History, Narrative, and Multiplicity Theme Analysis

In Suzan-Lori Parks’s nonlinear, deeply allegorical The America Play, a black man named the Foundling Father impersonates Abraham Lincoln for a living and charges people a penny to play-assassinate him. After he dies, his wife Lucy and son Brazil go looking for traces of him. The Foundling Father organizes his life around the impulse to embody and retell history, and then his past becomes history worth uncovering for Lucy and Brazil. Yet, while he oversimplifies Abraham Lincoln’s complex life into a single assassination scene, Lucy and Brazil fail to form a coherent narrative about his life and death. Parks uses this contrast to show why history must accommodate multiple, fragmented, and ambiguous voices rather than insisting on a single authoritative narrative that inevitably leaves some tales untold.

Parks emphasizes the dangers in reducing history to a single narrative rather than exploring its complexity. In Act One, for instance, the Foundling Father visits the Great Hole of History, an amusement park in which actors parade around dressed as “Great Men.” Instead of including voices from the past, this Great Hole presents history as the sum of these Great Men’s images (and erases the context necessary to understand their “Greatness”). Similarly, despite his encyclopedic knowledge about Lincoln, the Foundling Father endlessly reenacts the single most popular story about him—his assassination. People dress up as the white supremacist John Wilkes Booth and shoot him with blanks, completely missing the historical context that makes their performances racist and disturbing. Although he calls Lincoln the “Great Man” and laments being “Lesser Known” in comparison, the Foundling Father ironically does not see that his own mistaken view of history as a parade of “greats” is the precise reason that “Lesser Known” people, groups, and voices are erased from history. Brazil makes a similar error, misinterpreting the past by assembling his father’s “faux-historical knickknacks” (such as a bust of Lincoln and a pair of wooden teeth modeled on George Washington’s) into a “Hall of Wonders.” But these “Wonders” say nothing about history: they are the junk that history left behind. Because the audience can see through Brazil’s error, his “Wonders” allow Parks to show how believing in heroic, fantastical, storybook versions of history leads people to erase the voices of those who actually lived in the past and to overlook the lessons history holds for the present.

Ultimately, Parks aims not to find the true version of history grand narratives distort, but rather to show that there is no such true narrative, both because the same facts can be narrated in many different ways and because the exact details of history are unknowable and irrelevant. Instead, for Parks, there are always multiple legitimate stories about any single event, since all narratives (including historical ones, and including plays) are written somewhere, by someone, for some purpose. Indeed, the Foundling Father points out that nobody agrees on the exact details of Lincoln’s assassination, like what Booth said after shooting Lincoln. This uncertainty makes Parks’s storytelling stronger, not weaker: by having different Booth impersonators yell out different lines after shooting the Foundling Father, she illustrates the range of thoughts and emotions that may have motivated Booth, encouraging the audience to think critically about history rather than blindly accepting one version of events. Similarly, the Foundling Father wears different beards on different days in order to show that different versions of Lincoln are equally legitimate and powerful, even if some stray from the truth. He recognizes that his history is alternative, but so is any other version of history. All versions, however, have power: at the end of the play, the Foundling Father suddenly returns to the stage, as though resurrected by the stories told about him. This illustrates how, to present-day people, the past is created or brought to life through stories. This, in turn, is why it matters whether history is reduced to a single story, like the grand narratives of the Great Hole of History and Hall of Wonders, or allowed to be complex and multiple.

Finally, by telling fragmented stories that highlight the difficulty of narrating history in the first place, Parks further explores how history affects the present day, which, she argues, is where its true significance lies. For instance, Lucy only vaguely references an abusive relationship with the Foundling Father, but never tells her story directly, in part because her inability to make sense of it demonstrates how it continues to affect her. She spends Act Two listening for messages from the Foundling Father (which she calls “echoes” and “Whispers”), but she does not get any coherent story from him: rather than distorting his meaning by speaking for him, she instead admits that she cannot recover what he has left behind. In contrast, Brazil likes to speculate wildly and irresponsibly about the past, spinning outlandish narratives that give the audience mistaken ideas about the Foundling Father and prompt Lucy to yell at him to “keep [his] story to scale.” Like the Great Hole’s parade of Great Men, Brazil’s stories lack the context that connects the past to its implications for the present and shows people what history can do for them. This is crucial because, for Parks, not only are people the products of history, but they also actively use history as a tool to build the future.

Ultimately, Parks’s goal in The America Play is to narrate history without seeking or pretending to offer a singular version of it. While she recognizes that history weighs profoundly on the present, she does not believe that it is possible to pin down with certainty. Indeed, she insists that any single story is a distortion—the more one digs into its omissions and assumptions, the closer one gets to the “truth” of the matter, and so the best way to narrate history is to expose and reconstruct the multiple, complex, and even contradictory voices of the various people who lived, made, and suffered from it.