Repetition & Revision in Suzan-Lori Park’s History Plays and Topdog/Underdog Anonymous 12th Grade

In her two decades as a playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks has tackled American history from many angles; while she shuffles themes of race, family, death, and time between each of her plays, they are all linked by the common structure of what she calls her “Repetition & Revision” writing style. Most of her early work employs this jazz structure of repeated and rephrased dialogue as the framework for the play itself, which is more of a performance piece than a narrative. For example, the texts of 1994’s The America Play and 1990’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Entire World (commonly referred to as Parks’s history plays) define the structure as something of a lyrical cacophony. However, her breakthrough 2002 Pulitzer-winning Topdog/Underdog reconfigures “Rep & Rev” into a more traditional dramatic structure.

Topdog/Underdog is grounded in natural dialogue, without overlapping or repeating, but it retains her stylistic ethos in its plot, which recycles historical narratives into a contemporary urban setting. It also features characters that attempt to revise their own personalities, but unlike the speakers in Parks’s history plays, who revise slave narratives to form authentic, self-created identities, the characters...