Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks on making art about Covid

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks on making art about Covid’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
We aren’t seeing a lot of plays about the pandemic yet, but I was at one recently. It was by the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and it’s called Plays for the Plague Year. There’s this scene in it that reminds me of how we were so stressed out back then that we were kind of forgetting to breathe. One of the main characters breaks the fourth wall and he walks right up to the audience and he asks us to do this breathing exercise with him. And so he tells us as an audience together to breathe in for four, hold for four, and breathe out for four. And I breathed in for four and I just, like, immediately started to cry. (chuckles) And I was.

Suzan-Lori Parks
Wow. Oh, bless your heart.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Like totally involuntary. That’s me telling Susan Laurie about this just days after seeing her play.

Suzan-Lori Parks
And that’s so great. No, no, no. If you can feel it, you can heal it. We are a nation that does not want to grieve. And we need to grieve. We need to look back and go, oh, gee, if something unfortunate happened, we need to grieve it. We need to see it, We need to embrace it. We need to . . . all these human things that we no longer do.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the pre-eminent playwrights of our time. She studied under James Baldwin. She’s a MacArthur genius and she’s a Pulitzer Prize winner. She’s the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama for her play Topdog/Underdog. But this play about Covid feels different from her other work. It feels more earnest. Today, Suzan-Lori joins me to talk about why she decided to write a pandemic play and why she decided to put it on now. Now is an interesting time because we’re not in the thick of Covid anymore, but we’re not totally out, and our emotions around it are still raw to the touch.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Let me set the scene for you for this interview. I’m in a small conference room in the basement of an administrative building in Lower Manhattan across from the Public Theatre where the play is on. I’ve just taken a Covid test and I’m wearing a mask, and Suzan-Lori Parks is across from me, and she’s wearing a mask.

Suzan-Lori Parks
Why are we wearing masks? I know. And this is the thing. So the way things are now, I know we run around without masks, but when we’re in a small room because I am actually in my show Plays for the Plague Year, what happens is if one of us in the cast should test positive for Covid, even if we don’t have any symptoms, even if we feel fine, all that stuff, if we should test positive, we are not allowed to participate in the show for 10 days. OK. And I do not have an understudy. So last time around we did the show in the fall. Covid blazed through our show, and then I got Covid. I couldn’t help it. We were hanging out. So we had to shut down the show. We had to cancel the show.

Lilah Raptopoulos
In March of 2020, Suzan-Lori decided that she was gonna write a little play every day to keep her mind occupied until things got back to normal. But of course, as you know, nothing went back to normal. And the plays became this reflection of how abnormal our lives and our culture have become. Suzan-Lori plays a version of herself on stage, so you see personal stuff like her and her husband and her son doing all the Covid things we remember: the elbow bumping, the virtual school, the walks in the park. They have a friend who gets a job at a morgue. They have another friend who dies. You also see the cultural and the political stuff, like election night and the police brutality and the protests at that time. There’s also a lot of music.

[CLIP FROM ‘PLAYS FOR THE PLAGUE YEAR’ PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
So in the first year or so of the pandemic, you decided to write a little play every day and you collected it into one big play and you’re in the play. And first, I’m curious what it’s been like to stage it. You know, it’s three years out from the start of the pandemic.

Suzan-Lori Parks
Exactly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So what has it been like to stage this play while we’re still kind of in it?

Suzan-Lori Parks
Yeah, that’s a great question, because the, I mean, you wonder, what do we do with history and what do we do with memory and how do we digest things? Our culture these days, I feel like, is encouraged not to reflect, not to digest, not to process. And this show really, in a really joyful way, in a funny way, there are more jokes in there than I’ve ever written, I think, it encourages us to think about what happened. Yo, you know, it’s OK. It’s not gonna . . . it’s not gonna, it’s not going to cause harm. It’s going to cause some joy, strangely enough. Reflecting on the past is a doorway to incredible joy and incredibly . . . also some sorrow and some sadness. But for the most part, it is a joyous experience. And like I said, there are a lot of, there are a lot of fun jokes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. I’m curious how it went process-wise, how it went from this thing that you were doing, this thing that you were writing a little play every day, into a real production, into a show?

Suzan-Lori Parks
Into a show, right. The fun thing about, in my experience and in writing, writing period, and then there’s writing for the theatre, right? As I do writing across, you know, I’ve written from novels to movies to TV shows to songs, to essays, to all kinds of things. And I’ve written a lot of plays, and when I write plays, I’ve learned that I write them for a specific . . . they’re plays. They’re not essays. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think this might be performed one day. That’s in that’s integral. That’s part of the DNA of a play. Right? And when I started writing these plays, it was very much I’m creating something so that when we get back together, we’ll have something to share with each other. We’ll have a . . . I was setting the table, if you will, for this banquet, for this dinner party. I was planning a dinner party. Didn’t know what actors I was going to invite in. Big question mark. But I knew that I was going to have a dinner party, and I knew that the dishes would be these plays. And of course, I wrote one a day, sometimes two a day, sometimes two a day, and a song for a whole year. So there are many more than we actually see on stage. We see about 90 or so. I never counted.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m curious what that process was like editing this? Sort of tweaking it to make it . . . 

Suzan-Lori Parks
Yeah, yeah, sure. Sure, sure. Because it would have been, you know, 10 hours, 15 hours long. if we had done all of them. (laughter) And, you know, so, so to edit it, to your question, to edit it. Yeah. What to leave in. Oh, what to leave out. Again, what do we want to encourage the audience to remember. What do we want to let go of?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Was there a play that you read it and you were like, I want to forget that, so I don’t want to put it in. Or that wasn’t, you know . ..

Suzan-Lori Parks
No. Wouldn’t have written it. If I, if I wanted to forget it, I wouldn’t have written it. It wouldn’t have made it to the page, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the ones I wanted to now, I didn’t only want to remember the quote unquote, “good things” or the “good moments”. I mean, there are a lot of very upsetting moments that I wanted to, I wanted to maybe remember, remember literally put the body together, put the body back together, and we remember them in different ways. So, for example, I mean, for example, some of the difficult things that happened during the year. Breonna Taylor was killed. Now, do we recreate the killing of Breonna Taylor? No. We have her standing on stage talking about it. Ahmaud Arbery was killed. Do we recreate the killing of Ahmaud Arbery? No, we don’t, actually. The wonderful actor Leland Fowler stands on stage and says Ahmaud Arbery goes for a run. You know what happens next? And then The Writer says to her son, “Pumpkin pie. Can I give you a hug?” And so what we’re recreating is . . . everyone knows what happened and we’re also creating a moment where a mother can reach out to her son and say, I love you. So we’re creating much more than just . . . it’s not trauma porn. It’s not, oh, let’s run the audience through these horrible things that happened. So, ha! It’s never like that at all. As artists, I feel like we do need to learn how to discuss or engage in discussions or presentations of quote unquote, “difficult things” without engaging in the creation of trauma porn. Trauma porn to trauma is like sex and love is to pornography. There’s a difference. We all know it. But why haven’t we learned it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
When Suzan-Lori talks about trauma porn, she’s referring to this idea that’s becoming popular, especially with young artists. It’s that we shouldn’t be excessively rehashing a group’s traumas and pain for entertainment, that that is often exploitative. Suzan-Lori thinks it’s not that simple. For her the good needs to live alongside the bad. There’s a way to wrestle with both because they intertwine and you see a lot of that in this play.

Suzan-Lori Parks
I teach at NYU. I think that we who have been at the game, at the game of writing a game of artmaking a little longer than some of the others need to teach it. I don’t think it’s something that we grow, you know, come into the arts knowing. I think we need to be taught.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can I ask, what do you teach your students in or around this specific? Oh, like, how would you . . . 

Suzan-Lori Parks
Well, yeah, it’s not. I mean, I mean. And, you know, let’s be. I don’t teach a class called How to Write.

Lilah Raptopoulos
No, of course. But I’m . . . 

Suzan-Lori Parks
Yeah, I, uh. But what I teach applies to every subject. Right? Go deeper. You’re a better writer than that. Why are you going for the thrill when you could go for the truth? I just ask them questions like that, you know? What is your character really feeling right here? Yeah. You got. Yeah. You’re titillating the audience. Is that all that you want to do? Really? And I look them in the eye. We’ve forgotten how to have conversations. We’ve forgotten. I’m looking you in the eye right now. Yeah, I know this mask. Let’s pull the mask down to see. Right. Because there’s a part in the play, you know, there’s the. Hello. The rest of your face part. Hello, the rest of your face. Amazing. Show me yours. There you are. Hello. The rest of your face, right? Yeah. It’s an amazing thing. We’ve forgotten how to do that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Suzan-Lori Parks
Even before pandemic, we forgot. We don’t look each other in the eyes anymore. Yeah, we have hot takes and cancel people and ha! We feel powerful, you know, with our thumbs. Yeah. You’re cancelled. You, you know, we don’t have conversations anymore. We . . . a conversation is a beautiful thing that helps create, quote, unquote, “civilisation”.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

[CLIP FROM ‘PLAYS FOR THE PLAGUE YEAR’ PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Suzan-Lori singing on stage. One thing that Plays for the Plague Year does is it reminds us that Covid wasn’t just a health crisis, it was also a political crisis. At the start of the pandemic, the crisis messaging was wild. You probably remember politicians were urging Americans to prioritise reopening the economy over protecting the health of the elderly. Suzan-Lori’s play processes a lot of that messaging and she had a lot to say about it with me too.

During your play, I got emotional in a number of places that I didn’t expect to.

Suzan-Lori Parks
Like where, where, where that you didn’t expect it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
When I just forgot how many people died. It was like, I knew, but I forgot. And there was something about the way that it was sort of you reminded us through it, sort of repeated it three times as the count was getting higher. You know, it’s so early to be processing the pandemic and there isn’t a lot of art yet, and there aren’t a lot of plays that are doing this. And I’m just curious how you think about that. Like, is it too early? I mean, maybe it’s not too early?

Suzan-Lori Parks
Is it too . . . is it too . . . I mean. Is there a . . is there . . . is there a . . . calculate? What is the math? What is the math on trauma happened. Or not trauma. Let’s take that word away. Something happened. Something. Thing. It happens. And when are we supposed to . . . what is the . . . what is the . . . is there a math to that? Is there a formula to you know, it sounds like you know, because I don’t . . . I don’t . . . I don’t know. I feel . . . I feel something happened, it happened. And if I’m feeling something, then that is appropriate. I learned from the actors involved, everybody involved, and people who’ve come to the show. They so wanted to feel. They had stuffed things in their bodies that they had forgotten about and they wanted to keep it that way. And actually they realised they didn’t want to keep it that way. They just didn’t know what to do. So they are just holding tight and going shopping. (chuckles) Buying stuff. No, really. After 9/11, we were encouraged to go shopping. I remember that. And we all thought, a lot of folks thought that’s a good idea. Get the economy back on track. Show that we’re still here. Go out and spend that almighty dollar. Yes. You know, and that was considered by some, you know, that was considered, you know, some OK advice.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What would you have liked?

Suzan-Lori Parks
Well, I don’t know. And I can’t remember. You know, I don’t I don’t know. I don’t know. But what I do know is that during the pandemic, we were encouraged to consider allowing the elderly to die for the sake of the economy. Now, that’s a similar kind of thing. And in the plays, the kid asks, Mom, mommy and daddy, what’s the economy? Because he knows what the elderly are. The elderly? Grandma and grandpa. And Mr Charlie, who lives down the hall and you know, he knows who the elderly are. But he doesn’t know what the economy is. And so that kind of thing. So when is it an appropriate time to process? Well, we’re going to see that we’re going to have a 10-year anniversary and process it then? (laughter) Or is it a win, the political of either party? We’re going to wait for them to tell us when it’s appropriate to process something?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Turns out I needed to process it two days ago. (chuckles)

Suzan-Lori Parks
Yeah. And we’re there for you. We’re showing up. We’re showing up for people. And we’re showing up for each other.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulo
Plays for the Plague Year is very different than the play that made Suzan-Lori famous. That play, Topdog/Underdog came out in 2002. Last year it was reprised on Broadway for its 20th anniversary and I went and it was one of the most intense theatre experiences I’ve had in years. And when I left the theatre, it was like the words from the play were pounding in my head. This play feels more gentle. So I was curious if there was a throughline for her and what that throughline was. I would like, Suzan-Lori, to ask you a little bit about Topdog/Underdog, and I will explain it briefly to our listeners, although it’s a very hard play to explain because it’s about so much. Oh, gosh.

Suzan-Lori Parks
No, it’s OK. Pretend I’m not here. Just pretend.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s about two adult brothers and their dad named them Lincoln and Booth as a joke, and they live together and they’re just in conversation in their home and they’re dealing with many things, racism and trying to just make enough to get by and how to do that when the cards are kind of stacked against you and their relationship with each other in their family. And I saw some parallels with Plays for the Plague Year. And maybe the clearest link is just dealing in a nuanced way with what it means to be black in America. At one point in Plays for the Plague Year, you have James Baldwin come on, who was a teacher. And he says people have no memory.

The Writer
Any tips, Mr Baldwin?

James Baldwin
Don’t fear pain. Don’t fear joy. Say what you think. Even if it’s unpopular, even among those who you consider to be your people. Shout if you have to. But don’t shout so much that you lose your voice.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m curious if you see parallels between the two plays?

Suzan-Lori Parks
You know, that’s a great question. That’s a wonderful question because they’re so far apart in time from each other. I wrote Topdog/Underdog in 1999 and we reference it in Plays for the Plague Year. Yeah. Yeah. Are there parallels? Well, I would say it’s it’s funny. The thing about the first he said about Topdog/Underdog, one of the first things was, you know, two brothers, adult men. They’re dealing with racism. That’s the very first thing. To me that’s interesting, because to me, that’s not how I see it. And as a black person, that is how our drama is deemed relevant. That is how we are seen as having a relevant story to tell. Me and racism, you know. These guys, I think they’re biggest bigger than race. It’s the, it’s, it’s you’re my big brother. I’m your little brother. I want to learn something, you know, and you won’t teach me. That to me is the biggest thing again. Plays for the Plague Year. Racism, sure it happens, but it happens because I am a black woman. But it’s not the stuff of the plays, I don’t think. Although the similarities is to me with Topdog and the Plays for the Plague Year, one, they couldn’t be more different. People go in Topdog, they go, Where are you? This isn’t about you at all. And oh, it’s all about me. You just don’t see me. Plays for the Plague Year, you see me. There I am. You can’t not see me there, right? You know, so they couldn’t be more different. And yet they are so much of the same song because both shows embrace, you know, the mystery of being human. What is it? What actually is going on? How is reality created? That’s what I really am interested in. And we could talk all day about racism and race relations, but that’s just the veil that has been used to hide from us the thing that’s really interesting, which is right now we’re creating reality. Isn’t that cool? And how is reality created? You know, and when The Writer, the first thing that she says when she walks on the stage is I play The Writer. What does that mean for me, Suzan-Lori Parks, to walk on stage in a play, a series of plays that I wrote and sing to the audience, “I play The Writer.” What does that mean? How do we create reality? And if we can look at and embrace the ways, the various, the many multitudinous — I don’t even know that’s a word — ways in which we create reality every moment, then we can be more attentive to the fact that we are creating reality every single moment. We’re not just in some some labyrinth of someone else’s design, you know what I mean? So I do think that the topic of race relations, while it is important, is actually a diversion from the real beautiful thing that here we are, humans, being human and together we are creating reality. Wow. Look at us.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can you just, it’s just a follow up. When you say we’re creating reality all the time, and what does that mean? I guess tangibly when do you feel that? And I ask that partially because in the pandemic I felt like, wow, we are really living history. And what, you know, what do we do to preserve this time? How do I, how am I going to remember this time in the future? And I was very aware of the ways we were creating reality and living in reality and in a way that I don’t feel palpably anymore.

Suzan-Lori Parks
Right.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I guess I’m curious.

Suzan-Lori Parks
Because things are back to normal. (chuckles) When things get where everyone kept saying, when things get back to normal, when we put the veil over it again and you start being aware of what’s going on of your your part in it, that’s what Plays for the Plague Year is really doing. That’s, in a way, another reason why it’s so emotional. It’s not only reminding us of stuff that happened, but it’s reminding you of the part that you play in the construction of reality. Moment by moment by moment. And that’s the great, I think, service of Plays for the Plague Year. It’s just helping us wake up to our authority, the ways that we on stage, the actors, we the musicians, we have a wonderful band. Take care of each other while we’re on stage. We assist each other on two pieces of furniture. We move pieces of furniture. We help each other into certain costume changes. We applaud each other. We witness the plays that we’re not in. The way that we’re there for each other is an invitation to model that behaviour. We’re inviting the audience. Try this. Next time you’re feeling me, we’re like, you don’t give a fuck? Try something like this. Stand up for somebody else. Witness somebody, be there for somebody who you don’t know.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mmm. Suzan-Lori Parks, this conversation was a real honour. Thank you so much.

Suzan-Lori Parks
Thank you for having me.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the Life and Arts podcast of the Financial Times. Next week we have the actor Arian Moayed. He plays Stewy, a fan favourite, on Succession and so much more. And he’s on to tell us what it’s like to play an unlikeable character. Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes, alongside a link to a great discount on an FT subscription. That’s also at FT.com/weekendpodcast. There’s also a link in there to a discount to the second annual US FT Weekend Festival, which is in Washington, DC on Saturday, May 20th.

As you know, we love hearing from you. So if there’s something that you’d like to hear us take on or someone you’d like to hear us interview or an activator you want us to chat with, get in touch. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @FTWeekendPod, and I am on Instagram and Twitter, @Lilahrap. I post a lot of behind the scenes stuff about the show on my Instagram.

I am Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.