One of the hallmark strengths of Suzan Lori Parks' work is her ability to translate and make achingly familiar the foreign or estranged through simple, thick, and omnipresent metaphor. In In The Blood, one of her two riffs on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hester, an illiterate homeless mother of five children by five different fathers, struggles to "get a leg up" on an impossible terrain. Wading through the mire of the welfare, medical, and social systems, she strains against those who only use her but claim she taxes them. Dehumanized, most literally via a court-advised removal of her "woman's parts", and improbably hopeful, she strives to learn the alphabet but never gets past the letter "A". A pair of shoes she refuses to wear until she has the finery to match are a sore reminder of what she might've had and cannot have, as are her children. Parks double casts the various men and women that manipulate and rely upon the heroine as her progeny, underlining the dependency and vulnerability inherent in the role of "victimizer". In the proper mouths, incantations of these "little spells" (as she calls combinations of words) pummel, corrode, and malleate the audience's perception of what poverty really means and what victimhood really entails. more ›

Random Favorite Blog of the Week: We just happened on to the LJ Austin community, which is a blog of sorts. There are all sorts of posts there about local happenings and other such topics. more ›