The America Play Summary, Characters and Themes

The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks is an experimental drama about history, performance, racial identity, memory, and the strange ways America turns the past into spectacle. The play centers on a Black man known as the Foundling Father, who resembles Abraham Lincoln and makes a living reenacting Lincoln’s assassination for paying customers.

Through his abandoned family, Lucy and Brazil, the story examines what gets remembered, what gets buried, and who is allowed to become part of national history. Parks uses repetition, theatrical fragments, and symbolic objects to question the difference between truth, legend, and performance.

Summary

The story begins with the Foundling Father, a Black man dressed as Abraham Lincoln, standing inside a large hole that copies a famous attraction called the Great Hole of History. He is surrounded by Lincoln objects, including a bust and a cutout, and he speaks about how people have always told him that he looks like Lincoln.

Because of this resemblance, he began dressing like the “Great Man” and calling himself the “Lesser Known.” His identity has become tied to imitation, comparison, and the desire to be recognized by history.

The Foundling Father comes from a family of gravediggers. Digging graves is not only his work but part of his inheritance.

He takes pride in his skill and speed, and he understands burial as a kind of public duty. Yet he also wants more than ordinary labor.

He wants the shape of his life to matter after he is gone. He thinks about the way Lincoln left behind a huge historical presence, a “hole” filled with speeches, images, stories, and national memory.

By contrast, the Foundling Father fears being forgotten, despite his talent and his resemblance to a famous man.

He remembers visiting the Great Hole of History with his wife, Lucy, during their honeymoon. That place was a theme-park-like attraction where ordinary people could sit at the edge and watch major historical figures pass by in pageants.

The experience affected him deeply. It made him think about his own place in history and whether a person like him could ever become important enough to be remembered.

Lucy worked as a Confidence, a person who listened to and kept the secrets of the dead. Together, they imagined a family business: he would dig graves, Lucy would keep final secrets, and their son Brazil would perform mourning at funerals.

The Foundling Father becomes obsessed with Lincoln’s assassination. He imagines being present at the moment of Lincoln’s death, hearing Mary Todd Lincoln call for someone to put the Great Man in the ground.

In his imagination, because he looks so much like Lincoln and because he is a skilled gravedigger, he would have been chosen to bury him. This fantasy becomes a way for him to connect himself to a national event from which he is historically excluded.

He wants to attach his own life to Lincoln’s, even if only through imitation, labor, and death.

Eventually, the call he imagines becomes too strong. He leaves Lucy and Brazil and goes west, where he digs his own Great Hole of History.

At first, he tries to earn money through speeches and by presenting himself as a Lincoln-like figure, but people are not interested enough to pay. Then spectators begin visiting him in the hole and throwing old food at him.

One person says that he plays Lincoln so well he ought to be shot. This remark gives him the idea that changes his life.

The Foundling Father creates an attraction in which visitors pay a penny to choose a pistol and pretend to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. He sits in a rocking chair in a darkened box, dressed as Lincoln, laughing as if he is watching a play.

Customers enter as John Wilkes Booth and “shoot” him. Some quote Booth’s famous lines, while others invent their own versions.

One regular customer is especially concerned with historical accuracy and repeats the scene again and again. The Foundling Father becomes successful because people are willing to pay not just to see history but to perform violence against its image.

As he describes the act, the Foundling Father reveals how complicated his performance is. People expect Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, even though Lincoln would not have worn it in the theater.

They accept some inaccuracies but reject others. A yellow beard, for example, bothers some customers, while other distortions are good for business.

The Foundling Father understands that history is not simply truth; it is also a performance shaped by expectation, repetition, and profit. His work depends on giving people the version of Lincoln’s death they want to see.

The assassination scene repeats with different visitors. Men, women, and couples come to shoot him.

A newlywed couple asks to shoot Lincoln together, suggesting that this violent reenactment can become a family outing, a shared memory, or even a tradition. The Foundling Father accepts the damage caused by his job, including hearing loss from the repeated gunshots.

He sees this as a small price for success and recognition. Yet underneath the performance is a deeper sadness: he is trying to catch up with Lincoln, but he cannot, because Lincoln belongs to the past and to national mythology.

The sound of a gunshot carries into the second part of the play, where Lucy and Brazil arrive at the hole. The Foundling Father is gone, and they are searching for him.

Brazil digs while Lucy listens through an ear trumpet. She can hear echoes of past gunshots and tries to distinguish between memory and the present.

Their search is both physical and emotional. They are looking for his body, but they are also looking for proof of his existence, his final words, and the meaning of his disappearance.

Lucy explains her work as a Confidence. She listens to the secrets of the dead and keeps them, often long after anyone else cares.

She remembers the secrets of Bram Price and his family, showing that death does not end a person’s need to be heard. For Lucy, the words of the dead have weight and must be preserved.

Yet her work also depends on silence, because she keeps secrets rather than revealing them. This makes her a guardian of hidden truths, even as she struggles to hear her own husband’s final echoes.

Brazil has inherited elements of both parents. From his father, he has the connection to digging and performance.

From his mother’s world, he understands mourning and death as ritual. As a child, he was trained to wail at funerals, and he took pride in becoming good at it.

Now, while digging for his father, he performs grief and also feels it. He calls his father his “foe-father” and “faux-father,” words that suggest both distance and imitation.

His father is real to him, but also strangely artificial, shaped by absence and performance.

As Lucy and Brazil dig, they uncover objects and place them in what Brazil calls the Hall of Wonders. These objects include Lincoln-related items, a jewelry box for beards, a bust, a shovel, a trumpet, pennies, and other fragments that may or may not carry historical importance.

The act of arranging these objects gives them meaning. Brazil treats them like museum pieces, turning the hole into an archive of broken history.

Some objects seem connected to famous national figures; others seem connected to his father. The difference between public history and family memory becomes uncertain.

Lucy corrects Brazil when he imagines that real historical figures rose from the dead at the Great Hole of History. She reminds him that they were only impersonators.

Her warning to keep his story “to scale” shows her resistance to exaggeration, but the play also shows that history itself is full of exaggerations, copies, and staged scenes. The Foundling Father’s life has become hard to separate from Lincoln’s story because he spent so long performing it.

Even his family begins to understand him through the language of historical display.

The Foundling Father’s voice returns in echoes and fragments. He announces scenes, quotes speeches, lists state capitals, and describes Lincoln’s assassination.

His performance continues even after his death, as if he has been absorbed into the very history he tried to imitate. Lucy and Brazil watch him on a television they have dug up, seeing a replay of his earlier performance.

The past becomes mechanical, repeatable, and strangely alive. The dead man is present, but only through performance and recording.

At last, the Foundling Father appears before Lucy and Brazil. They recognize that he is dead and that they have found him.

A coffin waits for him, and Lucy has sent invitations for a funeral, believing many people will want to honor him. Yet he is not ready to enter the coffin.

He tries to hug his wife and son, but they are not ready either. Their reunion is full of hesitation.

The family has been separated for too long, and death does not repair the wound immediately.

Lucy asks him to perform Lincoln for Brazil, who was only five when his father left. The Foundling Father does so, and once again the gunshot sounds.

He slumps in the chair, repeating the death he has performed so many times. This final collapse suggests that the role has overtaken him.

His own death cannot be separated from Lincoln’s staged death. He has spent his life trying to enter history by acting out another man’s end, and that performance becomes the form through which his family receives him.

Brazil then describes his father’s body as another object in the Hall of Wonders. He gives it a place among the artifacts, treating the body like a historical discovery.

The final attention turns to last words, last breaths, and mourning. The play closes on the question of how a nation mourns, who receives public honor, and whose remains are left to be found by family members in a hole.

The Foundling Father sought greatness through imitation, but what remains is more personal: a wife listening, a son digging, and a body finally placed within a family’s memory.

Characters

The Foundling Father

The Foundling Father is the central figure in The America Play, and he is defined by the painful gap between who he is and who he is mistaken for. As a Black man who resembles Abraham Lincoln, he lives under the shadow of a white national icon.

His resemblance gives him a strange kind of visibility, but that visibility is never fully his own. People recognize Lincoln in him before they recognize him as an individual.

This shapes his desire to become historically important, not simply admired in the present but remembered after death. His career as a gravedigger connects him to burial, labor, and the unseen work that supports public memory.

Yet he wants to move from being the person who buries history to someone who belongs inside it. His Lincoln act is both clever and tragic because it brings him success while reducing him to a repeated death scene.

He earns money by allowing others to shoot him as Lincoln, turning himself into a living copy of a national trauma. His ambition is understandable, but his method shows how destructive the hunger for recognition can become when the only available path is imitation.

By the end of the play, his own identity has been so absorbed by performance that even his family encounters him through the role he chose.

Lucy

Lucy is one of the strongest and most complex figures in The America Play because she represents memory, listening, secrecy, and emotional endurance. As a Confidence, she keeps the secrets of the dead, which gives her a quiet authority over hidden truths.

Her work is not public like the Foundling Father’s performance, but it is deeply connected to history because she preserves what others cannot or will not say aloud. Lucy understands that truth and what people believe to be truth are not always the same.

This makes her more grounded than her husband, who becomes consumed by the staged version of history. She corrects Brazil when his imagination grows too large, reminding him that the historical figures at the Great Hole of History were impersonators, not resurrected originals.

At the same time, Lucy is not merely practical; she is wounded by abandonment and still bound to the man who left her. Her search for her husband is an act of duty, grief, anger, and love.

She wants his body found because improper burial is a family shame, but also because his absence has left her and Brazil suspended in uncertainty. Her inability to hear his final words near the end is important because the woman whose life depends on hearing the dead cannot fully recover the voice she most needs.

Brazil

Brazil is the son who inherits a broken family history and tries to make meaning from what remains. In The America Play, he stands between his father’s world of performance and his mother’s world of listening.

As a child, he was trained to mourn at funerals, and his skill at wailing shows that grief, like history, can be practiced and performed. Yet his sorrow over his father is not only theatrical.

Brazil genuinely misses him, even though the man left when he was very young. His language for his father, including terms that suggest both ancestor and fake father, reveals confusion, resentment, admiration, and longing all at once.

He wants to follow in his father’s footsteps, especially when Lucy gives him the shovel, but he also seems aware that those footsteps led to disappearance and death. Brazil’s creation of the Hall of Wonders shows his need to organize the past.

Each object he finds becomes part of a display, as if arranging artifacts can repair absence. He treats his father’s remains as a discovery, which may seem emotionally distant, but it is also his way of giving the dead man a place.

Brazil’s character shows how children inherit not only family stories but also unfinished grief, public myths, and the burden of making sense of what adults leave behind.

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln does not appear as a living character, but his presence dominates the play through image, costume, quotation, and repeated reenactment. He functions less as a person than as a national symbol that others use, copy, sell, and reshape.

For the Foundling Father, Lincoln represents historical greatness and the possibility of being remembered. Lincoln’s assassination becomes the event through which the Foundling Father tries to attach himself to American memory.

Yet the play complicates Lincoln’s symbolic role by showing how easily history becomes performance. The hat, beard, chair, gunshot, and famous lines matter because spectators expect them, even when some details are inaccurate.

Lincoln’s image becomes a script that can be purchased for a penny and repeated endlessly. This treatment does not simply mock history; it exposes how national memory often depends on selective repetition.

Lincoln stands for freedom in American mythology, but the Foundling Father’s Blackness reveals the limits of that mythology. The resemblance between the two men is never treated as neutral.

It raises uncomfortable questions about who gets to embody national greatness and who is allowed only to imitate it. Lincoln’s role in the story is therefore powerful because his absence creates the space in which others struggle for recognition.

John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth appears through customers who play his role in the assassination reenactment. Like Lincoln, Booth is less a developed individual than a repeated historical position that different people step into.

Each visitor who enters as Booth brings a slightly different relationship to the act. Some quote famous lines, some care about accuracy, some improvise, and some seem to enjoy the violence more than the history.

Through these performances, Booth becomes a mask that ordinary people can wear. This is important because the play is not only interested in Lincoln as a national symbol but also in the public appetite for reenacting his murder.

Booth’s role allows spectators to become part of history through aggression. They do not have to study, mourn, or understand; they only have to pay and shoot.

The weekly customer who insists on accuracy shows how violence can hide behind devotion to historical detail. The women who perform Booth also complicate the scene, proving that the role is not limited by gender but is available to anyone willing to enter the script.

Booth’s presence reveals that historical memory can preserve the murderer as much as the victim, especially when the event is turned into entertainment.

Themes

History as Performance

In The America Play, history is not presented as a fixed record that people simply inherit. It is shown as something staged, repeated, edited, sold, and consumed.

The Foundling Father’s Lincoln act makes this clear because his customers do not come to learn about Lincoln in a careful or reflective way. They come to participate in a familiar scene and to feel the thrill of acting inside a famous event.

The performance depends on recognizable details: the beard, the hat, the chair, the gunshot, and Booth’s lines. Yet the play repeatedly shows that some of these details are inaccurate or shaped by audience expectation.

What matters is not whether the scene is fully true but whether it feels historically satisfying to the spectators. This theme raises serious questions about national memory.

If people remember the past through repeated images and rehearsed scenes, then history can become less about truth and more about habit. The Foundling Father understands this and uses it to survive, but he also becomes trapped by it.

His own life disappears beneath the role he performs. The play suggests that when history becomes spectacle, it can make certain figures larger than life while leaving others visible only as copies, servants, or bodies placed at the edge of the story.

The Desire to Be Remembered

The Foundling Father’s deepest need is not simply to make money or entertain people. He wants to leave behind a shape large enough for others to notice.

His thoughts about Lincoln reveal this longing. Lincoln’s life has produced a vast historical presence filled with speeches, images, objects, and public mourning.

The Foundling Father compares himself to that presence and feels the smallness of his own position. His work as a gravedigger gives him access to death, but not to fame.

He buries others, yet he fears becoming one of the countless people who vanish without public recognition. This desire explains why he leaves his family and builds his own version of the Great Hole of History.

He is trying to make a place where his life can seem important. The tragedy is that his path to remembrance requires self-erasure.

By becoming Lincoln, he gains attention but loses ownership of his identity. People remember the role more than the man.

Even after his death, Lucy and Brazil must dig through objects, echoes, and performances to find him. The play treats remembrance as both necessary and dangerous.

To be forgotten is painful, but to be remembered falsely, or only as someone else, is another kind of loss.

Family, Absence, and Inheritance

The family story at the center of the play is marked by abandonment, but it is also shaped by inheritance. Lucy, Brazil, and the Foundling Father are connected by professions that deal with death: digging graves, keeping secrets, and mourning.

These roles could have formed a family business, but the Foundling Father’s obsession with history pulls him away. His departure leaves Lucy and Brazil with emotional damage and practical unfinished business.

They must search for him because his body has not been properly buried, and for a family connected to funeral work, this failure carries shame. Brazil’s inheritance is especially complicated.

He receives his father’s shovel and talent for performance, but also his absence, restlessness, and uncertain identity. He wants to follow his father, yet the play makes that desire feel risky because the father’s path led to isolation and death.

Lucy’s inheritance is also heavy. Her role as a Confidence began in childhood, when others believed she could hold the words of the dead.

She carries secrets for families, but her own family remains full of things unsaid. The search for the Foundling Father becomes a search for a buried family truth.

What they find does not erase the abandonment, but it gives the loss a visible form.

Truth, Secrets, and the Unreliable Past

Truth in the play is unstable because it is always being filtered through memory, performance, silence, and belief. Lucy understands this more clearly than anyone.

As a Confidence, she knows that what people say publicly about the dead may not match what the dead actually confessed. Families often prefer a cleaner version of final words, while Lucy carries the private version.

Her work shows that history is built not only from facts but also from secrets that remain hidden. The Foundling Father’s performances create another kind of uncertainty.

He repeats Lincoln’s assassination with details that are partly accurate and partly shaped by audience demand. People complain about some mistakes while accepting others, which shows that their concern is not pure truth but the comfort of a familiar version.

Brazil’s Hall of Wonders adds yet another layer. The objects he finds may be meaningful, random, historical, personal, or falsely assigned importance.

By placing them in a display, he gives them value, but that value depends on interpretation. The play asks whether the past can ever be recovered cleanly.

Echoes, artifacts, and memories all survive, but none of them speaks with complete certainty. What remains is a struggle to listen carefully, name honestly, and accept that some truths arrive damaged.