Like many of us, Suzan-Lori Parks thought the Covid shutdown would last a few weeks.
The Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, writer, musician, and all around multi-hyphenate, was on the set of Genius: Aretha, a season in National Geographic’s anthology series that focused on the life of singer Aretha Franklin.
“They said, ‘[It’ll be] a couple of weeks, you know, go home, put your feet up right. We’ll be back,’” said Parks to the Guardian.
But soon, weeks turned into months, and months turned into over a year of lockdown with her young son and husband in their one-bedroom New York apartment. Parks did what she always does: stayed present and wrote.
“I believe that in the moment is the point of power,” said Parks on the importance of writing in real time while quarantining.
The culmination of material is what makes up Plays for the Plague Year, Parks’ latest show set to reopen this spring at the off-Broadway Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub. Parks and her family have since moved out of the apartment. The playwright, the first Black woman to receive the Pulitzer prize for drama, has other upcoming projects, including an original musical based on the 1972 film The Harder They Come.
But, for Parks, the desire to look, to stay connected, to “pay attention” remains. Parks was warm and overflowing, as she detailed her year-long writing process on a Zoom call.
From March 2020 to April 2021, Parks wrote a short play a day. Sometimes, Parks would write multiple. Other times, Parks would write fragments of a song, eventually creating 23 original songs for the theatrical piece that charts the family’s journey through the pandemic.
One song Parks wrote, RIP The King, was for Chadwick Boseman, the lauded Black Panther actor who passed in 2020 from colon cancer. Parks learned of Boseman’s passing while dancing with her husband on their anniversary. Her eight-year old son asked, “Mommy, are you going to write a play for T’Challa,” in memoriam for the late actor. “It was so kind of earth shattering that the only way I could express it was by making this song,” said Parks.
The theatrical concert, edited down from nearly 12 hours of material, also includes several vignettes that spotlight those who passed during the lockdown. Among those honored are Mohammaed Jafor, a 56-year old, New York City cab driver who died of Covid, and Dr Li Wenliang, who first issued warnings about Covid in Wuhan, China. Others include those Parks knew personally. Paul Oscher, who is commemorated in the play, was a blues musician and Parks’ ex-husband who passed from Covid-19.
“That was very hard,” said Parks of Oscher’s portion of the play. “For weeks when we rehearsed it, I would just cry through it.”
Parks’ piece also centers several high-profile deaths of Black people that took place during 2020, including George Floyd, who was murdered by Minneapolis police, and Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky. Both deaths led to global protests on racial injustice, and quickly redefined the lockdown for Parks.
“It wasn’t the summer of Covid lockdown [or] should we or should we not wear a mask,” said Parks. “It was a summer that George Floyd was murdered. It was the first summer you know, after Breonna Taylor had been murdered.”
The play-a-day writing practice Parks embarked on is her third published collection (though Parks has written several unpublished ones). But Plays for the Plague Year mark Parks’ first time acting across her decades-long career. “I take the stage and say, ‘I play the writer, and I’ll be here for you, to help us all through this thing,’” said Parks.
Parks said the latest collection started as an attempt to “keep my hands moving”. But eventually, as quarantine continued, the nature of the project shifted. “I thought, ‘I want to write something so that we can all have something when we get back together,’” said Parks, describing the piece as a “campfire to gather around” and reflect on the shutdown year.
Parks readily acknowledges the difficulty of looking back at the pandemic. As more than 6 million people have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic’s onset, looking back at the traumatic period of quarantine can be excruciating. But Parks noted the propensity to “only remember things that were hard” or avoid the memory of the pandemic all together robs people of experiencing moments of joy, community, and humanity that sprung from the communal experience.
“With Plays for the Plague year, we realize there was a lot of joy,” said Parks. “There were a lot of jokes, a lot of moments of celebration.”
Parks also called out America’s tendency to avoid grief altogether, and instead embrace numbing activities like “shopping”, said Parks. “In our country, we don’t want to grieve. We don’t want to talk about the bad stuff,” said Parks. “There’s some people who don’t think we need a 9/11 memorial,” Parks added.
“[Grief] is an experience that has a lot of opportunity in it, and is rich, and it’s like, ‘You put your hands in the dirt,” said Parks. “This is what it is to be alive. What a wonderful opportunity.”
Creation for Parks was a “necessary” part of getting through the shutdown. But when it came to embarking on more collaborative processes, navigating ever-updating safety conditions presented its own challenges. “It was a challenge. Lots of praying. Lots of prayer,” said Parks of working on Genius: Aretha as the shutdown restrictions eased.
While the process of managing Covid-19 within artistic spaces is easier as the industry has “a game plan”, Parks has still had to deal with her share of Covid disruptions, most recently with Plays for the Plague Year. Fall performances of the show were disrupted due to Covid infection within the cast. “It was absolutely heartbreaking,” said Parks, who expressed gratitude at being able to remount and a new song that came to her via a fever dream (“That was a beautiful gift”).
With The Harder They Come set to open in a few weeks, Covid protections continue to be emphasized amid cast and crew.
“For those of us on the ground and in certain professions, the pandemic is still happening,” said Parks, adding that those involved in The Harder They Come test daily for Covid.
Of the musical, Parks gushed about the modernization that audiences will experience: “We’re not reinventing the wheel with the show. I feel like we’re rolling the wheel forward because the film is so important and iconic to world culture and to Jamaican culture, and to Black culture.”
“Everybody is treated with consideration and dignity,” Parks added.
For now, Parks, ever reflective, is grateful for the creative moments she has been apart of, like the remount of her Pulitzer-prize winning play Topdog/Underdog: “[Actors Corey Hawkins, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and director Kenny Leon] just took it to the next level, a level that I always knew it was there, but requires the transmission of love. Which is a huge ask.”
The next remounting of Plays for the Plague Year will be just that, another opportunity to transmit love, hope, sadness and all that the pandemic brought us.
“We tend not to want to reflect, right? Lest the whole thing fall apart, but it won’t. If we reflect together,” said Parks.
The Harder They Come starts previews at the Newman Theater in New York on 16 February and Plays for the Plague Year will begin previews on 5 April at Joe’s Pub
