THE HOLE AND ITS HISTORICITY

I want to begin this discussion of performance and the past by looking briefly at Suzan-Lori Parks’s recent play The America Play (1994), a theatrical meditation on the relationship between history and the space of performance. The play opens in ‘A great hole. In the middle of nowhere. The hole is an exact replica of the Great Hole of History’. The main character, ‘The Foundling Father’ (a former gravedigger, now known by his stage name, ‘The Lesser Known’) describes how he travelled west, and built this replica of ‘the Great Hole’, an eastern ‘theme park. With historical parades . . . The Hole and its Historicity and the part he played in it all gave a shape to the life and posterity of the Lesser Known that he could never shake’ (p. 162); ‘Amerigo Vespucci hisself made regular appearances’ in the Great Hole of History, as well as ‘Marcus Garvey. Ferdinand and Isabella. Mary Queen of thuh Scots! Tarzan King of thuh Apes! Washington Jefferson Harding and Millard Fillmore. Mistufer Columbus even. Oh they saw all thuh greats’ (p. 180). The Foundling Father – played by an African American actor – ‘bore a strong resemblance to Abraham Lincoln’ (‘He was tall and thinly built just like the Great Man.