SCOTLAND
has played a major role in my creative and emotional life through travel, academia, kinship ties, plays, ethnographies, short stories, poetry, plays, and art.
ETHNOGRAPHY: Scottish Crofters (1990, 2005)
What began as anthropological fieldwork for Sue Parman's doctoral dissertation in 1970-71 turned into a life-long relationship with a community in the Gaelic-speaking Scottish Outer Hebrides.
Robert J. Theodoratus, "British Isles," Encyclopaedia of Cultural Anthropology 1:155, 1996: "The first social anthropological books on Scottish communities were by Americans and appeared in the 1980s. The best known is Susan Parman's (1990) general description of a crofting community on the island of Lewis."
PLAYS
I studied playwrighting at South Coast Repertory's Professional Conservatory in California. In California my plays were performed at Stages Theatre, the Nicholas Theatre, Newport Theatre Arts Center, and the Forum Theatre in Laguna Beach. After moving to Oregon, my plays have been performed as part of Portland's Fertile Ground, Portland Theatre Works, and Theatre in the Hood.
"Sue Parman has the great gift of being able to set the scene. She evokes place and time in the way of J.M. Synge. She balances manners with mores, realism with poetry, and pulls you into the world of the story." (Cecilia Fannon)
HOUSE OF RAVENS (full-length play): In the Gaelic-speaking Scottish Hebrides, two brothers and their retarded sister (who communicates primarily with raven calls) celebrate the New Year by inviting into their home their new neighbors, an Englishman and his daughter, an act that threatens the harmony of their household as well as their lives. Note: The language we speak is the house we live in. Subjugation of one language by another, even defining it as inhuman (as the English neighbors do with Gaelic, and as almost everyone does with the retarded raven-girl) justifies every kind of abuse, from ridicule and rape to murder.
NORTH OF SIXTY-THREE DEGREES (full-length play): When a mysterious stranger called Speaker appears in a small Scottish village with the power to force people to speak the truth, long-held secrets unravel. Speaker arrives looking for "Morag of the North," a woman who left her home thirty years ago to marry Iain MacLeod, and is still considered an outsider, a silkie, and a witch. Now estranged from her husband, who has fallen under the spell of the evangelical Rev. MacFarland, Morag struggles to protect herself and her children (Kenny, who wants to leave the village to attend University, and Mairi who is afraid to leave the house) from village gossip. She finds ambiguous allies in the minister's drunken son-in-law Calum Murray and his cowed wife Jean. So strong is Morag's courageous will that Speaker himself is forced to change his view of the universe and his mission.
"I love the garishness of this play, I love the massive big mix of all these bright and mad things (incest, strict religion, a longing to escape, the supernatural, drunks, shagging, gossipy suspicion, poetic/profane dialogue, Sci-Fi, time travel, standing stones shenanigans and an occasional biblical flourish to the dialogue). It's held together with a lovely handling of dialogue and strong scenes." (Playwrights Studio of Scotland)
"North of 63 Degrees" is the best play I've read in a year--and I read a lot of plays. Intriguing from the start, involving, eventually powerful and emotional,,an amazing blend of myth and realism..(Arthur Kraft)