Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

82 Chapter 4 The Playwright
The rhythm of her sentences, with their repetitions of
sounds and noises, creates a startling, poetic effect.
Other work has also discovered startling resonance
in the ravages of history. In The America Play, her main
character, “The Foundling Father,” is so obsessed with
Abraham Lincoln that he leaves his family to play the role
of America’s sixteenth president in a sort of traveling carnival,
soliciting spectators to come up on stage and, for a
fee, pick up a prop gun and, as John Wilkes Booth, shoot
him. And Venus (1996) portrays a nineteenth-century
African woman, Saartjie Baartman, who, because of her
enormous buttocks, was displayed throughout America as
a freak. The basic situations—as well as Parks’ savagely
comic and ironic style—of both plays have been transmuted
to current times in two of Parks’ subsequent works.
The Pulitzer-prize-winning Topdog/Underdog, staged by
playwright/director George C. Wolfe at the Public Theatre
in 2001, while set in present-day America, concerns
a violently contentious pair of brothers named Lincoln
and Booth, and once again Lincoln, now a retired master
of three-card monte, New York’s sidewalk con game,
is playing President Lincoln in an arcade show, while
Booth, a shoplifter, is his assassin in a fugue of sibling
and status rivalry. Inner identities, outer roles and status
levels all continuously shift and jostle in these plays,
which are more generally accessible than her earlier work
but no less controversial in their reception. Her continuing,
vital presence on the American theater scene continues
to inspire and disturb.
THERESA REBECK
Many of America’s best mid-century playwrights—
Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller—
were drawn to Hollywood after their biggest Broadway
hits, either by transposing their plays into films
(Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof) or writing original films of their own (Miller’s The
Misfits). For Theresa Rebeck, however, stage, film, and
television have been joint ventures since her career began,
after receiving graduate degrees (an M.F.A. in playwriting
and a Ph.D. in dramatic literature) from Brandeis University
in the late 1980s. Rebeck has written more than fifty
plays, and more than fifty films and television episodes
(the latter including L.A. Law, Law & Order, NYPD Blue,
First Wave, Third Watch, Brooklyn Bridge, Dream On
and Smash). But plays, in recent years, have become her
primary genre. Since the previous (2014) edition of this
book went to press, she has opened five new plays, Dead
Accounts at Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park, Fever at
the Resident Ensemble Players in Delaware, Poor Behavior
at the off-Broadway Duke Theatre, The Crown at the
Denver Center for the Performing Arts, and Zealot at
South Coast Repertory, which, in part performed in Arabic,
involves the current political and religious conflicts
between the United States, England, and Saudi Arabia.
Rebeck has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and has
won many other national and regional awards. This is a
writer who is at the very top of her many games.
An American secretary of state (center,
played by Charlayne Woodard) meets
in Mecca with a Saudi Arabian minister
(Demosthenes Chrysan, left) and a British
consul (Alan Smyth) as a riot is taking place
outside their window in Theresa Rebeck’s
Zealot, which premiered at South Coast
Repertory in California in 2014. The play is set
in the present, but calls historical attention
to Thomas Jefferson, Cyrus the Great, and
Joan of Arc—as well as contemporary political
figures Julian Assange and Edward Snowden—
with fiery speeches in American and British
English interrupted at times by Arabic tirades.
© Ben Horak/South Coast Repertory