Callaloo

Who are some of the people who have influenced you?

Well, James Baldwin is one because he told me that I should try writing theater. He told me to go down that road. I was at Mount Holyoke College at the time, and he was a visiting professor at New Hampshire College. He was teaching at Hampshire around 1983, I think. And it was a course in short-story writing. In that class, I was really animated, and he asked after a class reading, “Why don’t you try writing plays; have you ever thought about writing plays?” And being that I was very impressionable, I tried just that. These days I’m not impressionable at all. I’ve become hard. Back then, I was like a piece of wax. Another writer who has had an influence on me was Tennessee Williams. I remember I read one of his plays. I mean, it was the kind of play that people, you know, the cool people, were calling dumb theater, but it was theater that I liked. I’m a big fan of bad theater. Tennessee Williams is not an example of bad theater, but it could be compared to “serious theater.” I went to see Amadeus in Philadelphia, and I loved the people in costumes runnin’ around. I just saw them runnin’ around and I was thinking, damn, that is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen! Look at ‘em—runnin’! And they had wings on and stuff. It was great! What the play is about . . . I had no idea. And I didn’t care. Musicals like The Sound of Music or Oklahoma, you can’t beat them. I mean, just the idea of people, you know, in costumes. You know those nuns and the cowboys—I mean in the separate musicals. The nuns and their costumes—I love that whole thing.

What does play writing mean to you?

The more I think about plays, I think plays are about space. Plays are about space to me. Plays are about space, and, say, fiction is about place. I think that one of the things that led me to writing plays is the understanding I have inside about space, because I moved around so much when I was younger. And I think somehow that sort of helped along that process. Maybe it’s just the pageant of people through my life. You know, all the strange people not connected to any one backdrop.

What does moving around mean, and did that influence your writing?

My dad was an officer in the army, and we moved around everywhere—well, I mean it seems like we lived everywhere. We lived in Germany for a while. We lived [End Page 309] in Kentucky, we lived in Texas, we lived in California and North Carolina, and Maryland and Vermont, and all over Germany when we were there. And some other places that I can’t remember. At one time we were moving every year. I think moving around had an influence on my writing.

You talk about people who encouraged you: were there people who tried to discourage you from play writing?

I was being discouraged from studying English literature by my teacher in high school and discouraged from writing plays by some of my teachers in college. Those two things together, there’s nothing like it! There’s nothing like rejection to make you strong!

JIGGETTS: In what ways were you discouraged?

PARKS: Well, my teacher in high school said that I shouldn’t write because I couldn’t spell. She told me that if I studied anything, don’t study English. I was very good at chemistry. Actually, I wanted to become a scientist, so I was very good in those two subjects; I thought, oh, I’ll be a rocket scientist. But then I read Virginia Woolf—ah, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. That novel pulled me from the science lab into the literature lab. I said good-bye to physics. Then I...