Marked woman Suzan-Lori Parks takes on abortion in A BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Fucking A By Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by Rebecca Schneider. With Celine Justus, Shannon Ware, Biko Eisen-Martin, James Lowe, Katherine Meister, and Michael E. Smith. At Brown University Theatre through November 21.

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A is to your run-of-the-stage polemical play what a hand grenade is to a shaken fist. This Brown University Theatre and Sock & Buskin production may be a muffled explosion in the intimate Leeds Theater space, but audiences will leave with ears ringing as much from thoughts provoked as from arguments shouted.

Known for characters who exchange trenchant social-political commentary, Parks won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the much more accessible Topdog/Underdog, which is coming to Trinity in January. Fucking A, written after that success, may be considered a follow-up on a character introduced in her 1999 In the Blood. While that tragi-comedy told of the harrowing life of Hester La Negrita and her five children, Fucking A deals with an abortionist named Hester Smith (Celine Justus), and no one is laughing.

Here the reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s adulterous pilgrim Hester Prynne is made explicit, as Hester wears an A of scar tissue, a brand that the law decrees must always be visible through her clothing. In this dystopic quasi-USA, a woman may be assigned to be an outcast abortionist, in order to relive the long lines at clinics. Clever. Parks has devised a parallel much closer to the days when abortions were illegal here.

But the playwright’s outrage is as complex and interwoven as is our confused America. Parks sustains a connection between abortions, and their social utility, with our burgeoning prisons. (As director Rebecca Schneider notes in the program, 1 in 19 adult black males are incarcerated, a rate 7.6 times that of whites.) Hester hasn’t seen her son (Biko Eisen-Martin) since he was a boy. At first she doesn’t know that prison has turned him into the escaped Monster that news accounts are warning people about. She has been making payments to the authorities for decades, but his "picnic price" keeps being raised as he misbehaves, so she has yet to see him, never mind be able to bring a hamper of fried chicken.

Such living metaphors are interestingly fleshed out in a non-naturalistic style that never loses track of the pulsing human hearts at the center of each walking, talking outrage. The laments also stay grounded in actuality. For example, here hunters of prisoners get souvenir body parts as well as money, and from lynching history we know that’s no exaggeration. Parks gives every outlandish inclusion real-world thrust: she will know her son by the teeth mark scars she made on both their forearms, a perfect symbol for the cost and consequence of love.

Hester’s friend Canary Mary (Shannon Ware) is another outcast, mistress to the Mayor (James Lowe), who has an army and other powers of a national leader. (All politics are local, after all.) The mayor is furious that his dissatisfied wife (Katherine Meister) hasn’t given him a son. (All corrupt politics has monarchic aspiration, after all.) Wearing an apron as bloody as Hester’s is Butcher (Michael E. Smith), a sort-of soul mate, and in this dire setting the little bit of paper-wrapped meat he gives her seems like a great gift, as does any little kindness.

As Hester, Justus can easily control the emotional ebb and flow. All the actors do well, and some are especially skillful at individualizing what could come across as stereotypes — as Monster, Eisen-Martin can tap a haunting vulnerability that never slips into pathos; as Mayor, Lowe provides an easy charisma, through the politician’s self-assurance, that makes us wince with recognition.

A six-piece band at stage right comes in handy when characters break into song. Canary Mary and Hester, self-described "whore and baby-killer," sing about their socially necessary work. "We do not get to eat what we catch / That would be a little much," the hunters sing. Sometimes the inexpressible needs a little and-a-one-and-a-two help.

In other plays, Parks has honored Black English by using it in an elevated way, to enhance its place in American culture. Here a patois is sometimes employed that sounds like Geechee, the dialect of South Carolina coastal islands. Just called "Talk," some whites learn it in this world, a place where jazz may have not been devised but African-American language has made a creative contribution. Translations are projected, within the ornate frames of silent movies, when characters have rapid-fire exchanges, usually with sexual content.

The set design by Michael McGarty evokes more than denotes. Two institutional-looking doors are cut into a wall of clapboards painted red, merging a sense of home with that of prison. An industrial-strength clamp-handle showerhead dangles from a hose above the stage, washing away blood into a floor drain on several occasions. For contrast, the projection screen above the proceedings sometimes shows an innocent Simpsonsesque sky.

As Hester’s prodigal son, that walking horror story, sings: "The smallest seed grows to a tree / A grain of sand pearls in an oyster / A small bit of hate in a heart will inflate / And that's more so, much more than enough / To make you a monster." Discount the self-pity, if you like. But there’s no denying such karmic consequences, Suzan-Lori Parks and Brown Theatre have made clear to us.