Suzan-Lori Parks

Lori TOROK

Brothers Lincoln and Booth--given their names by their father as a joke--share an obsession with three-card monte and act out a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment.

Topdog/underdog

The stunning first installment of a new American Odyssey, set over the course of the Civil War.

Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)

THE STORY: In 1810, The Venus Hottentot (as she is dubbed)--a young black woman with an enormous posterior--is lured away from her menial job in South Africa to tour the world and make lots of money. Once in England, however, she is sold to a freak s

Venus

THE STORY: Once upon a time there was a theme park called the Great Hole of History. It was a popular spot for honeymooners who, in search of post-nuptial excitement, would visit this hole and watch the daily historical parades. One of these visi

The America Play

THE STORY: In this modern day riff on The Scarlet Letter , Hester La Negrita, a homeless mother of five, lives with her kids on the tough streets of the inner city. Her eldest child is teaching her how to read and write, but the letter A is

In the Blood

Billy Beede, the teenage daughter of the fast-running, no-account, and six-years-dead Willa Mae, comes home one day to find a fateful letter waiting for her: Willa Mae’s burial spot in LaJunta, Arizona, is about to be plowed up to make way for a supermarket. As Willa Mae’s only daughter, Billy is heiress to her mother’s substantial but unconfirmed fortune—a cache of jewels that Willa Mae’s lover, Dill Smiles, is said to have buried with her. Dirt poor, living in a trailer with her Aunt June and Uncle Roosevelt behind a gas station in a tumbleweedy Texas town, and pregnant with an illegitimate child, Billy knows that treasure could mean salvation. So she steals Dill’s pickup truck and, with her aunt and uncle in tow, heads for Arizona with Dill in hot pursuit. While everyone agrees it’s only polite to speak of getting mother’s body and moving her to a proper resting place, it’s well understood that digging up Willa Mae’s diamonds and pearls will make the whole trip a lot more worthwhile. The enormously accomplished fiction debut from Suzan-Lori Parks, the 2002 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Getting Mother’s Body takes its place in the company of the classic works of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. But when it comes to an ingenious, uproarious knack for depicting the trifling, hard-luck, down-and-out souls who need a little singing and laughing and lying and praying to get through the day, Suzan-Lori Parks shares the stage with no one.

A Novel

Getting Mother's Body

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Two new controversial plays based on The Scarlett Letter.

The Red Letter Plays

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama comes an enormously accomplished and original debut novel about a down-on-their-luck black family in 1960s Texas in search of the storied jewels buried with one of their relatives.

365 days/365 plays

Top Dog Under Dog

"Parks has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way.... She's passionate and jokey and some kind of genius."--Vogue

The America Play, and Other Works

Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play every day for one year.

365 Days/365 Plays

THE STORY: A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks' latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foret

Top Dog/underdog

"In the Blood is an extraordinary new play…It is truly harrowing…we cannot turn away, and we do not want to. The play strikes us as Hawthorne claimed his first glimpse of the scarlet letter struck him, with "a sensation not altogether physical yet almost so, as of a burning heat, as if the letter were not of red cloth but of red-hot iron.’"—Margo Jefferson, The New York Times The playwright who "has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way [John Heilpern, New York Observer and Vogue]," has written two haunting riffs on Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter: In the Blood and Fucking A. Hester La Negrita of In the Blood is an unapologetic mother of five illegitimate children—"my treasures, my five joys"—who practices writing the alphabet to help herself "one day get a leg up. The letter A is as far as she gets. Hester Smith of Fucking A works the only job available—abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son. Her branded A bleeds afresh every time a patient comes to see her. These are two mature, beautifully crafted, inventive and poetic plays by one of the most unique voices writing for the stage today. Suzan Lori-Parks is also the author of The America Play and Other Works and Venus, both published by TCG. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Topdog Underdog by Parks, Suzan-Lori [Theatre Comm Grp,2001]

Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom

Two haunting riffs on Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter, from a leading American playwright. Hester La Negrita of In the Blood is an unapologetic mother of five illegitimate children, whose daily struggle among many is to master writing the alphabet, to help herself 'one day get a leg up'. She remains unable to get further than the letter A, scrawled in chalk beneath a railway bridge. Suzan-Lori Parks' play In the Blood was first staged at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York, in 1999. It was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2000. Hester Smith of Fucking A works the only job available - back-street abortionist - in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son. Her branded A bleeds afresh every time a patient comes to see her. Fucking A was first staged at the DiverseWorks Artspace in Houston, Texas, in February 2000.

Suzan-Lori Parks

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