The America Play

The America Play, by Suzan-Lori Parks, opened off-Broadway in 1994 at the Public Theater. The play was one of Parks’s earliest successes, and she became one of the most celebrated African American playwrights of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. As a playwright, Parks became particularly well-known for her poetic language, innovative style, and experimental structures. Like many of her works, The America Play explores the way Blackness is represented and erased in mainstream narratives of United States history. The play suggests that subjugated histories are not entirely lost—just buried.

The central figure of the play, the Foundling Father, is a Black Abraham Lincoln impersonator who longs to make his own mark on history like the late President Lincoln. The Foundling Father character returns in Parks’s most well-known play, Topdog/Underdog (2001), which was her first work to transfer to Broadway in 2002, and for which Parks became the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama. Through performance and alternative modes of excavation, Parks uses the stage as a site for historical mythmaking to exist alongside the fabricated myths of White-dominated historical narratives.

Plot Summary

The play takes place “in a great hole.