Suzan-Lori Parks

American playwright

Biography

When Suzan-Lori Parks received a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the play Topdog/Underdog (1999), she became the first Black American woman playwright to win the award. Born into a United States Army colonel’s family, Parks traveled extensively as a child, spending time in diverse places across the United States and Germany. Parks graduated cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Mount Holyoke College in 1985, double majoring in English and German. She studied creative writing at Hampshire College with James Baldwin, who encouraged her development as a playwright, and she later spent a year in London studying acting.

Parks works as a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She was previously the director of the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theater Project’s writing for performance program at the California Institute of the Arts. She has won awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. She also won a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2001, the NAACP Theatre Award in 2008, and the Gish Prize in 2015, and several of her plays have received the Obie Award and nominations for the Tony Award. In 2015, Parks was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3 (2014). In 2019, Parks received the Outer Critics Circle Award, Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play for White Noise (2019), and in 2023, Parks was awarded a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play for Topdog/Underdog (1999). In 2001, she married Paul Oscher, a blues musician. The couple divorced in 2010, and Parks married Christian Konopka in 2017. The couple share one child.

In 1989, at the age of twenty-six, Parks was hailed by critics as one of the most promising young playwrights. From 1984 to 2014, she published eighteen plays, as well as the project 365 Plays/365 Days. Parks’s plays are positioned toward global audiences, while still addressing the distinct concerns of Black American culture. Her use of adaptation, uncompromising critique of social ills, manipulation of history, revisionist linguistic and vernacular strategies, and mathematical interpretation of the theatrical endeavor help define innovative twenty-first-century theater.

Parks introduces unusual settings and contexts of history that challenge each individual to take responsibility for their response to history and society’s ills. One of Parks’s most radical historical conventions is her redefinition of Abraham Lincoln’s meaning as an American icon. In The America Play (1994), a Black American man impersonates Lincoln and makes money as a traveling sideshow vendor, selling the opportunity for individuals to play the part of John Wilkes Booth in a reenactment of Lincoln’s assassination. Parks expands this idea in Topdog/Underdog, a play about two Black American brothers, Lincoln and Booth, obsessed with hustling, history, and sibling hierarchy. The play can be compared to the stories of Cain and Abel, and Oedipus.

Parks’s The Red Letter Plays (In the Blood and Fucking A) are revisionist adaptations of themes of sexism and class from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850). In the Blood (1999) features a homeless mother of five, Hester La Negrita, who uses street wit and a gritty, self-confidence to resist the inevitable tragedies of social injustice, abandonment, poverty, and double standards of morality imposed on her by the welfare system and a privileged, accusing society. In Fucking A (2000), the protagonist, Hester Smith, is branded as an underground abortionist in a society where it is a crime to have children out of wedlock. The play questions the negative social labels a violent society stamps on people experiencing poverty and their children.

Parks’s play Venus (1996) humanizes the image of the early nineteenth-century Venus Hottentot, South African Saartje Baartman, who was manipulated and taken on a world tour in a freak show to exhibit the physiology of her phenomenally shaped posterior. Betting on the Dust Commander (1987) explores gender themes such as male-female communication and the duality of symbolism in the setting of a couple’s deteriorated marriage relationship. Devotees in the Garden of Love (1992) is a satirical allegory about how the domestic dreams that mothers and society at large instill in young women and young men can be confusing, damaging, and inevitably absurd.

Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989) and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990) are specifically Black American cultural explorations, but they do not fit into any pattern or tradition of Black American theater. Parks’s messages are complex, although her characters are recognizable.

The ambitious Father Comes Home from the Wars: Parts 1, 2, and 3 (2014) alludes loosely to Homer's Odyssey, contextualizing the narrative as the story of a Black American slave who leaves home to fight on the Confederate side of the Civil War. Though set in the 1860s, the play occasionally employs modern slang, adding a postmodern flair to Parks's rumination on freedom, identity, and self-preservation.

White Noise, Park's 2019 off-Broadway production, explores issues of friendship and race as two friends, Leo and Ralph, engage in a controversial agreement allowing Ralph to "own" Leo for several weeks. The production won an Obie Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Parks's works in the 2020s have included Sally & Tom (2022) and The Harder They Come (2023).

Bibliography

Als, Hilton. “‘White Noise’ Is a Morality Play without the Passion.” The New Yorker, 25 Mar. 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/white-noise-is-a-morality-play-without-the-passion. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023.

“Arts Professor Suzan-Lori Parks.” NYU Tisch School of the Arts, tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/dramatic-writing/109531680. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Brown-Gillory, Elizabeth. “Reconfiguring History: Migration, Memory, and (Re)Membering in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Plays.” Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism. Ed. Robert L. McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige. U of Alabama P, 2002.

Frieze, James. “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: Suzan-Lori Parks and the Shared Struggle to Perceive.” Modern Drama, vol. 41 no. 4, 1998, p. 523, doi.org/10.3138/md.41.4.523. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023.

Garrett, Shawn-Marie. “The Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks.” American Theatre, www.americantheatre.org/2000/10/01/the-possession-of-suzan-lori-parks. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023.

Hartigan, Patti. "What’s the Big Idea?" Writer Mag, 21 Oct. 2018, writermag.com/improve-your-writing/scriptwriting/suzan-lori-parks. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023.

Larson, Jennifer. Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks. U of South Carolina P, 2012.

Parks, Suzan-Lori. The America Play and Other Works. Theatre Communications Group, 1995.

Parks, Suzan-Lori, and Shelby Jiggetts. “Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks.” Project MUSE, vol. 19, no. 2, 1996, pp. 309–317, doi:10.1353/cal.1996.0053. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023.

Parks, Suzan-Lori. Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries. Routledge, 2014.

Pochoda, Elizabeth. “I See Thuh Black Card . . . ?” Nation, vol. 274, no. 20, 2002, p. 36. www.thenation.com/article/archive/i-see-thuh-black-card. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023.

Reichel, Chloe. “Giving History a New Voice Keeps It Alive.” The Vineyard Gazette, 24 Aug. 2017, vineyardgazette.com/news/2017/08/24/giving-history-new-voice-keeps-it-alive. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Sigmund, Bill, et al. “Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks on Self-Worth and Loving the Grind.” WNYC Studios, 14 May 2024, www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/helga/articles/playwright-suzanlori-parks-on-selfworth-and-loving-the-grind. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Weinert, Rob. “Suzan-Lori Parks: Make Space for the Difficult Things.” American Theatre, 18 Oct. 2022, www.americantheatre.org/2022/10/18/suzan-lori-parks-lets-make-space-for-the-difficult-things. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Wilmer, S. E. “Restaging the Nation: The Work of Suzan-Lori Parks.” Modern Drama, vol. 43, no. 3, 2000, pp. 442–452.