Austinist Interview & Ticket Giveaway: Suzan-Lori Parks

I'm now picturing it as kind of a combination of a revival and one of those lecture circuit lectures that they used to have back in the day.

I'm thinking of incorporating some snake handling next year, so...

No way, really?

No! But I do have a strange fondness for snakes. I mean, in my mind it'll be snake handling. That's where I'm going. I'm going out. Snake handling. That's the next thing.

Well, so, how did you learn how to play guitar?

Well, this is the sad story of me and the guitar. When I was a kid, I mean in like high school, I wanted to play guitar, and the white kids and the black kids I knew were like, "Why would you wanna do that for? Only white kids play guitar." Which in the '80s, '70s, was kind of true. The enormously brilliant guitar players, male and female, in the limelight, were not African-American. There was Muddy Waters and John Hurt and the thousands of gazillions of black guitar players, but they weren't in the limelight. It was like Eric Clapton, and Eric Clapton, and Eric Clapton. There was Jimi Hendrix, and oh yeah Bob Marley, who played the guitar but he wasn't a "Guitar Player." And all these kids, black kids too, were like, "What do you wanna be white for?" So I put down the guitar. It's been a long process of picking it up again. I've been picking it up and picking it up for like the last ten years. And I had the brains to marry a guitar player. So he's a big inspiration. When I wrote the songs to Getting Mother's Body, and I was going on book tour, he was like, "Take your guitar, bring the music to the people!" So I started doing it in public.

So the songs in the book actually have tunes.

Oh yeah. You can get the CD on CD Baby. We did a little CD, like homegrown. But just so people can get the idea of it.

What are you working on now?

The people who did the Ray Charles movie are doing a stage version of the Ray Charles story. So I'm doing that. And I'm doing this 365 Plays thing. I wrote a play a day for a whole year, so we're putting them on starting in November, God willing and the creek don't rise. It’s going to be in New York, LA, Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta, and other places I've forgotten, simultaneously. It’ll run for a whole year in seven cities at the same time. So any given day a theatre in town will be performing one of the plays.

Sounds like an enormous amount of work to coordinate.

Well, it's weird, because it's like a relay race. Any of us right at this moment could run a marathon, if we divided the work. If we all ran a mile, we could run a marathon. Any of us right now could eat an airplane, by breaking it up into bite-sized pieces and each eating some. So that's what we're doing. We're all only going to do a sizable portion.

Are you going to chronicle it at all?

We're going to have a website, and TCG is bringing out the book, but we're really into the grassroots nature of it. We don't want it to get co-opted into some piece of shit. We want to keep it really, really low-key and let it take on its own identity.

How was it to write them?

Looking back on it, it was an insane endeavor. An act of madness. I think it was like praying, which is an act of madness. Or praying is an act of mantis.

Whoa! You said it.

Yeah! Connecting with the deity is crazy. And so there you are, saying, “I'm going to connect with the deity every day, no matter what the weather is.” It was hard, but also it wasn't hard.

Were you in different places every day?

I was on book tour! I was in airports at four in the morning, being like, "I have to write a play!" And I'd be standing there and be like, "Shit, I don't have anything to write about," and then the woman behind me would begin to cry because she'd just lost her sweater, and then there was the play, you know. There it was, unfolding in back of me. That was the play. That's the thing about it, the Play, capital P, is always happening. And that's why I did it. I just plucked some out of the ether. I still, I have to kind of stop writing them. It's hard. I can hear them still. They're still happening.

Have you felt like you've had to reform yourself back into a less compulsive way of writing?

No, I just decided to take up snake handling! And I think the more I joke about it, it's like one of those jokes that's probably going to end up being true. Because I love snakes, I have this thing for snakes.

There's an amazing book about this community of Appalachian snakehandlers...

Oh yes! And they got bitten a lot.

And they'd say that if you didn't survive after getting bitten, it was God's will.

But I'm more into the Indian snake charming. We went to India and I'd hang out with the guys who were charming the cobras. My husband would be taking pictures, saying, "Don't get that close! Don't get that close!" And I'd be standing next to the guy with the snake. Maybe I like that more because with the folks in Appalachia, they don't have the basket, and I think the basket is something I definitely like.

Were you giving talks in India?

I gave a lot of talks the first time; I went to some colleges and some theatre groups that were doing this spontaneous performances of Topdog/Underdog. They were these Indian guys, mostly, but at this one college in the south of India in Chennai, there were these two women who did a version. And it was fantastic. I was all prepared to be bored. But it was absolutely amazing.

They really got into it despite all the American history?

Yeah, I really thought there would be no...but they were great. Some of the young men would come up to me and say, "I am Lincoln! I am Booth! This is me, this is my life!" Wow! They had all these bootleg photocopied versions of the play. I have no idea where they got them. It was amazing. They were so into it; it was so relevant to them.

Going to India was also an opportunity for people to meet Americans who aren't stupid. I gotta get out there and show them we're not all stupid. And we can be Texas-loving. We can love Texas and not be a dummy. People like to say, “hiss hiss, boo, Texas,” but this is a state of many different kinds of people, and this is an incredible place. People think Texas is stupid who've never been here or only been here once, or they see something on the news and think they hate it, but that's the same thing other people are saying about America.

Did you ever study American history...or how did you get interested in it?

I'm an American! I don't have to study it!

I mean, how did you end up putting so much in your books and your plays?

Well, I mean, if I commit a crime it will not be premeditated. My work is not premeditated, but it's very deliberate. I won't plan ahead but I'll be there pulling the trigger. So, like, you know, I'm totally, I'm not sitting around being like, "How can I best articulate the point I want to make?" I'm not doing that. I'm more of like, oh wow, Lincoln's in my head! I gotta get him into the play, get him out of my head. And then I'm like, “Oh I think I'm over Lincoln,” and then I'm setting Getting Mother's Body in Lincoln, Texas! It’s not a premeditated thing. Just something like...a crime of passion. I’m possessed by certain historical moments or elements. When I was a kid I loved Greek mythology. And there you had Zeus, which was a myth that was created to explain the absence of understanding of something else. Or what about Persephone? “Oh look, it’s fall again, why is it fall?” “Well, it's fall, darling, because Persephone is going down to Hades...”

So the myth is created to fill the gap of understanding. It's not a patch. It's sort of like a tree grows out of an enormous hole in the ground. Or it’s a little hole in the ground, and then it becomes an enormous hole as the tree grows out. So I'm interested in history that’s a myth growing up out of a hole in history. I keep going back to the hole, the hole in history, the hole in Lincoln's head, the hole that Willa Mae, from Getting Mother's Body is buried in and speaks from the bottom of.

So I don’t do research. Well, I bought a kid's book about Abraham Lincoln, a picture book. There he was, looking skinny and worried. But the plays have less to do with Lincoln and more to do with the memory of Lincoln. Less to do with The Scarlet Letter and more to do with the memory of the wound, but not even with that.... It's the past in the present moment. It's not just looking back. It's the past as it explodes into the present. When we remember, we're literally putting the members back together, putting our bodies back together.

Fill in the blanks. And, who knows, maybe you'll be the lucky winner to see this amazing woman in person tonight at the Parmaount.

Congratulations to Cynthia Smith, winner of the ticket giveaway.

Or, just buy your tickets here.

KLRU Spark Speaker Series
Suzan-Lori Parks
Paramount Theatre
Tonight @ 7:30