Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom by Suzan-Lori Parks
"Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom" is a notable play by Suzan-Lori Parks that received the Obie Award for Best Off-Broadway Play in 1989. This work stands out for its unique structure, featuring "figures" rather than traditional characters, and it engages with the complex themes of the African slave trade, highlighting the historical and emotional scars left by this dark chapter in human history. The play is characterized by its poetic language and employs indirection, metaphor, and repetitive motifs to explore profound issues related to identity and trauma. Critics have noted that Parks' writing evokes both horror and a sense of dark humor, illustrating the duality of the black experience in America. Her style has been compared to jazz, suggesting a fluidity and improvisational quality that challenges conventional dramaturgy. Influenced by literary figures such as Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, the play reflects Parks' love of language while engaging in deeper philosophical inquiries about communication and meaning. This layered approach invites audiences to reflect on the complexities of history and the ways in which it shapes contemporary existence.
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Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom by Suzan-Lori Parks
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First produced: 1989 (first published, 1995)
Type of work: Play
The Work
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom won for Parks her first Obie Award as the best Off-Broadway play of 1989 and led theater critic Robert Brustein to call her “a most unusual addition to the growing ranks of female playwrights.”
Filled with “figures” rather than characters, the play deals obliquely with the slave trade when more than nine million Africans went missing. Written in what director Liz Diamond calls wonderful poetry, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom defines contemporary and traditional dramaturgical methods while using indirection, metaphor, and persistent repetition to convey the horror of the slave trade and its impact on the lives of those who either experienced it or followed it. Shawn-Marie Garrett in her essay “The Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks” writes:
Parks has dramatized some of the most painful aspects of the black experience . . . . Yet even as her plays summon up the brutality of the past, they do so in a manner that is, paradoxically, both horrific and comic—irresistibly or disrespectfully so, depending on your point of view.
Parks’s opening question and answer provide a ringing tribute to the nature of what is to follow:
Charlene: How dja get through it?
Molly: Mm not through it.
As the first of her four plays which “re-member” history, Parks is exploring her love of language in a fashion that reflects her profound influences provided by Gertrude Stein, Woolf, Joyce, and most especially Beckett. Diamond, her long-time collaborator, stated in a Fall, 1995, interview published in TDR:
The first time I read a Suzan-Lori Parks play, I flashed to Wittgenstein, not Gertrude Stein. There seemed to be a utilitarian focus to Parks’ words—a surgical intensity—that belied her play’s surface impression of hypnotic languor. Surely this is what Wittgenstein meant when he spoke of language games, I thought, and the contingencies of various meanings in languages’ various contexts, words having uses and not mere definitions, family resemblances of certain words, etc. Wittgenstein believed that the philosopher’s task was to bring words back from their metaphysical usage to their everyday usage, and Parks’ drama seems to play between the boundaries of both.
As Diamond notes, Parks’s drama has more in common with jazz than with the dramaturgy which preceded it.
Bibliography
Bernard, Louise. “The Musicality of Language: Redefining History in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” African American Review 31, no. 4 (Winter, 1997): 687-699.
Brown, Rosellen. “Stumbling from Stage to Page.” New Leader 86, no. 3 (May/June, 2003): 37-39.
Brustein, Robert. “The Element of Surprise.” New Republic 222, no. 4 (January 24, 2000): 31-35.
Brustein, Robert. “What Do Women Playwrights Want?” New Republic 206, no. 15 (April 13, 1992): 28-31.
Bryant, Aaron. “Broadway, Her Way.” Crisis (The New) 109, no. 2 (March/April, 2002): 43-46.
Drukman, Steven. “A Show Business Tale/Tail.” American Theatre 13, no. 5 (May/June, 1996): 4-6.
Drukman, Steven. “Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond.” TDR 39, no. 3 (Fall, 1995): 56-76.
Elam, Harry J., Jr. “The Postmulticultural: A Tale of Mothers and Sons.” In Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of the New Millennium, edited by Marc Maufort and Franca Bellarsi. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2002.
Garrett, Shawn-Marie. “The Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks.” American Theatre 17, no. 8 (October, 2000).
Graham, Don. “Not-So-Great Plains.” Texas Monthly 31, no. 10 (October, 2003): 74-78.
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): 447-461.
Roach, Joseph. “The Great Hole of History: Liturgical Silence in Beckett, Osofisan, and Parks.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 1 (Winter, 2001): 307-316.
Ryan, Katy. “’No Less Human’: Making History in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 13, no. 2 (Spring, 1999): 81-94.
Smith, Wendy. “Words as Crossroads: Suzan-Lori Parks.” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 19 (May 12, 2003): 37-39.
Sova, Kathy. “A Better Mirror.” American Theatre 17, no. 3 (March, 2000): 32.
Wood, Jacqueline. “Sambo Subjects: ’Declining the Stereotype’ in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World.” Studies in the Humanities 28, nos. 1/2 (June-December, 2001): 109-120.
Young, Jean. “The Re-objectification and Re-commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus.” African American Review 31, no. 4 (Winter, 1997): 699-709.