The marketing strategy of putting the playwright on the poster bothers me. It's a feeling made all the sharper by the Zach Theatre's importing of MacArthur 'Genius Grantee' Suzan-Lori Parks twice over the past six months for sessions entitled "Watch Me Work." The public was invited to watch Parks write -- at a desk? on a computer? on a yellow legal pad? -- for most of an hour, following which she had an exchange with the spectators. Now, that does not at all fit my concept or my requirements for writing; I find that I have to assume something of a hypnotic trance before the computer screen, capturing thoughts and words as if I were hunting elusive butterflies with a keyboard. I may well be wrong, for I didn't attend, but "Watch Me Work" seemed a bit too glam or too cult, the equivalent of displaying the playwright in the shop window.
The Zach has continued that "See The Playwright" marketing, even including in the program an insert with Dave Steakley's interview of Parks.
I didn't read it. Parks seems in Kirk Tuck's rehearsal pictures and in the Zach's videos to be a pleasant and intelligent person, but the identity of the playwright is not what lures me into the theatre. In similar fashion, David Mamet's newly celebrated political conversion from leftish to glowering rightish is frankly irrelevant in my mind to the performance of his work.
Parks' play The Book of Grace first went on stage at the Public Theatre in New York in April, 2010. The Zach Theatre recruited Parks herself to direct the play in this "definitive" version, playing now until July 20. The published play script will be the text used in this production. Parks was evidently still adjusting it during rehearsal . The program advised that there would be no intermission but the Steakley insert informed us correctly that there were two acts with a fifteen-minute intermission.
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