Suzan-Lori Parks

reading at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside, Thursday April 29, 7:30 pm

I was introduced to the text of Suzan-Lori Parks’ breakthrough play Venus in a college class, and have never forgotten the experience. It was a sultry, simmering stew of American history, Negro exploitation, retribution, and heaving sexuality. It crushed my preconceived notion of what theater could do, leaving me breathless.

I’ve followed Suzan-Lori Parks’ career ever since. In 2001 she won the Pulitzer Prize for her play Topdog/Underdog, a twisted analysis of two brothers swept up in the throes of street hustling. And last year, she published her first novel, Getting Mother’s Body. Set in the dusty void of West Texas, 1963, Body follows the teenaged Billy Beede, knocked up and reckless, as she and her quirky family make their way to Arizona, where Billy’s mother is buried… and her collection of priceless jewels. The story employs a rapidly shifting first-person monologue format that allows Parks to indulge in a novel-length story arc without (thank God) losing a speck of her visceral theatrical stylings.

In person, Parks is as charming and exuberant as her writing would suggest. Chatting with me over the phone while on tour for the paperback release of Body, she laughed, joked, and even sung.

So… West Texas… Yeah.

I was born in Kentucky, but we spent a lot of time in West Texas, where the novel’s set. My mom’s whole family still lives there, and I love it down there. I know Texas gets a bad rap, but it’s really cool. It gets a really bad reputation because people don’t like Bush. They think it’s all about cowboys.

So writing Getting Mother’s Body was sort of a homecoming, in a way…

It’s drawn a lot from my own growing up. There was this need to write the story of my own family and expose some family secrets. It took a long time to find the story, to “get real” with the fact that I had to write this story. It’s a difficult job.

Do you think the monologue device you employ was a way to deal with that difficulty? To address personally challenging subject matter without getting too far from the theatrical roots you’re so comfortable with?

Totally. It’s such a bridge. But [Body] was always [conceived as] a novel. As Steinbeck says, “Texas is a state of mind,” so I knew that the best way to show West Texas was to really have it grow in the mind of the reader. Novels are fun because your characters can really spread out, they can really have long moments where they’re just thinking, and it’s the kind of thinking that’s really going on inside your head, and not spoken aloud.

Your characters don’t just think, they sing. Do you actually have music for the songs Billy’s mother, Willa Mae, sings from beyond the grave?

Oh yeah, we put out a CD. My husband’s a blues musician. He plays on the CD and I sing the songs. When I do readings I play at least one song.

Novels, plays, songs, and you’re also writing screenplays now, working on adaptations of works by both Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. Is it difficult leaping between all these mediums?

The thing is that the stories that are novels are very different than the stories that are suitable for plays, and the stories that are more suitable for screenplays are different than the stories that are suitable for novels. So it’s not difficult to jump between them because it’s like one day you want to walk, one day you want to ride your bike, one day you drive, one day you take the train. What’s hard is finding the time to do all the different things.

Any chance of a screenplay adaptation of Getting Mother’s Body?

People have been talking about that. I probably would do it myself because I have a reputation in Hollywood as someone who does pretty good adaptations of novels.

I once heard Richard Price say that after the experience of Clockers he would never adapt one of his own books to a screenplay again.

It is hard. You have to let go of what it was. It’s like a translation really. It’s not about trying to improve the novel; it’s about trying to remain faithful to the spirit of the original while being faithful to the requirements and needs of a screenplay. You have to embrace both. I’d be into doing it. But I think I’m more interested at this point in writing new things. JUSTIN WESCOAT SANDERS