Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom

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.

The staging of the play varied, but a recurring part of the set dressing is a set of photographs projected onto screens at the back of the stage that comment on and reflect the content of each of the scenes.



The first scene is the repeated “Third Kingdom”—this summary will address this scene last.

The second scene, “Snails,” features a strange, vaguely Kafka-esque scenario. Three black women discuss their shared speech patterns and grammar, worrying that they seem to be unable to conform to the “proper” language that is expected of them by their white employers. One of them, Charlene, then describes her relationship with a strange “robber” who has come to the house several times without actually stealing anything. The women complain about the roaches infesting their apartment. The scene shifts to a Naturalist at a podium delivering a lecture on the method scientists have come to use to observe creatures in their natural habitat: a “fly” on the wall. This “fly” turns out to be an enormous cockroach in which electronic surveillance equipment has been embedded—the robber Charlene encountered was installing it in the women’s house. The rest of the scene features the women desperately trying to do battle with the increasingly threatening and frightening giant bug.

In “Open House,” the play’s third scene, an older black woman has a horrific waking nightmare. She envisions a cruel and vicious dentist extracting her teeth one after the other without anesthetic and with manic glee. The woman’s uncontrollable pain and suffering, and the fact that no relief is in sight seem to point to the fact that she is experiencing a piece of the collective memory of slavery. In one of Parks’s more obvious word plays, the “extraction” of the woman’s teeth plays on the literal extraction of enslaved people from the coast of Africa, and on the idea of someone’s ethnic or racial background, also called extraction.



In the fourth scene, “Greeks (or The Slugs),” Mr. Sergeant Smith’s wife and two daughters parse the letters he sends home from his overseas post in order to figure out two things: when he will finally receive the military Distinction that he has been waiting for seemingly forever; and how much he loves each of them individually from the others. As Mrs. Smith, Muffy, and Buffy examine how much of each letter is taken up with various categories of information that they assiduously catalog—such as “Report of Duties,” “General News,” and “Mention of Family”—they squabble over how to interpret his seeming oversight in mentioning one of them by name. This decoding of his mostly bland and innocuous message clearly satirizes military intelligence and the kind of analysis necessary to assimilate into white middle-class culture in the way the women aspire. Throughout the scene, they clean the house, pick out clothes to prepare for his imminent and triumphant arrival on furlough, but it is clear that the Distinction he and they believe is due any second has been due any second for an interminable amount of time.

The first and last of the play’s scenes, “Third Kingdom,” is often singled out by critics as the most affecting and best realized. In it, a group of imprisoned passengers on a ship is terrified that they will drown every time they approach the shore—a clear allegory of the Middle Passage and its slave ships. Five speakers, Shark-Seer, Kin-Seer, Us-Seer, Soul-Seer, and Over-Seer, discuss dreams in which they appear as other selves, selves that seem desirable but are unreachable. This internal split becomes externalized, and they describe the feeling of being between two different places but unable to comfortably exist in either one. Repeatedly, as the ship nears land, they panic that they will drown. Finally, the play ends as the Over-Seer slips out of the speech patterns the rest of the characters have been using, instead, calling out “Land Ho!” in formal language.