Critical Reviews of Early Productions

Page by Carly Valdez

Positive Reviews for all three major productions 

The America Play at Yale Repertory Theatre in January 1994, directed by Liz Diamond, with Reggie Montgomery as The Foundling Father

Front of Program from Yale Rep 1994 Production

Comments on the play itself: 
- Mistrusting time and memory 
- A cerebral workout

- Parks examines what she calls "reconstructed historicities," and implies that everything we have learned from history books, except for mere facts in isolation, is unfinished. - critics comment (Klien).  

"...ideas are so crammed and arbitrarily unfolded that her play -- her play as a play -- is neither fathomable nor cohesive. But her unanswerable questions are freeing; the verbal and temporal leaps, even the vastness of her intentions, are invigorating."

The America Play Off-Broadway at the Public Theater from February 22, 1994, to March 27, 1994, directed by Liz Diamond, with Reggie Montgomery as The Foundling Father

- Surrealistic sideshow
- Troubled dream
- A poetic riff on black identity

- The America Play defies easy explanations, has no tidy meanings and seems purposefully unclear.

- A play for you if you like the freedom to wonder about works of art and if the space between words intrigues you as much as words themselves.

- Praises Parks, she has written a script that is American through and through. "Inverting conventional patriotic imagery and fragmenting famous proclamations, she is taking metaphorical account of the very country itself."

"This is a vast simplification of a dense yet haunting personal vision. It strikes me that "The America Play" has a lot to do with the search for an authentic father. (Lincoln, the great white father, has been reduced to a dead-end carnival figure, spouting hollow rhetoric.) It shows us people trying to dig their way (literally) out of the detritus of someone else's history. More generally, it's about being trapped in a world of splinters and echoes."

The America Play at the Theater@Boston Court from October 14, 2006, to November 19, 2006, directed by Nancy Keystone with Harold Surratt as The Foundling Father


-Lucy is miscast, she is too young for the role and a connection between her and the Foundling Father is missing.

"Nancy Keystone’s L.A. premiere production brings this phantasmagoric pageant to life with all its dense wordplay and overlapping images, and reflects the ever-adventurous tastes of Pasadena’s Theater@Boston Court."

"By refusing to allow thematic resonance to take precedence over the human drama, she avoids the directorial self-indulgence that so often renders nonrealistic plays unwatchable."

- The final tableau has the Foundling Father with pennies over his eyes was commented as a chilling metaphor "for the inescapable role that the dead past continues to play in our personal and national consciousness"

Sources:

Klein, Alvin. “THEATER; Yale Rep Offers 'America' Premiere.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 Jan. 1994, www.nytimes.com/1994/01/30/nyregion/theater-yale-rep-offers-america-premiere.html?rref=collection/timestopic/Yale Repertory Theater&action=click&contentCollection=theater®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=search&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection.

Richards, David. “Review/Theater; Seeking Bits of Identity In History's Vast Abyss.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 11 Mar. 1994, www.nytimes.com/1994/03/11/theater/review-theater-seeking-bits-of-identity-in-history-s-vast-abyss.html.

Verini, Bob. “The America Play.” Variety, 24 Oct. 2006, variety.com/2006/legit/markets-festivals/the-america-play-1200512429/.