SOURCE: Ryan, Katy. “‘No Less Human’: Making History in Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 13, no. 2 (spring 1999): 81-94.

In the following essay, Ryan explores the sexual, racial, and political overtones in The America Play and considers Parks's use of language, repetition, and absences to subvert white-based and white-written history.

We stand to-day at the national center to perform something like a national act—an act which is to go into history.

—Frederick Douglass¹

Frederick Douglass spoke the above words on 14 April 1876 in a speech to commemorate the Freedmen's Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. The statue, financed by African-Americans, depicts a kneeling black man, shackles broken, looking up at Abraham Lincoln who holds the Constitution in his right hand and extends his left over the head of the former slave. Lincoln looks straight ahead. In Beware the People Weeping (1986), Thomas Turner reinforces...