The America Play Themes

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…

In The America Play, a black man known only as the Foundling Father makes a career out of impersonating Abraham Lincoln and charging people to pretend to assassinate him. By portraying black suffering in the context of a white narrative, Parks reveals how white people have capitalized on this suffering throughout history and emphasizes that black identity is an inalienable part of American identity. Ultimately, she argues that separating white and black narratives in…

The first act of The America Play follows a black man named the Foundling Father, who leaves his gravedigging career to instead make a living reenacting his idol Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Throughout this first act, the Foundling Father only mentions his family in passing. But in Act Two, his wife Lucy and son Brazil move from the shadows to the center of the narrative: they reveal that he abandoned them three decades prior…

The America Play’s plot revolves around death: specifically, those of Abraham Lincoln and the Foundling Father, a black man who is Lincoln’s “dead ringer” and who makes charges customers to watch him reenact Lincoln’s assassination. These deaths are constantly reenacted onstage, and the protagonists’ lives revolve around death, too: the Foundling Father, his wife Lucy, and their son Brazil make a living by digging graves, listening to dying people’s secrets, and mourning…