Stumbling from Stage to Page

...The fairly simple plot is built around the most fundamental directive every writer learns: Make your characters want something badly...

...Half the family takes off toward the grave in Laz' hearse...

...Billy heads the party, with her bellyful of baby going before her...

...Billy is irresistible: agile-tongued, smart, fierce, quick to lie, willful, and pregnant herself by a man who has neglected to tell her he is married and the father of many...

...Sixteen-year-old Billy Beede (named after Billie Holiday by a shaky speller) is the precocious daughter of wild Willa Mae Beede, who wore a tight red dress and flashed her stuff up and down the back roads of Texas right into an early grave, courtesy ofabent coat hanger...

...In spite of her cynicism, she would rather Billy et al...

...The man is a coffin-maker named Snipes...

...There is a lot of death here, mostly comic, certainly not scary...

...offstage people are gathering to march on Washington...

...She is not impressed...

...It surely is not...

...and a frustrated suitor named Laz, short for Lazarus because he was born dead...

...Along to protect Billy are her uncle Roosevelt Beede (Teddy, if you please), a failed minister who now works pumping gas for The Man...

...But this, I stubbornly persist in thinking, is not the kind of writing Suzan-Lori Parks was made for...

...Did Parks take Faulkner, O'Connor and all those Steel Magnolias plays set amid the chatter of beauty and barbershops and stir them together with a knowing wink, fully aware that they were distillations of life as it is in "the rural...

...Moved along through transitions from voice to voice that are as smooth as good stagecraft, the story built upon these wants, needs, obsessions, and compulsions is more antic than earnest...

...But the proceedings are never grim...

...Henry James and Thomas Wolfe tried hard and, famously, failed...

...Maybe by the year 2000, but surely, the world will end by then...

...I turned the novel's pages with pleasure...

...Or rather, someone else's play...

...In Top Dog/Underdog, even Lincoln and Booth, duking it out, are rendered mythic by those names...

...After the challenges and violence of her plays, Getting Mother's Body ends like a Shakespearean comedy, with everyone neatly rewarded, requited, reconciled...

...The Mother Showman...

...his wife June, who has about given up on the dream of having enough money to buy herself a new leg to replace the one she's lost (Flannery O'Connor anyone...

...Not this year, though...

...Insight into racial hostility, for example, is as straightforward and unsubtle as "It's 1963 and a Negro life is cheap...

...It's like The Hole shapes the words for me and I don't got to think or nothing...

...Its members are motivated by an assortment of unsentimental reasons, mostly concerning the jewels said to be in the casket with her...

...Does the reverse work better, the migration from stage to page, or are prose writers stuck fast in their genres...

...Now another playwright with a vivid profile and a small body of highly acclaimed work has vaulted that fence...

...Time is running out on all of them: Billy, having discovered Snipes'treachery, wants an abortion she can't afford, and it's just about too late...

...The bad girls are endearing, the bad boys are easily put in their places...

...The novel is essentially a series of monologues, "opened up" the way films are opened up (that is to say, enacted by too many characters in too many places to be staged...

...Diverting as it is, in a blind reading I would have guessed it to be someone else's book...

...Though the weight of the segregated South is palpable, there are just about no white folks here, at least none with any particular power in the face of the daring Beedes...

...There are probably others, yet they are relatively few and hardly leap to mind...

...But like the large majority of dramatists before her, she has failed to make a real incursion into the distinctive territory of fiction...

...Maybe the price'll rise to reach the value of the cost we brought in slavery times...

...Ntozake Shange is responsible for a few pieces of estimable fiction, but nothing so strong or influential as her theatrical work...

...there is a small, set fire...

...Then again, maybe a dramatist whose most recent play is her unique variation on The Scarlet Letter, which today stands for Abortion, could use a little comic relief...

...There are exceptions: In recent years E.L...

...Willa Mae bled to death six years earlier in a scene that's far from funny, but by now she's as unrepentant in her grave as she ever was...

...a gun...

...The caravan is colorful, if not wholly original—a hard-luck bunch whom their antagonists accuse of "Beedeism," which is pretty much Snopesism for Black folks...

...Being in the ground is bad enough," complains Billy's Aunt June, "now she gotta have a Piggly Wiggly or who knows what with all them people walking around with they shopping carts rolling around on top of her...

...Most surprisingly, for a writer who has used her inventiveness to explore the ways in which history has cast both blacks and whites in interchangeable roles that can be turned inside out, its characters are astoundingly conventional...

...Her contribution to the chorus is a bundle of blues lyrics, some memories of Billy as her sweet, wild child, and Billy's poignant explanation of where she got her daring: "Mother said she could see The Hole in people and then she'd know how to take them....Words shape theirselves in my mouth and I start talking without thinking of what I need to say...

...quick stolen sex and long devotion...

...There is no authorial voice or binding narrative thread, no conceptual complexity...

...It also plays fast and loose with its Black and Southern stereotypes—the vamp in the tight dress, the dusty gas station, the requisite beauty parlor where Billy is a star hair stylist and winning confidante...

...Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Author, "Half a Heart," "Street Games" IT IS a matter of little dispute that novelists rarely have managed to write good plays...

...Suzan-Lori Parks' Getting Mother's Body offers real pleasures, and I would be curmudgeonly if I pretended I did not enjoy its lively tumult of voices...

...She has a reputation, however, as a writer who has challenged stage conventions and cast some long shadows across the racial divide: She won a Mac Arthur "genius grant" in 2001, followed by a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her Top Dog/Underdog...

...Somewhere en route, they are joined by a cousin named Homer, who also fancies Billy in spite of her distance from his patronizing family's Spelman/Morehouse degrees...

...And all the while, out in Arizona, the builders are advancing on Willa's grave...

...But that is a dangerous allusion, unless the book (which could be called As I Lay Dead) can measure up to it...

...All of them are being chased by Dill Smiles, a six-foot tall ex-lover of Willa Mae, born a woman but now more or less male...

...There are robberies, lies, secrets, gossip, con games, lusts acknowledged and denied...

...A reader therefore has reason to expect her fiction to be emotionally, thematically and structurally demanding—or at least as original as her plays...

...not pry up that coffin lid...

...Doctorow has acquitted himself honorably, and Joyce Carol Oates, by dint of sheer intelligence and verbal energy, has turned out stage-worthy scripts—though none so indispensable that it has been widely produced...

...She never could figure out why someone should get to keep her treasure when she's dead, and makes it clear at the start that the crazy parade will end in frustration— yet she chases after it anyway...

...But no, the book's characters are insistently real, their voices literal, varied, perfectly heard...

...Black Woman With Fried Drumstick...

...Her seducer seems cheerfully unconcerned about consequences: He invites her to his real town with the promise of marriage, and when she shows up at his house with a wedding gown she has cajoled out of a shopkeeper who couldn't resist how pretty she looks in it, she is stunned to meet his wife at the door...

...She has never much believed in The Victimhood of Her People anyway, so if all's well that ends well and everyone is grinning, perhaps that's a statement in itself...

...Billy's baby's father was a coffin-maker, and all that blues, needless to say, is death-obsessed...

...Sam Shepard has published some very good short stories...

...Chekhov is a category of one...

...At one point a character who is unlikely to have read Faulkner calls him "her Snipes or Snopes," which only proves that Parks reads...

...It is 1963...

...Dill confides early on, unapologetically, that she did not bury those jewels when she laid her lover in the ground...

...As long as they are going to be there, they plan to move her bones out of the path of an encroaching supermarket project...

...Should we read their stories backward from stereotype to the common reality the types were made of in the first place...

...Instead of a journey to bury Mother (as the title seems to suggest), Parks' family is on the road to La Junta, Arizona, where Willa Mae is buried, to dig her up...

...All are so familiar that perhaps they are, in their way, analogs of the characters in Parks' plays after all, who live under the titles of their archetypes as though they wore signs: Man With Watermelon...

...When she declares that she has risen above Beedeism, her relatives "smile, as if they understand what I have said, but that would be like having a pig understand that one day he will wake up from a dream to discover he's actually a man...

...Though it's mighty late in the game, she needs those jewels to pay to be rid of Snipes' little gift to her...