The appearance of Hester’s five children (from five different fathers) is jarring, and not just because they are developmentally disabled. Hester’s manic children are not distressed by the falling trash they are delighted with it! Bits and pieces of waste make up their clothes, their toys and even their meager income of discarded soda cans. Although it has been nearly two decades since the debut of In the Blood, the play has lost none of its relevance or bite. Their vocal barbs assume the form of physical waste, which descends noisily from a garbage chute onto Hester’s home, an abandoned lower ramp beneath a bridge. Their insults rain down upon Hester and her child with no sign of waning, and in fact this relentless toxicity never truly abates. This is Suzan Lori-Parks, and the "A" stands for her annihilation of apathy.Ĭruelty and disdain drip from a modern Greek chorus as they surround and condemn Hester (Saycon Sengbloh), a young homeless woman delicately caring for her newborn babe. Photo by Joan Marcus.īOTTOM LINE: This is not the Scarlet Letter you remember from your tenth-grade summer reading. Jones, Frank Wood, Jocelyn Bioh, Saycon Sengbloh and Michael Braun in In the Blood. Parks describes the latter as "a revenge tragedy." Together, they make up The Red Letter Plays.By Suzan Lori-Parks Directed by Sarah BensonĪna Reeder, Russell G. It was followed by Fucking A, about Hester Smith, an abortionist. First came In the Blood, about Hester La Negrita and her five children by five fathers and the "hand of fate" that afflicts her. "Draft, draft, draft, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite for like four years," she said of the drudgery of writing, which turned out to be more than worth it, because Parks got two plays from the concept. Parks and a friend were paddling along, the playwright said in a 2007 video interview for the Academy of American Achievement, when she happened to holler, "I'm going to write a play-a riff on The Scarlet Letter-and I'm going to call it Fucking A." The pair broke into laughter, but the idea Parks meant as a joke (surprisingly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist hadn't yet read Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel) stuck with her and she ran with the idea. The idea for a play with a title considered unprintable by the New York Times was hatched in a canoe. This fall, the third-year actors presented Suzan-Lori Parks' Red Letter Plays: In the Blood and Fucking A, directed by Shaun Patrick Tubbs and Erin Ortman, respectively.
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