I’ve never really been one for plays. I prefer fiction. But in the same way that the poetry of Saul Williams spawned my interest in poetry, Suzan-Lori Parks’s “In the Blood” morphed my views on plays. Based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which I’ve always had a soft spot for, Parks swaps Hester Prynne out for Hester La Negrita, a homeless single mother with five children: Jabber, Bully, Trouble, Beauty and Baby. She lives under a bridge in a world where the odds are completely stacked against her and it addresses many of the issues that plague modern society: What is the role of single mothers in America? Why do so many single mothers end up in poverty? What are some solutions? Is religion full of hypocrisy? How effective is welfare? What types of power relations exist between men and women, white and black? How do these power struggles ultimately affect the lives of the non-elite?

As a Journalism/English major, women’s studies minor, I can’t help but totally geek out at immaculate writing that simultaneously manages to touch on current societal issues. The play doesn’t just pose some of the aforementioned questions, but Parks uses such clever language that sometimes the double meanings are missed on the first read. She uses “watch” to mean the physical object, as well as the action; wage is a monetary term and a risk. And the symbolism – masks, religious emblems, the names of the characters, the letter A. So much of “In the Blood” relates to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Parks does, indeed, borrow the basic characters, the general plot, and some of the themes. Yet she manages to take the similarities and make it entirely her own.

With that said, the play is probably not for everyone. Parks writes in a very nontraditional format – spelling things in dialect, eliminating certain types of punctuation, partaking in what she refers to as a dramatic pause by repeating character names for emphasis, putting parentheses around things she thinks are unnecessary to the play’s advancement. It’s quirky, but fascinating. Parks easily could have written a scholarly essay to tackle some of the social issues. But she didn’t. She took a classic novel and reworked it into a modern play, so you can take it for what it is, or peel back the layers of complexity.

Parks started writing plays while in college. She went on to receive the MacArthur Grant and her later play “Topdog/Underdog,” which uses the assassination as Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth as the basis for the story, which won the Pulitzer Prize. The irony is that I don’t feel as if plays are given the literary recognition that they deserve. Despite my initial distaste for plays, I can recognize when good writing exists and I only wish that more college courses incorporated “nontraditional” mediums like plays and graphic novels. You can’t go wrong when performing arts, fine arts, and liberal arts intermingle.