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Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom

Suzan-Lori Parks

Digital Only

A Sun & Moon title.

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Part of From the Other Side of the Century II

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks won one of her several Obie awards for her first play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: African-American History in the Shadow of the Photographic Image, which premiered Off-Broadway in 1989. Written in the theater of the absurd style of playwrights like Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, the play explores African-American lives and the way their experiences during slavery echo and reverberate in the modern-day.

The play consists of five acts comprising four unrelated scenes, which function as metaphors or allegories; the first scene repeats at the end of the play to make the fifth act. Because of her genre, Parks’s characters are closer to archetypes than to realistic representations of people—typically, they are isolated, unhinged, and removed from a place in the world—and the play is full of puns, language games, and phrases that carry multiple meanings. Altogether, the scenes and their characters attempt to capture some of the horrors of the slave trade through unexpected imagery, indirect staging, and even irreverent comedy.