Suzan-Lori Parks is best known for making dark fun of icons of American history. Her earlier acclaimed works, The America Play (1994) and Topdog/Underdog (2001), feature Black men who make livings impersonating Abraham Lincoln and encourage sideshow visitors to reenact Lincoln’s assassination. Parks argues that American history, as most of us were taught it, is something like a sideshow to the actual experience of Black Americans, as it has intended to obscure or distract from our nation’s past.
Receiving its local premier by Rapid Lemon Productions at the Strand Theater, The Book of Grace, focuses on a newer American icon, the “Fence”: the chain-link barrier along the border between south Texas and Mexico, and precursor to the Trump administration’s steel wall. Here the icon is, like an assassination, grim—and its implications, disturbing.
The Book of Grace opens with a familiar theme, the love-hate relationship between a domineering father and an aspiring son. By the end of the play that conflict has taken on world-shattering significance for both men. Buddy, at twenty-five, comes back after fifteen years to south Texas where his father, Vet, a Border Patrol officer, lives with Buddy’s stepmother, Grace.
Buddy claims his father did something “unspeakable” to him; he expects to talk the matter out, reconcile, and perhaps get his father’s help in joining the Border Patrol. The reconciliation never takes place. Vet, threatened, refuses to acknowledge his son’s grievances. Buddy takes his father’s old name, Snake, and begins planning a murder-suicide that he believes, thanks to social media, will set off a world-wide uprising against “The Man”. When Vet convinces himself that Grace and Snake have been intimate, he explodes in a murderous rage, grippingly staged by Casey Kaleba. The play ends with Snake strapping on a grenade vest.
