: Diamond, Liz. “Perceptible Mutability in the Word Kingdom.” Theater 24, no. 3 (1993): 86-87.

In the following essay, Diamond analyzes Parks's experiments with language, casting, and non-linear time in her plays, particularly Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom.

The poetic imagination, while not entirely absent from the American stage in recent years, makes its appearance fitfully. Most often, it appears either in that watered-down version of Romanticism called lyric realism, where simile rather than metaphor rules, or in the guise of a North American magic realism, a pale version of its Latin cousin, with just enough strangeness to arouse our imaginations before drying up and leaving us parched as before. But in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, poetry, the radical condensation of meaning in form, is everywhere present. From the intimate, ironic portrait of a marriage in Betting on the Dust Commander to the operatic grandeur of The Death of...