Warned, she wrote it anyway

Oh, there she is, the raging wildfire of a playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who zips toward the outdoor stage in chunky sandals five minutes before her first-ever reading of her much-anticipated debut novel. Under the coolness of sycamore trees, an audience of about 75 waits on folding chairs on a UCLA lawn. It’s a sleepy scene compared to the electric Broadway opening last April of her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Topdog/Underdog,” in a 1,125-seat theater.

But on this spring morning, the tall and yoga-toned Parks is about to pivot into new territory, wearing jeans, a form-fitting T-shirt and black knit cap. (On Broadway, she took her bows on stage in a black mini-skirt, black velvet top and a little trinket she borrowed from her pit bull, Lambchop -- a spiky silver collar.) Her book, “Getting Mother’s Body” (Random House), which is being released today, is narrated in the rough voices of down-on-their-luck characters -- including a wily, pregnant 16-year-old -- who take a road trip though west Texas in 1963 in search of buried treasure.

Parks is known for experimental plays that probe issues of race, family and history, for provocative scenes and misfit characters whose dialogue is lyrical and true. Expectations for her novel have been building since last May, when Parks signed a deal with then-Random House President Ann Godoff, who announced she would edit it herself. Now, her publisher is comparing the book to classics by Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker (tentative marketing plans call for ads in the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review; advance copies were not given to book reviewers).

At home in Venice, two days before her appearance at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, Parks insists that she isn’t hanging on the reaction to her latest work. She is too busy whittling down a staggering load of high-profile projects while heading the dramatic-writing program at CalArts in Valencia. And she’s an expert at shrugging off the weight of expectation.

“So many people told me, ‘Don’t write a novel. What are you going to write a novel for? You’ve got this good thing going in playwriting. You’re going to mess it up.’ I’m like, ‘I got a novel in me.’ ” She diffuses her recalcitrance by pretending to chomp on her nails.

Parks, who turns 40 this week, is alternately the exuberant goofball and the raging intellect. Her words rush out in an unrelenting patter of images and metaphors, relayed with theatrical voices and gestures. She never lets more than a beat or so pass in silence, offering up part hyper-articulate thought, part interior monologue: “Look at this silly dog,” she says affectionately when her sweet pit bull jumps on the couch.

“So, my book comes out, then it’s my birthday” -- she sings the rest of the sentence -- “then my students graduate! Then I go on book tour! Then the dog goes bananas! Little Miss Bananas!”

Three months ago, Parks and her husband, 53-year-old blues musician Paul Oscher, moved into a cozy three-bedroom, tri-level house in an unpretentious neighborhood a block from the ocean. Unopened boxes clutter the floors. A beat-up upright piano sits in the living room. Shelves hold books on Zen studies, running and W.E.B. DuBois, along with such classics as “Moby-Dick” and “Bhagavad-Gita.” The couple’s bicycles, which don’t get out much, lean against the dining room table.

This is a head-spinning time for Parks, who begins an 11-city book tour in a couple weeks, wrapping it up in time for her to attend the London premiere of “Topdog/Underdog,” the story of a simmering sibling rivalry. In March, she was in New York for the opening of her new off-Broadway play, a loose take on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.”

She’s writing a TV adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel “Paradise” for Oprah Winfrey’s production company. This week, also for Winfrey, she’s on deadline to rewrite a script for a TV adaptation of Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In between reading her students’ papers, Parks is working on a musical theater production for Disney about the Harlem Globetrotters.

“I think I figured out the key,” she says of her schedule. She pictures her projects on a slow-spinning Lazy Susan, and she keeps only one task in front of her at a time. And she squeezes in 2 1/2 hours of yoga, five days a week.

Parks has put aside plays before, writing, for example, the screenplay for Spike Lee’s 1996 feature film, “Girl 6.” And did we mention that she composed several songs for her novel, wrapping the lyrics into the narrative? As a little girl, Parks notes on a recent afternoon at home, she always made up songs; as an adult, she has studied music informally.

She explains her plan for the upcoming book festival. She’ll read a few chapters, take questions and then pick up her National guitar, a gift from her husband. Then, for the first time, she will perform music in public, singing and playing a blues song from “Getting Mother’s Body.”

The prospect, she concedes, is “scary and weird and frightening, but you grow, so you have to do the next thing” and shoot for a fledgling open-minded Zen state, or “beginner’s mind.”

“Being at the book fair, at the podium, reading from my work and then playing a song, you’re, ‘Yo! You’re in beginner’s mind, baby!’ Because it’s new and how do you deal with it? Do you shut down? Do you decide not to do it? Do you say, ‘That’s not who I am,’ denying that aspect of your personality?”

She nods at her guitar. “Because this is part of who I am.... It’s maybe not as developed as the playwriting side of me, and the novelist side isn’t as developed as the playwriting side of me. So? We need to allow each other to grow.”

In her cluttered office, Parks curls into an easy chair with stuffing poking out -- it’s been in her family since she was 2. Her father, an Army officer, moved the family often, including a stay in Texas.

When she was a student at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, novelist and playwright James Baldwin suggested that she try her hand at plays. In the world of theater, Parks blazed her way up from plays she put on in garages and bars. Along the way, she has been recognized with a long list of honors, including a 2001 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. In 2000, she made Time magazine’s list of “Time 100: The Next Wave of Innovators.”

She didn’t think about writing a novel until six years ago, when the characters in her story began nagging at her. Parks heard their voices in her head and, for the first time, saw a story unfold through her characters’ eyes.

So how confident was she about taking on a novel?

“It wasn’t about confidence,” Parks says. “It was more about, like they say in the South, being ridden. Like you have a haint or a spirit that has attached itself to you. It’s like being possessed ... like I have to do it because these characters are driving me crazy.”

The characters take turns telling the story, in voices that bespeak their poor roots. (Example: “Yr waiting for me to say go head but I ain’t gonna say it.” A similar narrative technique was used by William Faulkner in “As I Lay Dying,” which Parks acknowledges as an inspiration.)

Parks says she is just as excited about her novel’s debut as she has been on the opening nights of any of her plays, even “Topdog/Underdog,” when, in the darkness of the theater, the audience’s ovation hit her like the roar of the ocean.

“It’s thrilling and much different from an opening in a way because I’m going to be reading,” she says. “There are no actors who are going to be reading my work. A playwright is sort of a behind-the-scenes kind of person, and it’s like I’m emerging from behind the scenes with this.”

Taking the stage at the book festival two days later, Park grins at the audience, guitar in hand. She stretches her arms, puts her hands on her hips and begins to read. Her voice is steady and slow, infused with the drama of her characters. When she is done, the applause is warm. She picks up her guitar.

People smile and chuckle with anticipation. “The guitar is not miked,” she warns. “That might be a good thing.”

“M-ah man, he loves me, he bought me a Cadillac car, mmmm-hmmm,” Parks sings. The song is blues-y, but she underplays the emotion, in a voice that is more gentle than gritty. Throughout the performance, the crowd is with her, whooping at the end.

Afterward, Parks is all smiles. She jumps up from a table where she’s signing books to get a hug from her yoga teacher, who declares her reading “fabulous.”

“It was really fun,” Parks says. “I had a great time.” No, she says, she wasn’t nervous, though she did concede that she was up at 6 a.m., practicing her song and reading in front of her husband.

And the reaction to Parks’ debut as a novelist?

In line for the early release of the book, 32-year-old Liza Orr says she loved it. “Can you imagine? Getting up there and singing?” Parks’ reading got her excited about reading the book for “the voice, the rhythm, the risks, the power, character. Stuff like that, you don’t find.”

Phyllis Thompson, 43, who had seen “Topdog/Underdog” in New York, bought two copies of the new book. “I love that she put in the songs. Her mind is so fast paced. You can see the wheels turning and turning.”