The Wilma Theater has brought to its stage to close its 2025-26 season a most unusual play by Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks. “The America Play” follows a Black impersonator of Abraham Lincoln, as he runs a very strange tourist attraction and takes us on a most surrealistic view of America.
Nine years later, she would write “Topdog/Underdog,” the play that won her the Pulitzer. It is about two African-American brothers, Lincoln and Booth, as they deal with racism, poverty, and other issues and Lincoln earns a living as a whiteface Abraham Lincoln impersonator.
The primary character in this play is a Black grave digger who resembles Lincoln and goes by the name Foundling Father. He charges customers a penny to be there for the reenactment of Lincoln’s assassination. They pull the trigger with a fake gun, and he goes into a sort of comic routine with his arms before he “dies.” Some return weekly to pull the trigger. It’s rather weird but so is the whole play. In fact, it appears that he often wishes he were Abraham Lincoln.
In the first act, Foundling Father (Lindsay Smiling, who also directed the play) tells us that he has dug 723 graves. That’s how he has made a living. But he wants more and leaves his family and heads west with a trunkful of beards and his black coat and stove pipe hat. He calls Lincoln “The Great Man” and refers to himself as “The Lesser Man.” He portrays the president so well that some say, “he ought to be shot.”
En route, he gives us a sort of history lesson, the thrust of which is that history is created by the recorders of history rather than by the actual people. Who gets to be remembered is determined by the writers who are often very biased. But he says it’s all a preface and will be rewritten many more times. As for Foundling Father himself, he’s learned things by digging those graves where he imagined different stories about so many famous people. But he is still searching. He wants his own fame and sets up The Hall of Wonders, a sort of Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. He claims to have a bone from Washington’s leg and also, the president’s wooden teeth. After all, what is the truth?
The second act of the play is about his son, Brazil’s (Brandon J. Pierce) quest for answers. He was deserted by his father when he was only five. He searches for the man but also searches for meaning in life which his father cannot provide since he has died.
There is so much that is talked about in this play, and I will confess- I did not follow all of it. It is most existential and often seems rather abstract. I often don’t get the meaning of modern poems, and I don’t relate to many works of abstract art. Be prepared to listen to lots of talk on what it means to be an American today. In the mostly monologue first act and the dialogue between Brazil and his mother Lucy (Kimberly S. Fairbanks) in the second act, there is a lot to absorb in his search for answers.
What does it take to become a great man? Parks gives us a most unique philosophical look at life as we think we know it, while providing a variety of comic moments and a look at history through an alternate lens.
“The America Play” by Suzan-Lori Parks at The Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., Philadelphia, PA 19107, 215-546-7824 wilmatheater.org Thru May 31, 2026
Philadelphia Theater Reviews by Frank Burd 