2003 Laura Pels Keynote Address
Suzan-Lori Parks delivered the keynote address to an audience of 450 theatre artists, funders, elected officials, and other supporters of the theatre at Curtain Call, A.R.T/New York's annual celebration of Off Broadway, on June 2, 2003. Ms. Parks won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Top Dog Underdog and recently published her first novel Stealing Mother's Body. She was introduced by George C. Wolfe, Artistic Director of The Public Theater and director of Top Dog Underdog.
Ms. Parks's Remarks:
June 2, 2003
Hi. Such a treat to listen to George Wolfe talk about anything. It's great. I'm living in Los Angeles now, so I haven't seen George in several months I guess. Since we opened the last play at The Public and it's just a joy to see him. Thanks A.R.T New York for inviting me to speak here this evening. I'm in the middle of rehearsal right now or I guess in the middle of a show. The show's called Book Tour and it's what happens, when you write a book or a novel. The wonderful company...if you're lucky...they send you out on book tour and you get up at 4:00 in the morning, get in a car, go to the airport, you know, do that. Let them wave the wand around, you go in the plane, you go do press, read and over and over. It's a city everyday, and so I have the great fortune to be in New York today, and I said, I don't want to do my reading tonight. I want to be at A.R.T. New York tonight, so Random House was kind enough to tweak the schedule and allow me to be here with you.
Different thing writing a novel than working on a play, someone's laughing. It's maniacal. A lot of people told me in theater, they said don't write a novel. Now I know, I think now I know why, because they knew about the book tour thing.
But I started writing back when I was a kid and I wrote...you know I was working on a novel, and I was in the fourth grade. And I was working on songs. I was the kind of kid who had a song about everything. Like I'm standing up in front of people talking, you know everything would have a song, they weren't very good, but I had a song about everything. As a kid writer though, I had the support of my parents, and they would take these songs or poems, or pieces of novel and they'd put them on the refrigerator, things like that. They would acknowledge the fact that I was disciplined or as they would say, hard headed, which meant that they understood that come hell or high water I was going to do what I was going to do and that somehow it would be a good thing. And, they gave me their support. They worried of course about me and they wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer. A doctor and a lawyer, but I think they're okay now. They're all right. They're cool.
But in high school I got more support, you could call it maybe negative support. I had this English teacher who because I was or am a poor speller, she suggested that I not become a writer. She was trying to save me from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and it was because it was before spell check. (Back in the day when we didn't have spell check, you young ‘uns out there, it was rough when you had to look up words that you didn't know how to spell.) So, this teacher thought she was supporting me by telling me, don't study English literature you're not going to be any good, study something else. So negative support is positive support, when you're hard headed, because it gave me an opportunity to exercise my hard headedness and, against the better judgment of my betters, I decided to become a writer anyway.
In college I got some support and encouragement of several teachers including James Baldwin. When I was in his class, we sat at the long library table, and we were all short story writers, so there was this kind of decorum to the class. But I was the one who, when it was my turn to read, I would gesture and do the voices of the characters and act out the parts and all that stuff, and he said, "have you ever considered writing for the theater?" Which I took as an, "oh no! I must really suck." [But] he was saying, maybe not short story writing, what we do in this class, maybe something else outside of this class. So, I kind of thought he was rejecting me for a minute and then I got hip to it and got over it, and tried it. Tried theater. I've been trying theater for 20 years and I've grown to love it and think that it's the most difficult kind of writing and the most difficult art to make.
People ask me on the book tour, which is more difficult novel writing, screenplay writing or playwriting? I tell them it's all the same. It's all hard. I say something diplomatic like that, but actually the truth of it is, I do think that playwriting requires the most strength and the most flexibility. You have to be very strong willed and you have to also learn to let go. It requires both of those muscles.
When I moved to New York I had the great, great fortune to have support from friends who are theater artists, and the support of total strangers like Alysa Solomon who writes for The Voice. We were at a performance downtown. I think it was at Franklin Furnace or something, and I saw her, and she looked like someone who knew what was in the know. I didn't know her at all, but we were riding the subway back in the same car and I was at one end and she was at the other end, and I decided, I was a new playwright on the block, and I thought, gosh I don't know where to get my work produced, this woman looks like she's in the know, because she was sitting in like a preferred seat in the theater, so I said well maybe I'll go over to her and ask her a few questions about theater in New York. I began to walk toward her, and, granted it was one o'clock in the morning, on the 1 train, in 1988 and I was as...well, I was stranger than I am now, and I'm walking toward her. And Alysa is a black belt in karate, and it was very tense and I couldn't understand why, you know? Because I'm just like walking toward her with this like ... you know ... I could say "give me your money," or ... what I did say is, "I'm a playwright. Do you know where I could submit my work to get it done?"
So I had this incredible moment. She sort of looked, she was actually very happy to help me and said...I'm lucky she didn't do one of those [makes karate gestures] hi-yah! on me and she said, BACA Downtown, which was that great performance space in Brooklyn, which closed several years ago. But I submitted my work there and after a couple of rejections, they took me on and they were for a long time before they closed, a wonderful supporter of my work.
I had the support of newspapers like the Village Voice and the New York Times and the theater scholar who write for those newspapers. Even though I, it's true, I'm not a big reader of press, my own or anyone else's, I do appreciate the act of; the fact that there is thought going on, and that there is a critical response, which I think is very important to generate audiences and to generate a history forward and backward of theater.
I had the great support of colleagues like George C. Wolfe. Back in 1990 he came to that theater, BACA Downtown. It was hard to get to. It was in downtown Brooklyn, tricky to get to back then. And he saw my play of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, and he said afterwards...he came up to me and he was like George Wolfe! It was like a moment. And he said, "I'm going to do your plays, I'm going to do your plays, I'm going to do your plays!" Like that. Just like that, well with more...you know. And, he didn't have a theater back then. Excuse my language, but he didn't have shit, you know? But he was just talking. He was just excited. He was just ready to support me. He didn't really know me. I mean I had seen him around town, but he didn't know me and he was ready to support me with whatever he had. When he did get his theater, when he did start to be the producer and the artistic director of the Public Theater, he kept his word, which is...well is an example to us all, I think.
I also had a lot of support from theaters like Yale Rep and Theater for New Audience, and the Women's Project. And institutions like New Dramatist and grants from, institutions both public and private. Someone asked me the other day, on book tour, what's it like to be an African American woman on Broadway, like you were out there all alone? Where were we? I don't know I was in like Minneapolis or something and they had heard about the show and all that, and wondered what it was like. I said, "oh you don't know? I wasn't alone at all." I mean maybe I was the only African American woman to have a play on Broadway that season, but I had the support of George C. Wolfe. I had the support of two of the most incredibly generous actors that I've ever worked with, [Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def] who...it was like, I was like Joan and the Army, you know. I mean, I was totally backed up by those guys and then behind them the Public Theater, and then in front of them was the audience every night who was so generous and supportive of this new thing that we were creating on Broadway.
So, I just realized, what am I talking about? I'm saying thank you to people. I don't get the opportunity very often to say thank you to people who have, over the last 20 years of my playwriting career, been there for me, and I'm just taking that opportunity right now to say thank you to all those people. Thank you to people like you who are helping playwrights who are very much established today and playwrights who are coming up; actors, designers, directors, who are just beginning and need very much your support. And, it doesn't have to be a great, grand, huge, enormous truck full of money or a residency on a farm where you don't have to do anything for a year. You know that's what we think. We think we have to give these artists something huge that will answer their every need. You don't. Sometimes just a simple word of encouragement or a pat on the back. If that's all you can give. If your budget is tight, you maybe don't have the money to give, maybe just some encouragement can really help and will go a long way with an artist. We're very good at making due and stretching what we get.
I was at Spellman the other week giving the commencement address at Spellman College in Atlanta, and I told the women there that they should all become superheroes and save the world. Yeah, I did. I told them that, but I've got to say that that is the kind of work that people like you are doing already. The names you have right now and the costumes you're wearing right now are your superhero costumes, and what we must do is, we must continue regardless of the weather, we must continue to help create the great good thing that we all call theater. Thank you very much.