Monica Parks
Actor - Film / TV/ Theatre
SAG-AFTRA * AEA * CAEA
✶ REVIEWS (3 of 3)✶
Photo credit: David Cooper
with Ryann Meyers; photo credit:David Cooper
Photo credit: David Cooper
The women in Gardley's play are deeply flawed figures, haunted by their pasts and yearning for salvation from a society they no longer recognize.
Though an ensemble piece, Beartrice is ultimately at the heart of Gardley's play and Parks offers a pereformance that if not completely sympathetic, is nonetheless astounding. Her matriarch is complex, cunning and uncompromising - a mother set on protecting her children no matter the cost to her or them.
Toronto Star
Joshua Chong
Moniica Parks is outstanding as Beartrice. Parks plays Beartrice as a fully rounded character, not simply a tyrannical mother. Parks lets us see that Beartrice has to put on a strong front before her wilful daughters and her prying acquaintance LaVeuve, but with Makeda she softens and Beartrice's genuine concern for Makeda and her daughters breaks through.
Stage Door Review
Christopher Hoile
The Sty of the Blind Pig, by Phillip Hayes Dean
The St. Louis Black Repertory Company
There is too much of death about Alberta Warren. Living in the controlling shadow of her arthritic tigress of a mother, the repressed Alberta finds her only creative release in writing obituaries and delivering eulogies.
... Monica Parks' Alberta is less showy but equally realized. Late in the play, for instance, Alberta finds herself alone with Blind Jordan. As the troubadour sits on the living-room sofa, Alberta stands behind him, attracted in ways beyond her understanding. Clearly she wants to reach out and touch him. Instead, Parks begins to stroke the sofa wing next to his shoulder. Her caresses are more intimate than any physical contact could hope to be.
St. Louis Riverfront Times
Dennis Brown
Spunk, by George C. Wolfe, Indiana Repertory Theatre
But to Brian Chandler, Dan Griffin, Eric Ware and Monica Parks belongs the glory. All provide lessons in versatility, moving effortlessly from play to play, role to role, but Parks makes the most astonishing of the impressions. If it didn't say so in the program book...one might be forgiven for thinking that Delia in "Sweat," the sassy girl in the Harlem number and Missie May were played by three different women, but they're all Parks and all fine.
Show Time
Charles Staff