On the surface Suzan-Lori Parks's early play Betting on the Dust Commander (1987) is reminiscent of absurdist senex comedies such as Beckett's Endgame, Albee's Counting the Ways, or Tennessee Williams's Lifeboat Drill, but without their complexity. In fact, reviewers have dismissed Parks's drama as "an endless loop of silliness" (Chad Jones, "Chan's 'Bones' Trumps Parks," San Francisco Examiner [August 15, 2008]) about a "married couple sinking into an abyss of habit and stale recollection"

(Stephen Holden, "Theatre in Review," "Arts," New York Times [June 26, 1991]). Dust Commander (in The America Play and Other Works [NY Theatre Communications Group, 1995]) revolves around Mare and Lucius (Luki), married for 110 years, who go through a series of rituals centered on a race horse named Dust Commander responsible for bringing them together, providing the down payment on their house, and dominating their relationship. Each character comically sports an appropriate racetrack name. Though Commander's victory has long since passed, Luki goes to the track each day, wears memorable Bermuda shorts ("They wash and wear. Washed em in the bath. Been worn" [82]), and carries a "clippin" of himself in the paper the day the horse won. Similarly, Mare recalls the tip she gave Luki about Commander winning and the "plastic flowers" used at their wedding because of Luki's "scratchity throat" (75). Amid their talk about the famous racehorse, the couple quibbles about furniture, Mare's eyelashes put the "wrong-side," and effective ways to blow a nose, a Parksian medley of ludic topics.

Yet Parks's one-act play is far more intricate than these oldsters' antics would suggest. Anticipating her later multi-layered, fabulist works, Dust Commander destabilizes the way a naturalistic theatre conceives of and represents time, history, and memory through linear plots that lead to irrevocable climaxes. Departing from such models, Parks employs in Commander and elsewhere in canon a pattern of "Rep & Rev" (repetition and revision) characterizing jazz and other forms...