Her ‘Kingdom’ Cometh : Stage: The Obie-winning play, which Suzan-Lori Parks wrote in the ‘80s, opens tonight with its first full production in L.A. It shows African-American archetypes while rejecting naturalism for ‘epic theater.’

Suzan-Lori Parks is in a curious situation. It took so long for her 1986-89 play, “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom,” to finally receive a full production in Los Angeles that, as she tells it, the play now reflects a chapter of her life that has been securely closed.

“Oh yeah, I’ve moved past that one,” she said confidently on the phone from her New York home. “When I did it, it was done, and I moved on.”

Subtitled “a tetraptych” (or four-paneled work), “Third Kingdom” is structured with three discrete sections, plus one about slaves crossing the ocean that gets repeated.

Although “Third Kingdom” frequently portrays images and archetypes of African-American culture--black women treated as scientific specimens, ex-slaves deluged with memories, a black soldier awaiting the military honor of his career--it rejects any shred of naturalism for what Parks calls “epic theater,” a realm of language, rhythms, impressions, images.

Now that director Peter Brosius is staging the work at the Odyssey Theatre (opening today), Parks is finding herself returning to “The Third Kingdom” and thinking anew about the work that garnered her the 1990 Obie for best new American play.

“This was the second play I wrote,” recalls Parks, who recently turned 30, “and the first play that dealt with public history and that was big in scale. But it was the first and last play of mine to deal with black people as an oppressed group. I thought about it, I did it, it was interesting. But it is no longer. As black people, we’re constantly told that we’re oppressed, and it comes like an equation. You hear it from whites and blacks, and it feeds on itself. It’s not the only state of existence. I think it’s an equation that lies. We gotta break that chain. There’s a lot more out there.

“Some folks out there consider it a crime if you’re not saying, ‘Uplift the Race.’ It can get treacherous when you’re part of a group which is undergoing great stress politically, and you write something, and then that group turns to you and says that you’re not dealing with what’s really happening. I mean, I’ve had people roll up my scripts and shake them in my face.”

Parks has had a lot on her mind lately: Her “The America Play,” which she would describe only as dealing with American history, is currently receiving a workshop production (directed by her frequent collaborator, Liz Diamond) as part of the Dallas Theatre Center’s the Big D Festival of the Unexpected. She also has just finished her second draft of “Venus,” which she said is so new that she couldn’t describe it.

Brosius wasn’t sure how to respond to “Third Kingdom” when he first read it, even though Parks’ poetic, elliptical style wasn’t far afield from a work like “The Undead” by Dennis Cooper and Ishmael Houston-Jones, which Brosius first staged in the Mark Taper Forum’s New Works festival, where “Third Kingdom” also happened to receive a reading.

“At first,” says Brosius, “my reaction was, ‘I don’t fully get this, but I’m intrigued, and it’s dangerous and I have to keep investigating it in order to understand it.’ As a director, you feel fortunate when you have that kind of experience.”

Parks began writing “Third Kingdom” in 1986 and followed it with other works such as “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World” (produced at both Brooklyn’s BACA Downtown and Yale Repertory) and “Devotees in the Garden of Love” (staged by the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival in 1991).

Because her father was in the Army, Parks’ family moved often, including long stays in then-West Germany. She admits to developing an independent, willful streak early: “People have always been telling me what to do since I was a child. My advanced placement English teacher told me not to major in English, since I flat out refused to memorize spelling words. Hey, I can use the big red Webster’s book whenever I need to, thank you. I would listen to my teachers, but I end up thinking I know better for myself, that there’s something else out there that maybe they haven’t considered, and let that something else speak to me.”

One of those teachers was novelist James Baldwin, with whom Parks studied at Hampshire College in 1983. “I came to his sessions rapt with attention, sat right next to him. Around that time, I was writing ‘regular’ fiction; it wasn’t weird or anything. Then one day, I was at my desk writing one minute, and in the next there were people in the room, talking dialogue. And I thought, wow--like the first time you have sex, and you’re hooked.”

The voices that most influenced Parks did not, however, include Baldwin, but poet Adrienne Kennedy and playwright Ntozake Shange. In a remarkable case of time bringing the mentors and students together on the same platform, Parks, Kennedy and Shange will share a panel discussion during the upcoming L. A. Festival in August.

“That is so cool,” says Parks. “I have no idea what I’m going to say. I am beside myself with excitement.”

* “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom” opens today and continues indefinitely at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. Tickets: $17.50-$21.50. Call (310) 477-2055.