Suzan-Lori Parks

1992 Winner in

Drama

Named among Time magazine’s “100 Innovators for the Next Wave,” Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most acclaimed playwrights in American drama today. She is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, is a MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient, and in 2015 was awarded the prestigious Gish Prize for Excellence in the Arts. Other grants and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also a recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, a Whiting Award in Drama, and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. She is an alum of New Dramatists and of Mount Holyoke College. Parks’ project 365 Days/365 Plays (where she wrote a play a day for an entire year) was produced in over 700 theaters worldwide, creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history. Her adaptation of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess won the 2012 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. Her other plays include: Topdog/Underdog (2002 Pulitzer Prize winner); The Book of Grace; Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Musical; In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist); Venus (1996 OBIE Award); The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 OBIE Award, Best New American Play); The America Play, Fucking A, and Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3; Horton Foote Prize, Edward M. Kenney Prize for Drama and 2015 Pulitzer Prize Finalist).

Photo Credit:

Stephanie Diani

Reviews & Praise

“Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), swoops, leaps, dives and soars across three endlessly stimulating hours, reimagining a turbulent turning point in American history through a cockeyed contemporary lens . . . [it] might just be the best new play I’ve seen all year . . . The wonder of Ms. Parks’s achievement is how smoothly she blends the high and the low, the serious and the humorous, the melodramatic and the grittily realistic; she, too, has eyes that go this way and that, and a voice that can transform blunt, vernacular language into fluid, flowing free verse.” —Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

"The play . . . vibrates with the clamor of big ideas, audaciously and exuberantly expressed . . . Topdog/Underdog considers nothing less than the existential traps of being African-American and male in the United States, the masks that wear the men as well as vice versa. But don't think for a second that Ms. Parks is delivering a lecture or reciting a ponderous poem . . . Topdog/Underdog is a deeply theatrical experience." —Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“In the Blood is about the way we live now, and it is truly harrowing . . . Ms. Parks's writing has grown leaner and hungrier . . . the dialogue alternates with beautifully timed and paced confessions from each character, delivered in a square of harsh white light . . . You will leave In the Blood feeling pity and terror. And because it is a work of art, you will leave thrilled, even comforted by its mastery.” —Margo Jefferson, The New York Times