Martín Solá, Lauren Molina, Danyel Fulton, Greg Keller, Suzan-Lori Parks, Orville Mendoza, Rona Figueroa, and Leland Fowler in Plays for the Plague Year. Photo: Joan Marcus

“Maybe when I started I had this belief that theatre would save us. But it won’t. Not in the way I thought it would. But it does preserve us, somehow.” 

I could stop there, and have said everything that truly needs to be said about Plays for the Plague Year,  a sort of end-times companion to Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays from 2003. Whereas the 365 plays comprising the former cycle were disparate, often abstract, and were originally staged in a dispersed way, scattered across the country and distributed to different theaters, the Plague Year cycle, commenced on the day COVID lockdown suspended production on Parks’s TV show, March 13, 2020, is deeply personal. Parks wrote the text and the songs; she performs as both the Writer character at the narrative’s center and in the band. It’s a collage of bearing witness–and one of the striking things about it to me is that even at this very small remove in time, it’s already almost impossible to conceive of how much loss we all bore up under in that short time. 

The play, despite its bluesy music and its attempts to memorialize joys and triumphs along with sorrows and its witty costumes (by Rodrigo Muñoz), never steps more than a whisper from grief and anger. It reminds us at every turn how quickly 2020 outstripped all of our ability to process the world. Parks’s usual dense language and deep metaphors are traded here for a simpler style, both stripped down and laid bare, sometimes so simple as to feel obvious. It’s not straight up realism, of course—there’s a little hint of Brechtian remove in calling the characters as the Writer, the Hubby, the Kid, rather than using the real names of Parks and her family. (The Brechtian echo is fitting, because I kept thinking during this play of Brecht’s famous lines of poetry: And in the dark times will there also be singing? / There will also be singing about the dark times.) And there’s an embodied COVID virus/stalker, darkly glittering, and a downtrodden Planet Earth, and a muse with shimmering wings made of smudged manuscript pages; there’s the songs, heartfelt and sometimes whimsical; there’s the tailcoat Parks wears, reading “Sacred Agent” on the back. But there’s also an emotional straightforwardness, rooted in weariness: Two bouts with COVID for the Writer; a crippling case of long COVID for Hubby. A months-long separation from their child. Trying to parent a young, ebullient Black boy through not just lockdown in a one-bedroom apartment but the drumbeat of Black deaths that accompanied the pandemic: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and all the rest. 

The spine of the play is the personal vignettes from life under lockdown for Writer, Hubby, and Kid (with a few guest appearances by the Writer’s first husband Paul, played by Martín Solá with an irascible charm). They’re sketches rather than narrative, snapshots of time and place rather than crafted scenes building to a whole, but they evoke the quotidian ridiculousness of life under lockdown, and we get the references because we were all there. (Greg Keller brings his usual and enormously valuable everyman warmth to the Hubby, stricken and trying not to be, while Leland Fowler, as the Kid, is equally remarkable when portraying the tireless exuberance of a fourth-grader; the heartbreaking gravitas of other Black mothers’ Black sons lost to the violence of 2020 such as Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd; and the dry sophistication of James Baldwin–Parks’s teacher, whose birthday she marks in a play, over his chiding reminder that “There are people out there thinking right now that I died this year.”) 

Those scenes are anchored in time by interspersed segments marking the historical mileposts of that time, with conscious effort made to mark the positive spots alongside the horrible ones: The shutting down of theaters. The 7 pm applause for medical workers. Anti-mask protest and BLM protests. The approval of the first COVID vaccine. The election of Joe Biden. The death of George Floyd and the trial of his murderers. Juneteenth as a national holiday. The shooting of six Asian women in Atlanta. (The plague year of the title, in the end, could refer to the litany of racist murder alongside the pandemic.)

The ones that stick are the plays in memoriam, each named after the ghost it honors, some of them famous, others ordinary; some of them deaths of COVID, some of state-sanctioned violence, some of unrelated natural causes: A Play for Dr. Li Wenliang, the Chinese ophthalmologist who was one of the first unwitting COVID whistleblowers. A Play for Dez-Ann Romain, a high school principal. Unfortunately, A Play for Larry Kramer. A Play for Breonna Taylor. A Play for George Floyd. A Play (a song, really) for Chadwick Boseman. For RBG. For John Lewis. And finally for a death within the Writer’s own circle that brings the strands together. The casualness and informality of the Joe’s Pub setting make some of the work being done here seem deceptively easy, but the deft shaping of these characters in both writing and performance show the level of craft executed by director Niegel Smith and the company. (The company in general shows an unusual level of collective attunement; you can feel their tenderness and their intimacy in the way they check in with one another when they’re in the background of a scene, with a held glance or a touch on the shoulder. But standouts for me, in additional to Fowler, were Danyel Fulton’s Breonna Taylor, handing out flowers to the audience; Rona Figueroa’s tell-it-like-it-is Muse, who pushes the question “In what ways are we the Man?”; and Martín Solá’s Mohammed Jafor, a Bangladeshi chemist turned NYC cabbie for whom death is his only time to rest.)

With few exceptions, only the dead get named. (One exception that proves the rule: Bob, a musician friend of Hubby, who after losing his normal forms of employment to the shutdowns, ends up working in the morgue.) The living characters are all of us who survived; the dead retain their terrible specificity. Many of the dead plead with the Writer not to write a play for them: to be memorialized, one must accept the reality of one’s death. And by the end, the Writer can do nothing but stop, with so many plays of memory and memoriam yet unwritten: no play for Joan Didion or Sidney Poitier or bell hooks or Roe v. Wade. How do you engage with the teasing contradictions of history when you’re living them? How do you watch death after death, from disease and police brutality alike, and still hope that art will save us?  You don’t, of course. But you try to find your meaning and your joy where you can. In a program note, Parks writes “For me, plays celebrate our humanity and demonstrate the process of community….[And] singing with others creates magic. These plays are songs are meant to give us some tools we need to process both what we’ve been through and what we’re going through now.”

Because who has tools to process such a series of collective griefs? Sarah Ruhl’s recent Letters from Max, a ritual addressed this by zooming in tight, on one bond of friendship as a stand-in for all our losses; for her, the ritual lies in bringing to life for us that one lost soul. Parks, as is her style, pans wide, asking more of the audience both in sifting through and finding meaning in the pieces she portrays, and in including the audience in some of these moments of ritual: accepting a flower, joining in song, sharing our memories. 

This show was on its feet in November 2022, when its original run was—irony!—shut down by COVID cases in the cast, not least Parks herself. That’s a full eighteen months after the “plague year” was meant to be over. We’re still living it, but we’re still here. Plays for the Plague Year ends by evoking the theater tradition of the ghost light. There’s a practical purpose for ghost lights, of course–it’s all too easy to hurt yourself when you’re trying to get to the light board in the darkness–but there are also plenty of myths and superstitions about the ghosts being appeased by one burning light. And in the pandemic, the ghost light–usually, as here, a single bulb on a stand in a wire cage–was used as a symbol in the faith that we could all come back together. There’s been a standing lamp onstage for most of Plays from the Plague Year but only at the end do we find out it was a ghost light all along. We hold the faith, but we can’t overlook the ghosts.