How do you portray an abyss that has swallowed up a cultural past? More urgently, how do you fill it? Knotty questions abound in Suzan-Lori Parks’s “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, a.k.a. The Negro Book of the Dead,” which opens on Sunday, Nov. 13. The script for this genre-defying work from 1990 specifies that the set include “an exact replica of the Great Hole in History,” into which entire chapters of the African-American experience have disappeared.

Ms. Parks (“Topdog/Underdog”) has devoted much of her career to excavating this vacuum. Those familiar only with her later dramas may be startled by the jazzlike structure of this early work, in which death happens repeatedly to the title character. This phantasmagorical riff of reclamation, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, is the first offering in a Signature Theater season devoted to Ms. Parks. (Through Dec. 18, 212-244-7529; signaturetheater.org.)