Sonja Parks

Unexpected power in a small package

By Quinton Skinner

Minneapolis: There are always a handful of names whose presence on a playbill evokes an undiluted sense of expectation. In the Twin Cities, Sonja Parks has a prime spot on this short list. She’s the sort of performer who invariably takes her work in unexpected directions, always with a sense of in-the-moment precision and a presence rife with thoughtfulness, even affirmation.

“If you knew what to expect every time I showed up, that would be really dull,” Parks says over her morning coffee in late summer at Minneapolis’s French Meadow Café. With her striking looks and long braided hair, she elicits double takes even from those who don’t recognize her from the stage. “I try not to pull out the actor’s bag of tricks, because that’s so easy. Hopefully I love the character, the piece, and then something kicks in. That’s when I’m playing.”

Parks is warm and down-to-earth. She’s quick to laugh but also evinces a self-possessed presence that carries over to the stage. When we talk about theatre’s capacity for the unexpected, she lands upon one of her own surprising traits—her deep and resonant voice.

“Look, I’m five-foot-two-inches tall, about a hundred pounds soaking wet,” she says good-humoredly. “And I always wanted to have a different voice—a more female voice. Finally I had a professor who told me, ‘Face it, you don’t have a small voice. Use what you have.’”

Parks grew up in Austin and earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas. She worked in New York and Los Angeles before coming to Minneapolis, which she calls her “home base, not home.” The acting bug bit early and often.

“I always used to get in trouble when I was a little girl,” she remembers. “I’d stay up way past my bedtime and watch the late-late show. I’d sit inches from the TV watching old musicals, Busby Berkeley, things like that. My favorite, though, was Bette Davis. I watched her every move, I studied her. Bette Davis was my acting teacher.”

Parks can be a study in contradictions. Her diminutive stature is in constant contrast with the sense of strength she projects, and her seriousness in repose shatters in an instant with a radiant smile. In a 2005 production of Tracey Scott Wilson’s The Story at Pillsbury House Theatre, she ably captured the inner friction in an ambitious, award-winning reporter who fictionalized her sources.

“Even with the most loathsome character who does the most horrible things and whom nobody likes, I have to find something in them that’s part of me,” she says. “I approach it with my own insecurities, trying to find truth and honesty in why they act that way.”

A more sympathetic turn was in the 2004 Pillsbury House production of Daniel Alexander Jones’s Bel Canto; Parks played Bessie, a single mother who futilely waits for her Vietnam draft¬evading husband to return home. She didn’t look old enough for the role, but nonetheless anchored the production with a mix of vulnerability and strength—cementing, for this writer, her capacity for ageless performance. (She’s in her thirties.)

Mixing traditional stage roles with site-specific performances, Parks also recently played Ismene in a production of Antigone by Ten Thousand Things, a company that performs largely in prisons, homeless shelters and before other nontraditional audiences. “It’s the essence of what theatre is,” Parks says of working with the company, and the enthusiastic (and often very verbal) responses its work elicits.

“Art feeds art,” Parks believes. “I call it the love loop. It’s playing, it’s giving and receiving,” she says, and mixes rapid-fire allusions to the classics and church rituals from a Baptist childhood. “It’s called getting holy, with the pastor, the music, the choir, the amens and the hallelujahs. It’s all theatrical, a way to go beyond this human veil.”

Parks appears this month with the Children’s Theatre Company in another Antigone, in a reprise of the title role she portrayed at the same theatre in 2003. While the production features the same cast and director (Greg Banks) as before, the plan is to rethink matters. Parks admits: “I’m a little frightened. We had something, and I don’t know if you can repeat that experience. I’m not a light switch.”

When Antigone first opened in 2003, Parks made news locally when, during a final dress rehearsal, she collided with another actor. “We had done the scene a billion times, no problem, always in a safe way,” she says. “This time the actor’s shoulder went right into my lip and bam, down I went! I was supposed to be dead, so I couldn’t react. On the ride home my teeth felt funny, something wasn’t quite right. In front of the mirror I pressed my tongue against my teeth—and four of them fell out in the sink. I said, shit, I have a show to do in four hours, and it’s hard to do Antigone when you sound like Elmer Fudd.”

Parks had emergency oral surgery, and for the show’s first performance she acted out her part while director Banks read her lines. Critics were discreetly asked to postpone their attendance.

This fall Parks begins work as a theatre instructor at the University of Minnesota, the news of which evokes an obvious but illuminating query: Would you recommend the life of an actor to a young person just starting out? Parks fields the question with little hesitation: “I would recommend it,” she says, “but only as long as you want to be an actor and not a star. They’re two very different things.”

Does taking the stage become easier with experience? Parks insists that the very notion is anathema to doing work that meets her standards. “I get nervous if I don’t feel nervous,” she says. “Even if it’s the 35th performance of the play, if I don’t feel nervous beforehand, that’s when I worry about getting into trouble.”

It’s a rare thing indeed to witness Parks in trouble on a stage (save for the odd dental-related miscue). “I might not be the most talented person at the audition,” she says, “but I will outwork everybody. I show up early and stay late. I ask a billion questions until I piss off the director. I tell students, you don’t have to have the most talent—you just have to do the work.”

Quinton Skinner is a Minneapolis-based arts reporter.