The black theatrical body is rendered flexible in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' The America Play. The America Play stealthily appropriates national comportment by drawing attention to the artifice of the show that is US citizenship. Twisting, turning, holding, and slumping his body just so, the protagonist of The America Play unravels mimetic blackness and centuries of black theatricality, revealing how performance “highlights the mechanics of spectacle.” In order to disrupt the equivalence of blackness with display and thereby to interrupt the passing down of black theatricality from one generation to the next, the play troubles genealogy. The protagonist is a gravedigger who moonlights as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and, upon his death, leaves a hole in the ground to his son Brazil. The hole left as Brazil's inheritance serves as the setting of the play and replicates another hole, the Great Hole of History, which is a historical theme park. The protagonist, also known as the Foundling Father, first encounters the Great Hole of History while honeymooning with his wife Lucy. A desire to recreate the Great Hole drives the Foundling Father to leave his family and to go west and dig a replica. Once transplanted, people begin to notice that the protagonist bears “a strong resemblance to Abraham Lincoln.” Although “diggin [is] his livelihood . . . fakin [is] his callin,” so the Foundling Father, whose name implies his lack of parentage, becomes an Abraham Lincoln impersonator (179). His protean nature bolsters ironically his presidential bona fides to the point where the Foundling Father suffers the same fate as Lincoln: a stray bullet kills him in the theater at the end of act i, which is how, as Parks describes, “he digged the hole and the whole held him” (159).

In the play the hole accumulates several different meanings: it serves as the setting of the play, refers to graves and women's genitals, undermines a teleological view of history, functions as a locale for improvisation and creation, and recalls the trauma enacted when the Foundling Father leaves Brazil and Lucy. Filled with ambiguity, riddled with doubling, and saturated with slippages, I argue that the hole also evokes two historical holes: the hole the bullet bored in President Abraham Lincoln's head and the one resulting from the trans-Atlantic slave trade that the Middle Passage symbolizes. Referencing the history of US chattel slavery, The America Play fills metaphorically the cavities related to the trade in human flesh with performances – faking and digging – which are two exemplary examples of reparative modes central to the black theater throughout the twentieth century. To clarify, I define performance – borrowing and intertwining Richard Schechner's and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's theories – as “restored” or “twice-behaved behavior” that “assumes an audience during its actualization.” While Schechner's often-cited definition does not explicitly require an audience, I assert the dynamics of reception to emphasize how reception functions as a critical part of the literary history of a play. African American dramatists direct the exertive force black performance produces to create rites of repair.