Howard University Professor Pat Parks Joins John Legend’s Imitation of Life: The Aesthetics of Power Have Never Mattered More
What the new musical by John Legend and Lynn Nottage reveals about who gets to be seen as a leader, who gets to build wealth—and who gets to have freedom.
Editor’s Note
Howard University Assistant Professor and Theatre Arts Administration Area Coordinator Pat Parks is a co-producer of Imitation of Life, the new musical by John Legend and Lynn Nottage, directed by Whitney White and starring Adrienne Warren. In this essay, Parks reflects on the questions of power, identity, economic mobility, leadership, and freedom raised by the production—and their connection to Parks’ research on The Aesthetics of Power.
By Prof. Pat Parks
Nearly a century after Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life first confronted questions of race, labor, identity, and economic mobility, a new musical adaptation asks us to reconsider what it means to be seen—and what it costs to be seen on someone else’s terms.
I am proud to serve as a co-producer of Imitation of Life, the new musical from EGOT winner John Legend and Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, directed by Tony-nominated Whitney White and starring Tony Award winner Adrienne Warren, who won for her performance in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. The production marks one of several major co-producing engagements for me on the New York stage this year and my first collaboration with Wagner Johnson Productions, the production’s general manager. Wagner Johnson Productions has worked on Broadway projects including John Proctor is the Villain, Good Night, and Good Luck, starring George Clooney, and the long-awaited revival of Dreamgirls.
Based on Hurst’s 1933 novel and its subsequent film adaptations, Imitation of Life follows two mothers and their daughters as they navigate race, class, identity, ambition, and economic and social mobility in a society structured by inequality. Legend and Nottage revisit those questions for the present, asking what identity costs, what we leave for future generations, and who gets to determine the course of a life.
Those are questions that sit at the center of my own work. As an artist, producer, scholar, and executive coach, I have spent my career examining how people gain access to opportunity, how they are recognized as leaders, and how they turn their talent and work into greater agency and economic mobility. More specifically, one pillar of my research agenda centers on The Aesthetics of Power: The Fine Art(s) of Performing Leadership. At its core, this work examines how an individual looks, sounds, moves, speaks, and otherwise performs authority—and how that aesthetic composition shapes whether they are seen as powerful, credible, legitimate, and worthy of leadership. As a producer, finding projects that so organically embody these ideas compels me to lend my energy to them. That is why Imitation of Life resonates so deeply with me.
Now consider Delilah, the Black mother in this story whose labor and expertise help make Bea Pullman’s business possible. Yet Bea, the white mother and business partner, becomes the public face and ultimately exercises greater control over the enterprise. Their relationship raises a fundamental question: who creates value, who gets recognized for it, and who gets to determine what that value becomes?Who has the power to determine what someone’s labor is worth—and whether the compensation for that labor provides the security, leverage, and economic mobility that can change the trajectory of a life?
That question of power takes another form in the story of Delilah’s daughter, Peola. Peola explores whether performing an identity that society will accept as white might provide access to even more opportunity, mobility, and belonging otherwise denied to her as a Black woman.
As Peola’s story progresses, we are forced to ask what happens when access itself comes at a cost. Though she gains access to spaces and opportunities unavailable to her as a Black woman, that access remains contingent upon perpetually "performing" an identity society recognizes as white. In turn, her story illuminates the difference between experiencing freedom and truly possessing freedom. Peola’s freedom is thereby conditioned on performing an aesthetic of whiteness.
Today, formal access to opportunity has expanded in many ways for people of color, but access to competition is not the same as equitable opportunities to lead. That is, a door can remain technically open while the threshold or goalpost for being recognized as belonging inside—and being worthy of leading—continues to move.
At the highest levels of corporate leadership, just three Black women serve as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies—0.6% of the nation’s largest corporations. One of them, Karen S. Carter, who became Dow’s CEO in July 2026, is a graduate of Howard University.
Similarly, at the highest levels of American government, this logic has at times been made unusually explicit. Today, people selected for positions of power have been described as coming from “central casting,” while personnel selection and presentation have increasingly emphasized loyalty, alignment, image, and performance. This is a more open example of what happens when aesthetics become a significant part of the selection process—shaping who is recognized, who is trusted, and who is perceived as belonging in the room. More often, however, such aesthetic formulas for selection are not shared so casually. When they are concealed, they can be equally pernicious.
These questions, however, extend beyond corporations and government; they are also central to my professional practice.
As an executive coach to Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies, as well as leaders in and beyond the entertainment industry, I have worked in corporate markets around the world, including places where people of color constitute the majority of the local population, yet senior leadership and the public face of organizations were often expatriate leaders who were not people of color.
Working with CEOs, C-suite leaders, entertainment executives, and organizations navigating leadership development and succession planning, I have observed how authority, representation, visibility, and assumptions about who looks like the “natural” face of an institution continue to shape contemporary systems of power.
These dynamics are also particularly visible in theatre, where questions of representation are often discussed in terms of who audiences see onstage—but the deeper question is who has the authority to decide what audiences see in the first place.
Black professionals have historically been underrepresented in the offstage positions that determine which stories reach audiences, who leads productions, and where institutional resources are directed. The scarcity becomes particularly visible at the highest levels of the field. A 2026 American Theatre analysis found that, among 43 U.S. theatres with budgets above $10 million, only three were led by women of color at the time of the analysis.
The point is not to diminish any of these forms of leadership. It is to recognize how rare access to the highest levels of institutional authority remains—and to ask what happens after access.
Because access to the position is not the same as freedom within it.
Leadership requires room to experiment, make mistakes, learn, recover, and find one’s way. That freedom is not always distributed equally. For leaders from historically underrepresented groups, an individual misstep can carry a representational weight that others may not experience; a mistake can become evidence used to question not only the individual, but the legitimacy of the broader claim to authority for that person and the underrepresented group they represent as a whole.
We have seen how even a singular aesthetic choice can become entangled with judgments about whether a leader looks sufficiently serious, appropriate, or presidential. The 2014 controversy over President Barack Obama’s tan suit—worn during a White House briefing on serious foreign-policy matters—became a striking example of how appearance could eclipse substance and become part of a broader conversation about presidential legitimacy.
That is the deeper issue: conditional access does not end when someone reaches the room. It can continue in the amount of freedom they are given once they are in the room and at the table.
Whose authority is trusted enough to withstand imperfection? Who is allowed to learn publicly? Who gets the benefit of the doubt? Who gets to recover from a mistake without having the mistake treated as evidence that they never belonged there in the first place?
Seen through that lens, Delilah’s story comes back into focus—not simply as a story from another era, but as one whose questions remain with us. Her labor created value, but she did not have equal power to determine what that value became. That distinction still matters. When access to leadership and high-value economic opportunities remains uneven, so does the ability to accumulate wealth, establish ownership, support families, invest in communities, and create greater choices for future generations.
Imitation of Life therefore asks us to look beyond who gets to work. It asks who gets to build from that work—and who gets to retain enough of what they build to shape what comes next.
To that end, my work at Howard allows me to help students see that the arts industry is not simply something they enter to offer their labor; it is something they can help shape, lead, and build.
For me, this is why Imitation of Life matters now—and why The Aesthetics of Power offers a framework for understanding the story more deeply. By examining how aesthetics shape perceptions of power, identity, opportunity, wealth, and freedom, the framework gives us a way to critically deconstruct the forces that continue to shape who is recognized, who is trusted, who belongs, and who has access to opportunity, power and wealth. The story helps us see what happened; the framework helps us examine why these patterns persist—and gives us better tools for ensuring we do not simply carry those patterns forward.
With that, I invite you to experience Imitation of Life not simply as a story from another era, but as a story that still has something to teach us. Art, and theatre more specifically, gives us the rare opportunity to encounter history through the lives of others—to experience its consequences together, in real time, through the uniquely immediate and undeniable power of a live performance.
Imitation of Life begins performances at The Shed on November 21, 2026, and runs through January 3, 2027.
About the Author
Pat Parks is an artist, producer, scholar, and leader whose work spans theatre, music, television, and organizational leadership. Parks is Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator of Theatre Arts Administration in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University and a co-producer of Imitation of Life, the new musical by John Legend and Lynn Nottage, directed by Whitney White. Parks was also a co-producer on the Tony-nominated 2026 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, starring Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer and directed by Debbie Allen. A Harvard-educated thought leader and executive coach, Parks has advised artists, creative professionals, and organizations on leadership, strategy, culture, and professional development. Parks’ research and creative practice examine how artists build sustainable, healthy careers; how artists develop the capacity to lead and advocate for greater equity and representation; and how aesthetics shape who is recognized as powerful, credible, and worthy of leadership in and outside the creative economy.