A juror’s still out on writer’s talent

YOUR piece describes a small but still troubling step in the decline of Western Civilization [“A Steady Diet of Plot Luck,” July 23]. Untold theater companies around the country, including a number locally, are falling over themselves to mount productions of what amounts to Suzan-Lori Parks’ daily musings, simply because she has stature. She is a MacArthur “genius” and a Pulitzer winner for the incoherent, pointless exercise that is “Top Dog/Underdog.” She puts on paper anything that comes into her mind. She calls her daily scribblings “plays,” and supposedly serious theater people agree to put them on.

It’s way too early in this playwright’s career to be “genuflected to” in this way by theater companies nationwide. This project of hers reminds me of the stories of Picasso paying restaurant checks by scribbling some face or figure on a napkin. Parks isn’t Picasso, nor is she August Wilson or Tom Stoppard or even Tony Kushner. Not yet anyway. I might, just might entertain a play a day from the likes of those proven talents or a Tennessee Williams or an Arthur Miller or a Eugene O’Neill, but Suzan-Lori Parks? Seriously?!

A “play,” as Parks defines it, may indeed be simply anything one commits to paper if one can envision it being “acted” on stage. But every such “work” shouldn’t necessarily be produced just because it was jotted down by a MacArthur genius while going through airport security.

The L.A. theater community, of which I’m a patron, should be ashamed of itself.

ROY EUGENE BOGGS JR.

Culver City