Theater and Reality Theme Analysis

The America Play, which centers on both a black Abraham Lincoln impersonator and his estranged family’s search for him after his death, actually consists of several (often overlapping) plays-within-a-play. From the Foundling Father’s “Lincoln Act” to the Great Hole of History and the reenactments of Our American Cousin (the play Lincoln was watching when he died), it is often difficult for audiences to tell whether they are watching the play’s real “figures” (a term Parks prefers to “characters”), or the figures acting out their own fictional characters. But this is intentional: not only does Parks hope to show how that theater can capture powerful truths through fiction, but she also rejects the hard-and-fast distinction between reality and fiction altogether. In short, Parks argues that everyone is acting all the time, and that there is no “true” original behind the stories that people tell.

By writing several layers of metafiction (that is, fiction about fiction) into this play, Parks illuminates the way that acting expresses and creates meaning through reinterpretation. the Foundling Father (who impersonates Lincoln) and his son Brazil (who is hired to mourn at funerals) are both actors who shift between “being themselves” and “acting” throughout the play. The Foundling Father’s wife, Lucy, even comments on his incredible talent for “fakin,” which she says “was his callin,” and acts out his act for Brazil. In these examples, acting honors the original by recreating and interpreting it. But it goes further: the Foundling Father’s “Lincoln Act” (Act One’s title, which is also a pun on his Lincoln reenactment) is itself a replica of an original play from the Great Hole of History, a theme park where actors played historical figures for the public. This Great Hole inspired the Foundling Father, who cared about the performance, not the historical figures behind it—for him, performance was the reality. Finally, Lincoln famously died in a dramatic setting, when the actor John Wilkes Booth assassinated him in a theater during the play Our American Cousin, which also gets reenacted during Parks’s second act. The assassination reminds readers and audiences that, even though its purpose is to elevate and celebrate fiction, the theater is a real space with real consequences. So The America Play has real consequences, even when it consists of an onstage reenactment (by the actors) of a reenactment (by Lucy and Brazil) of a reenactment (by the Foundling Father) of a reenactment (at the Great Hole) of something that happened in a theater (Lincoln’s assassination) during a play (Our American Cousin), which is also reenacted.

Parks blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction by showing how copies and interpretations can be just as real as originals (if “originals” even exist). For instance, the Foundling Father notes that he must distort the truth about Lincoln to satisfy his audience. Lincoln would not have worn his hat indoors, “but people don’t like their Lincoln hatless.” He uses various beards for the sake of flair and freely invents quotes that historical figures like John Wilkes Booth and Mary Todd Lincoln might have said. And he is black, while Lincoln was white. But the Foundling Father believes that these artistic liberties add to the power and authenticity of his performance, rather than detracting from it. Similarly, Lucy spends much of Act Two listening for signs of the Foundling Father, including the the gunshot that continually echoes in the theater. She emphasizes that one has “tuh know thuh difference” between the original gunshot and its echo—reality and the imitation of it—in order to find the truth that lies behind appearances. But she never figures out which gunshot is real, which suggests that perhaps this distinction is obsolete or unimportant. Similarly, at the end of the play, both the Foundling Father and Brazil give up on the distinction between reality and fiction: Brazil weeps for his father, without making it clear if he is expressing himself spontaneously (as a son) or theatrically (as a professional mourner), and the Foundling Father actually dies while reenacting the Lincoln assassination. Clearly, Parks rejects a sharp distinction between authenticity and acting.

Having rejected the distinction between reality and artistic representation, Parks also flouts narrative and stylistic conventions of the theater in order to give her actors power over the meaning in her work. She writes the intentionally vague stage direction “(Rest.)” and sections of blank dialogue called “spells” into her script, so that actors can freely portray their characters (or “figures”) in “their pure true simple state.” She also brackets sections to indicate that directors can omit them. Parks gives the interpreters of her work more autonomy than they would ordinarily have, just as her figures (like the Foundling Father) have autonomy over how they interpret the people they are supposed to represent (like Lincoln). This highlights actors’ power to shape an audience’s perception of the “real” figure (fictional character or historical person) being interpreted out onstage. But Parks also makes strategic omissions to highlight the relative nature of any individual dramatic performance, and that emphasize the silences and gaps that the audience will never be able to fill. For instance, she writes secret dialogue that the audience is not allowed to hear—at one point, Lucy tells Brazil something that “ssfor our ears and our ears uhlone.” Parks includes homophonic puns, like “he digged the Hole and the Whole held him,” that are clear in writing but may be confusing onstage, and she adds footnotes throughout the script, which provide context that the audience doesn’t see. In this way, she emphasizes that a performance—no matter how much truth it captures—is never a total, absolute, or perfect reproduction of the essence of an artwork.