This collection of essays on African American playwright, novelist, essayist, screenwriter and teacher Suzan-Lori Parks is a welcome addition to the (surprising paucity of) scholarship engaging her work. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002 for Topdog/Underdog and the recipient of numerous other awards, grants and honours, the only single-authored study of Parks's work to date is Deborah Geis's Suzan-Lori Parks (2008). It is curious, then, that editor Philip Kolin is not more emphatic about this paucity in his Preface and opening chapter. In fact, these opening sections do little to set out the critical terrain and to establish the collection's intervention in studies of Parks's work. They are, moreover, characterized by a rather uncritical fawning and hyperbolic tone: her plays “amaze and alarm” (7); her life has been filled with “creative accomplishments that bear the stamp of her genius” (9). However, Kolin is effective in identifying some of Parks's numerous dramatic and literary sources and influences – slave narratives, theatre of the absurd, the works of dead white males such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, religion and spirituality, popular entertainment and music – many of which are explored by the contributors to the volume.

For example, Jacqueline Wood and Nicole Hodges Persley are both interested in the influence of music on Parks's work. Both suggest that by transposing the “verbal and structural anatomies” of jazz (for Wood) and hip hop (for Persley) onto the stage, Parks explores her belief that history and time have “a circular shape” (43, 36). Wood explores Parks's deployment of a dramatic strategy analogous to jazz's “Rep & Rev” (Repetition and Revision), while Persley finds Parks's “sampling and remixing of history” similar to “strategies of identity negotiation in Hip Hop music and culture” (66, 67).

There is no question that this collection is both overdue and necessary. However, I did feel that several contributors were rather too inclined to frame their work and draw their conclusions from interviews with and/or essays written by Parks, and too quick to take Parks's claims at face value. Since the subtitle to the collection is “Essays on the Plays and Other Works,” a critical engagement with Parks's essays would have been welcome here. (It is not surprising, moreover, that the collection concludes with two new interviews with Parks.) Time and again, contributors use Parks's own formulations (“Rep & Rev” – Wood, Kolin, Achilles; “dis-membering” – Kolin; “radical inclusion” – Fraden, Larson) to underpin their discussions. Although this is a valid methodology, and Parks obviously writes eloquently about her own work, I was more drawn to the essays that employed other approaches. Jon Dietrick examines Parks's Red Letter plays (In the Blood (1999) and Fucking A (2000)), so-called because they riff on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), through the lens of the new economic criticism that reads “money as a symbol of a troubling discrepancy between the symbolic and the real” (89). Meanwhile, Christine Woodsworth is concerned with the representation of children in Parks's plays and argues that child characters “function to some extent as performative genealogies of their family histories or larger histories, highlighting the cyclical nature of Western literary traditions and Parks's reworkings of those traditions” (141).

As may be evident, Parks's preoccupation with the cyclicality of history is a major concern of the volume; indeed, so much so, that the volume itself eventually becomes rather repetitive. I would like to have seen some of the other common threads running through Parks's work, and these essays, foregrounded and theorized a bit more in the introduction. For instance, several contributors note Parks's interest in adaptation, whether this is adapting musical vocabularies for the stage, the work of dead white males (Hawthorne and Faulkner), or screen adaptation (Parks's screenplay for Their Eyes Were Watching God (Darnell Martin, 2005)). Notwithstanding these criticisms, as a collection of essays devoted to an important and underexamined writer, this is obviously essential reading for anyone interested in Parks's substantial body of work.