Susan Granger’s review of “Plays for the Plague Year” (Off-Broadway at the Public Theater)
Suzan-Lori Parks was the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama for her 2001 “Topdog/Underdog,” but I’ve been intrigued by her prolific work ever since she became a mystifying force at the Yale Rep in New Haven.
Now at Joe’s Pub, Parks shares the stage with eight performers who play her husband, son, friends, cops and colleagues – living and dead – in a marathon, three-hour session, recounting 13 months of songs and stories written at the height of the recent Covid pandemic and punctuated by Parks performing her own music with a band (guitarist Rick Molino, bassist Graham Kozak, percussionist Ray Marchica).
These short vignettes – a play-a-day – chronicle Parks’s family life, working on a television project while guiding her eight year-old son (Leland Fowler) through the rigors of remote learning and nursing her quarantined husband (Greg Keller) through a long bout of Covid – in a one-bedroom apartment.
Directed and choreographed revue-style by Niegel Smith with Rodrigo Munoz’s imaginative costumes, there are additional Black Lives Matter commentaries that ‘bear witness’ to Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Herman Cain. Above the stage, production designer Peter Nigrini displays the date attached to each memory segment.
There’s even audience participation since each of us fills out yellow notecards on which we write what we would like to remember about the pandemic year and what we would like to forget. Some of these are later read aloud.
“I had this belief that theater would save us,” Parks notes. “But it won’t. Not in the way I thought it would. But it does preserve us, somehow.”
A unique presentation, “Plays for the Plague Year” is at the Public Theater through April 30.