When it came time for Parks to apply to colleges, her parents encouraged her to consider New England, where they had attended graduate school. Parks ultimately settled on Mount Holyoke after she fell in love with the campus’s 1,200 trees. She started there in 1981, and in her junior year was admitted into a seminar taught by James Baldwin, who was then on faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She had been an admirer of Baldwin’s since 1972 — her parents gifted her a copy of “The Fire Next Time” for Valentine’s Day that year when she told them she wanted to be a writer — and was thrilled to study with him. Each week, the 15-person seminar workshopped a few students’ writing, and when Parks brought her stories to class, she would stand up and perform them as if they were theater. “I’m acting out these stories, and Mr. Baldwin suggested I try writing for the theater. He told me I could be good.”
After class, Baldwin would invite the students for drinks at a nearby bar, but Parks couldn’t bring herself to go. “To me, it wasn’t appropriate,” she told me, gently mocking her genteel Southern side. “I’d been looking at his face on the back of this paperback since I was in fifth grade!” For the young Parks, Baldwin was an educator, not a peer. The most important lesson she learned from Baldwin’s seminar, though, was how to show up, not just as a writer but as a human being. “What I received was how to conduct myself in the presence of spirit,” she told me, conjuring the religious underpinnings of Baldwin’s work. “You have to wrestle, tussle with the angels. I like writing because you get to hold the hand of the spirit.” For Parks, it became clear that the writer’s vocation was one of listening to the ancestors, and reverence for what you might learn.
Parks graduated in 1985 and moved to London to study theater at the Drama Studio for a year before returning to the United States and settling in New York. In 1987, she staged her first production, “Betting on the Dust Commander,” in a bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was only the second play she ever wrote, but it features all of her signatures: a mythic sense of time, a concern with how history echoes in intimate relationships and a reveling in language. The play tells the story of a Black couple, Lucius and Mare, who have somehow been married for over 100 years and speak in a style so country and rough that to an untrained ear it could read as pure caricature. At one point, speaking of his own death, Lucius compares himself to an old racing horse. He hopes that when he nears the end, “they stretch me out like that. Hope they get me in thuh home stretch fore I get all stuck up: arms this way, elbows funny, knees knocking, head all wrong.” Dwelling in the language of the rural South, which many might dismiss as backward, Parks listened for and shared its wisdom.
What followed was a prolific run of incisive and experimental productions. In the 1990 jazz requiem “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World AKA the Negro Book of Dead,” Parks filled the stage with a parade of historical figures, racial stereotypes and folklore characters (the play opens, for example, with a line from a character named Black Man With Watermelon). She confronted racial stereotype and distortion while also exploring Black people’s complex interiority. Her 30-year relationship with the Public began in 1994 with “The America Play,” about a Black man who works as both a gravedigger and (like the character in “Topdog/Underdog”) an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and “Venus” (1996), a lyrical portrait of Sarah Baartman, the 19th-century Khoekhoe woman known as the Venus Hottentot. In Parks’s depiction, the woman who was exhibited like a zoo animal and exploited is not simply a victim but a woman in search of intimacy and a sense of self. Aside from the steady production of new plays, Parks has embraced a variety of projects. She wrote the screenplay for Spike Lee’s 1996 film “Girl 6,” about a young Black woman actor who becomes a phone-sex operator. She was tapped to write the screenplays for film adaptations of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” as well as for Lee Daniels’s 2021 biopic “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.”
Parks’s day-to-day doings have a disciplined rhythm that is conventional even in what is an unconventional, spellbound life. She and her husband, Christian, a jazz musician and composer from Munich, are parents of a 12-year-old son. “When you’re a parent, life sort of has a certain flexibility,” she says, “respectful flexibility, where you can include and incorporate the boundaries that you have to erect to get your work done.” Each weekday, she wakes up at 4 to meditate and do yoga. Her son rises at 5:30 to read and play the violin beside her. She teaches in the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University, where she delights in facilitating among her students the kind of community she values dearly. “I love being with people and talking about the creative, being with people as they walk their path, because it can be very lonely. It can be very frightening. It’s a trip, so I’m like, ‘I’m a trip advisor!’”
