The Metaphor of the Hole in Suzan Lori Parks’s The America Play

Suzan Lori Parks is a contemporary African-American playwright who receives early critical accolade and renown.  She provides world literature with several dramatic contributions fighting the exclusion of the African-American experience from American history.  Her The America Play (1993) is an embodiment of her strife toward resurrecting the past and saving the black community from ever existing in the margins of American society.  The play also highlights Parks's innovation and virtuosity in using the theater as a medium for digging into the past and reconstructing historical events. This study  is a critical investigation into The America Play, demonstrating the different holes in the play and referring to the playwright’s devices for covering them up.  In other words, the study is an attempt to discuss the underlying significance of Parks’s metaphor of the hole and how she employs it to enhance her literary purpose.