American playwright (born )
Suzan-Lori Parks (born May 10, ) is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in ; Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the award for drama.[1] She was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine in [2]
Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky. She grew up with two siblings in a military family. Parks enjoyed writing poems and songs and created a newspaper with her brother, called the "Daily Daily."[3] Parks was raised Catholic and attended high school in West Germany, where her father, a career officer in the United States Army, was stationed.[3][4] The experience showed her "what it feels like to be neither white nor black, but simply foreign".[3][5] After returning to the U.S., her family relocated frequently and Parks went to school in Kentucky, Texas, California, North Carolina, Maryland, and Vermont.[3] She graduated high school from The John Carroll School in , while her father was stationed in Aberdeen Proving Ground.[6][7]
In high school, Parks was discouraged from studying literature by at least one teacher, but upon reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Parks found herself veering away from her interest in chemistry, gravitating towards writing.[8] Parks attended Mount Holyoke College and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She graduated in with a B.A. degree in English and German literature. She studied under James Baldwin, who encouraged her to become a playwright; Parks was initially resistant to writing for theater, believing it was elitist and cliquey.[8] Parks, at his behest, began to write plays.[9] Baldwin considered her talent as amazing.[7] Parks then studied acting for a year at Drama Studio London.[10][11][12]
Parks was inspired by Wendy Wasserstein, who won the Pulitzer in for her play The Heidi Chronicles,[13] and by her Mount Holyoke professor, Leah Blatt Glasser.[14]
Parks has written three screenplays and numerous stage plays. Her first screenplay was for Spike Lee's film Girl 6.[15] She later worked with Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions on screenplays for Their Eyes Were Watching God () and The Great Debaters ().[16][17]
Parks became the first female African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which was awarded in for her play Topdog/Underdog.[a] She has also received a number of grants including the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in [7] She is a winner of the Poets, Essayists and Novelists (PEN) America Literary Awards in the category Master American Dramatist.[19] She received the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. This biennial award is given to "established playwrights whose body of work has made significant contributions to the American theatre."[20]
Although Betting on the Dust Commander was not the first play Parks wrote, it was the first of her plays to be produced. Her first play The Sinner's Place, which she wrote for her senior project at Mount Holyoke, was rejected for production by her college's drama department as they considered it too experimental since she wanted to have dirt on the stage during the performance.[21] When her second play, Betting on the Dust Commander, first premiered, it ran for three nights in a bar in Manhattan's Lower East Side called Gas Station.[22] It is a short, one-act play set in Kentucky, centering around the lives of a couple, Mare and Lucius, who have been married for years. The play's title comes from the horse that won the Kentucky Derby in , Dust Commander. As the play goes on, we discover that Dust Commander's Derby is responsible for bringing Mare and Lucius together, and through the couple's discussion of him they think back over their many years of memories together. Poet Philip Kolin argues that Parks's incorporation of non-linear time and a repetitive style is reminiscent of African rituals and the way that their retelling of stories often incorporate the past in a literal manner.[23][24]
One of her best-known works is Topdog/Underdog. This play marked a departure from the heightened language she usually wrote.[citation needed] Parks is an admirer of Abraham Lincoln and believed he left a legacy for descendants of slaves.[25] It tells the story of two African-American brothers: Lincoln and Booth. Lincoln works at a boardwalk arcade, dressing up like Abraham Lincoln and letting the tourists shoot him with plastic guns. He got this job because he could be paid less than the white man who had the job before. Author Joshua Wolf Shenk argues that Parks does not judge Lincoln in this play, but rather enjoys bringing him into the other characters' lives and seeing how they are affected.[25] In an interview, Parks said, "Lincoln is the closest thing we have to a mythic figure. In days of Greek drama, they had Apollo and Medea and Oedipus – these larger than life figures that walked the earth and spoke – and they turned them into plays. Shakespeare had kings and queens that he fashioned into his stories. Lincoln, to me, is one of those."[25]
After her book Getting Mother's Body was published,[citation needed] Parks gave herself the task of writing plays in days, ultimately produced as Plays/ Days.[26]
The plays were presented by performing arts groups, taking turns until the entire cycle was performed.[26] The performances started in at The Public Theater in New York City, and included venues such as the Denver Center Theatre Company, colleges in England and Australia and the Steel City Theatre Company in Pueblo, Colorado.[26][27] Other venues were the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles.[26]
Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3 premiered off-Broadway at the Public Theater in a developmental production in March and a full production that fall. Directed by Jo Bonney, the cast featured Sterling K. Brown, Louis Cancelmi, Peter Jay Fernandez, Russell G. Jones, and Jacob Ming-Trent.[28] Jacob Ming-Trent won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play[29] and Parks won the Obie Award for playwriting presented by the American Theater Wing.[30] The play, which takes place during the American Civil War, is presented in three parts: Part 1, A Measure of a Man; Part 2, The Battle in the Wilderness; and Part 3, The Union of My Confederate Parts.[31] From September 15 to October 22, , the play had its London premiere at the Royal Court in a transfer of the Public Theatre production directed by Jo Bonney. The cast featured Steve Toussaint, Nadine Marshall, Leo Wringer, Sibusiso Mamba, Tom Bateman, and Jimmy Akingbola.[32]
The play was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Pulitzer committee wrote: "A distinctive and lyrical epic about a slave during the Civil War that deftly takes on questions of identity, power and freedom with a blend of humor and dignity."[33]
The Red Letter Plays refers to Fucking A and In the Blood, two plays incorporating themes from The Scarlet Letter.[34] Both plays have a mother named Hester struggling in a society where they put her in the role of outcast.[34] The first play, In the Blood, premiered in and follows the story of Hester, a penniless mother of five who is condemned by the men who once loved her. In the Blood was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Fucking A premiered in and tells the story of Hester, an "abortionist" trying to free her son from prison.[21][35]
In , Signature Theatre Company produced these two plays in the same season.[34] Parks said: "They were conceived from the same idea but until now have lived very separate lives. I can't wait to participate in the dialogue that will come from witnessing these two works in concert."[36]
In October , Sally & Tom, a play about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, began performances at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.[37]
Plays for the Plague Year, an anthology of plays and songs, described by The New York Times as "Parks's diaristic musings on the first year of the Covid pandemic and a coincident string of deaths, including those of Black Americans killed by police officers", was scheduled for a November premiere at Joe's Pub, with Parks onstage singing and starring.[37][38]
The Harder They Come, Parks's musical adaptation of the Jamaican reggae film was staged at the Public Theater in [37]
In , Parks married blues musician Paul Oscher; they divorced in [47] By , she married Christian Konopka, with whom she has a child.[48]
Parks noted in an interview that her name is spelled with a "Z" as the result of a misprint early in her career:
When I was doing one of my first plays in the East Village, we had fliers printed up and they spelled my name wrong. I was devastated. But the director said, 'Just keep it, honey, and it will be fine.' And it was.[49]
She teaches playwriting at Tisch School of the Arts in the Rita & Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing.