SOURCE: Rayner, Alice, and Harry J. Elam, Jr. “Unfinished Business: Reconfiguring History in Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” Theatre Journal 46, no. 4 (December 1994): 447-61.

In the following essay, Rayner and Elam survey the methods Parks employs in The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World “not only to challenge and re-write history, but to right history.”

The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World by Suzan-Lori Parks burst onto the American stage in September of 1990. Critics hailed the play as a work of “astounding power,”¹ and as a “brilliant compression of black rage and hope.”² Parks was crowned “theatre's vibrant new voice,”³ an “indigenous theatrical talent” and “the most promising playwright of the year.” At the same time, Mel Gussow said her play was “as recondite as it is elliptical”⁴ while another...