America Play: " . . .the piece de resistance is Rolla's lighting. Now warm, now stark, it suggests both carnival and affairs of state."

Suzan-Lori Parks is an audacious playwright -- playful, with an inventive sense of structure, and dauntingly smart. An African-American, her plays are nothing like the "mama on the couch" family dramas memorably parodied by George C. Wolfe.

Parks certainly tackles much of that material, including the personal and public perceptions of race. But she paints on a broader canvas that takes in history and politics, then dramatizes her investigations in surreal, even absurdist structures bubbling with hip-hop diction and energy.

As I said, it can be daunting. You can't reduce her plays to narrative sense. You do best simply to soak them up, because their sense is more that of poetry or music.

You know what I mean if you saw her Pulitzer Prize-winning "Topdog/Underdog" a couple of years ago at City Theatre. "The America Play," written a decade earlier and now in a handsomely mounted production at Open Stage Theatre in the Strip, is like its abstract background. "Topdog" concerns two black brothers, Booth and Lincoln. The older plays Lincoln in a carnival attraction where customers get to shoot the president. The history of American race relations and violence feeds into an intense confrontation between the brothers and the sensibilities they represent.

Although independent, "The America Play" is a kind of prequel. Act 1, "The Lincoln Act," takes place in "a great hole in the middle of nowhere ... an exact replica of the great hole of history." In effect, it's a monologue for The Foundling Father, a large black man who's a Lincoln look-alike. In oblique terms, he explains that he naturally gravitated into a theme-park impersonation of Lincoln, complete with a variety of beards, stovepipe hat and selection of pistols for the customers to choose from.

What they mainly enact, of course, is that night at Ford's Theatre when John Wilkes Booth not only shot Lincoln in mid-laugh but also interrupted a performance of a popular comedy, "Our American Cousin." Along the way, The Foundling Father lays the groundwork for Act 2, describing how he and wife Lucy and their son turned this into a career, going west to create their own imitation Great Hole of History, with its patriotic theme park.

That's what we see in the entirely different Act 2, named "The Hall of Wonders": Lucy and their son, Brazil, working down in the great hole, listening for echoes of the now-deceased Foundling Father and searching for tokens of the past. There are brief reprises of the Lincoln Act until the Foundling Father is recovered and buried in a magnificent casket.

And what does it all mean? Something about American history, of course. It's an oblique parable, like Sam Shepard's "Tooth of Crime" but in a bunting-draped atmosphere like that of Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins." The Foundling Father (a purposeful conjunction of pioneer and orphan) was originally a digger, they say, who "digged the hole and the hole held him." It's about how we serve history and it possesses us. But we also trivialize it, turning it into mementos, missing its point.

David Maslow, Open Stage's producing artistic director, directs a capable cast led by Garbie Dukes as The Foundling Father. He combines imposing stature with a surprisingly light voice, which suggests a sympathetic uncertainty -- is he an agent of history or just its negative echo?

The strongest stage presence is Rita Gregory's as Lucy, the cranky matriarch, determined to continue her task of reviving the past, however fragmented. She has a fine foil in Nathan Jedrzejewski's Brazil, an entertaining mix of dutiful heir and subversive commentator who provides most of the show's humor. Kashif Uqdah and Sara Rachel Canter play the "Our American Cousin" actors and various other small roles.

Adding to the difficulty of Parks' vision is her dialogue, which insists on a kind of slurred speech carefully captured by the cast, sometimes at the cost of intelligibility.

Nothing makes a stronger claim for significance than the design. The flexible Open Stage space has been turned into a regular proscenium, in which Jeremy Rolla erects a stage of polished wood, sharply raked, decorated by museum artifacts with a Victorian cast -- the debris of a sentimentalized history. In Act 2, the stage opens up into an actual hole in which Brazil digs.

Beth Steinberg provides period costumes, and the piece de resistance is Rolla's lighting. Now warm, now stark, it suggests both carnival and affairs of state.

At rear is a starscape to suggest large meanings, and the actors sometimes create huge shadows on the theater's left wall, like grandiose projections of human figures into capital "h" History.

History, it appears, is what we make of it, the sum of our fetishes, obsessions, ambitions and the rituals that we inherit.