Building a landscape for Parks

Would modernist techniques in design help to ground, clarify and (for lack of a better term) unify postmodern texts for a theatrical audience? Given a script like Suzan-Lori Parks’s. The America Play, how have scenographers dealt with ambiguous stage directions like, ‘Place: A great hole. In the middle of nowhere. The hole is an exact replica of The Great Hole of History’?

Using the questions above, among others, I analyse the scenographic choices in four productions of The America Play. Created in different parts of the United States and in theatres of various sizes, these productions demonstrate that not only can the design aspects be modernist while the script/text is postmodern, but that choosing a modernist design approach could be beneficial to the production. I examined several images from each production, supported by interviews with many of their respective designers, to argue that through the use of various modernist design elements each production offered visual elements that might have helped audiences to relate to the text and provide a way in to the postmodern language. Stated another way, these designs were used to bring the text more ‘down to earth’ by leaning towards visual metaphors to which the audience could relate. Since Parks appears to intentionally neglect any mention of design in the play script, there is a certain freedom offered to any design team, but that freedom also creates challenges. If we accept that this play is a landscape in the tradition of Gertrude Stein than could the best practice for this or other postmodernist plays be to surround them with a modernist design? This article will use primarily Park’s play and the works of postmodern theorists, to argue that the answer is ‘Yes’.