Performative cartographies: Theatre as methodology via 'The America Play'

Through this dissertation, I use performance---specifically African-American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' The America Play---as an epistemological practice. I suggest that this play, on the page and on the stage, offers not just a metaphor for understanding a larger reality offstage, but an active means for reading the production of current history. Through this play, Parks works to uncover unvoiced methods of remembering history. As such, I use her play as theory to articulate the production of current USAmerican history. Specifically, I use The America Play to address and uncover the following topics: Post-Katrina New Orleans as an already historicized, by now iconized, moment of our current history former President George W. Bush's insistent condensing of USAmerican English as a project of exclusion and re-charting of USAmerican borders how theatrical voice and speech practices position the USAmerican stage as a limited-access---if not colonized---space and the role played by the work of Suzan-Lori Parks in the unfolding of USAmerican theatre history generally, as well as her place as an icon of African-American theatre history specifically. As a result of this inquiry I argue for and utilize theatre as a methodology to approach history-in-the-making.Central to this project is the argument for using theatre as methodology, and the doing of this is the argument's realization. In this dissertation I cultivate theatre's potential as methodology for uncovering the performative affects of our interactions with our current historical moment. I am interested in the intervention gained by looking at specifically how language and history are employed as strategies in the play for uncovering artifacts that, assembled and displayed, work as altar and effigy to our history, and how that history is imagined. In arguing for The America Play as a methodology for understanding our current production of history, I lay the groundwork for my further work in using theatre as methodology, and open up this theory and practice for others.