THE PLAYWRIGHT
Suzan-Lori Parks (b. 1964) has enjoyed an award-winning career since graduating cum laude from Mt. Holyoke College in 1985.
Parks then studied at the Yale University School of Drama before
writing her first professional play, Betting on the Dust Commander, which was produced off-Broadway in 1987. This was followed by Imperceptible Metabolites in the Third Kingdom, winner of the 1989 Obie for best Off-Broadway play. Parks continued her steady output with the well-reviewed The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World in 1990 and The America Play in 1994.
In 1996, Parks presented her most controversial work, Venus, which received another Obie for best off-Broadway play. In the Blood soon followed in 1999, prompting the award of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 2001 Topdog/Underdog was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2003 Parks released her first novel, Getting Mother's Body: A Novel, and in 2005 she worked with Oprah Winfrey on the screenplay for Their Eyes are Watching God. Parks returned to playwriting in 2006 with the bold idea of 365 Days/365 Plays, a project consisting of 365 short plays written in a year and performed by theatrical companies across the world. Parks' latest play, The Book of Grace, opened in March off-Broadway at the Public Theater. Since its release in 1996, Venus continues to be performed by professional companies and university theaters across America.VENUS
In Roman mythology, Venus was the Goddess of Love and Beauty and was sometimes considered the patron of prostitutes. Venus, like many other gods of the Roman pantheon, was a double of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess who played a similar role in Greek mythology. Almost all sculptures of the Roman Venus follow the Hellenistic examples of solid, curvy, yet lean woman's bodies which resemble the statues of men more than the plump, full-chest figures represented by the "Venus" Figurines.
Venus Figurines
The moniker of "Venus" has been given to a series of incredibly similar pocket-sized statues depicting the image of a plump, Hottentot-like woman. These figures are still being found in sites spread across Europe and Asia. Examples of this figure are found in archeological sites dating from 40,000-10,000 BC.
The recurrence of this common element in over 30,000 years of human artistic development implies a unity in the artistic representation of women. Critics continue to debate the significance of these statues, postulating a variety of difficult to prove theories. One theory holds that the statues are the idols of an ancient Goddess-based religion. Others hold that the statues are fertility charms meant to aid procreation in a time when the average life-span for a woman was in the twenties. These figurines represent a group of the oldest sculptures detailing human anatomy as well as some of the oldest pieces of ceramics.
 SAARTJIE BAARTMANNo document records the real African name of the woman who became famous as Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman. Baartman was a KhoiKhoi woman from an area in Southwest Africa that is now the nation of South Africa. In 1810, Baartman, a twenty-one-year-old orphan and widow, was smuggled to England by failed British Army medical officer Alexander Dunlop and his manservant Hendrick Cesars in association with the manservant's brother, a previous owner of Baartman.
Baartman was then displayed as the "Hottentot Venus," a central figure in the freak shows and ethnographic displays prominent in London's Piccadilly Circus. Contemporary accounts describe her conditions as similar to those of a caged animal. She was presented as a physical specimen regarded without modesty and available for private shows supposedly offering completely nude viewings. The perceived lewdness of her display raised a public outcry that brought the attention of the courts upon Baartman's handlers. Partially due to Baartman's own testimony, Saartjie and her handlers landed a legal victory that freed them from implications of slavery. In 1812, the death of Dunlop left Baartman in the hands of Cesars, who vanished with her for two years, eventually resurfacing in slavery-friendly France. An animal trainer bought Baartman from Cesars in 1815, and he subsequently rented her to Georges Cuvier, the surgeon general of Napoleon's France. Saartjie Baartman died later that year. Cuvier's examination of Baartman after her death produced a full body cast, the preservation of Baartman's skeleton, a wax mold of her buttocks, and the preservation of her genitals and brain. Baartman's remains were displayed in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris until 1976, when she was packed away into storage. The rediscovery of Baartman's display in the 1980s began a contentious debate about her treatment that escalated in the newly democratic South African government of 1994 requesting the repatriation of her remains. The debate over her final resting place continued until 2002 due to worries of third-world countries demanding further repatriation of previously taken ancient artifacts and archaeological finds. The people of South Africa engaged in a celebration of her life and the burial of her remains as a way of respectfully ending her difficult journey.PARKS' IDEAS AND STYLEVenus is a play that features many prominent ideas and perceptions of our postmodern culture. The play addresses the facets of Postcolonial Studies and Feminism: the examination of race, gender, and other social identities as they transform in colonial and postcolonial situations. Parks creates a fictional world that questions the definitions of colonizer and colonized, master and slave, and victor and victim.The author plays randomly and ironically with traditionalized cultural signs and social hierarchies. The depiction of Sarah Baartman's harsh treatment is carried with emotional distance, theatricality, and in a mixture of previous dramatic styles. Parks wields elements of Surrealism in the carnival imagery, eclectic modes of representation, and deconstructed speech. There are also a number of elements of Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theatre in Venus. The play's structure consists of small, non-linear scenes, compiling the dramatic pieces of the unattainable tale of Sarah Baartman. Parks alienates both the characters and the audience through her use of the "rests" and "spells" -- unscripted moments of theatrical action that can create meanings opposite to the ones implied in the text. Additionally, some of the scenes are presented as "theatre-within-the-theatre." The character of the Negro Resurrectionist narrates crucial plot information throughout the play, diminishing the effect of the conflict and character development. The intermission also serves to blur the line between fiction and reality through the Docteur's scientific and probably historically accurate address to the audience. The questions presented by Venus appear open for debate instead of being overshadowed by the overly tragic story evoking cathartic transformation.Sources
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