Suzan-Lori Parks

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Suzan-Lori Parks, an American playwright, screenwriter, guitarist, and novelist.

Parks was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002, and she became the first African American woman to receive the award for drama in 2001.

Early life and education

Parks were born in Fort Knox, Kentucky. She grew up with two siblings in a military family. Parks loved writing poems and songs, and she and her brother, "Daily Daily," published a newspaper. Parks attended high school in West Germany, where her father, a career officer in the United States Army, was stationed. "What it looks like to be neither white nor black, but rather simply international" after her experience. Parks' family migrated frequently, and she attended classes in Kentucky, Texas, California, North Carolina, Maryland, and Vermont after returning to the United States. She graduated high school from The John Carroll School in 1981, but her father was stationed in Aberdeen Proving Ground.

Parks were forbidden from reading literature by at least one teacher in high school, but Parks veered away from chemistry and toward writing after reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Parks graduated from Mount Holyoke College and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a B.A. degree in 1985. Literature in both English and German. Parks was initially opposed to writing for theater, fearing that it was "where a lot of people with too much attitude wore funny clothes and bizarre little costumes, and they entertained themselves with joking while speaking in odd little voices even though they were from, say, New York or New Jersey." I didn't like it" at the time. Baldwin began teaching classes, and at his age, began writing plays. Parks later described him as "an utterly stunning and beautiful creature that has the potential to be one of the world's most valuable artists." Parks then trained at Drama Studio London for a year.

Parks also reflected that Wendy Wasserstein, a 1971 Mount Holyoke grad who received the Pulitzer in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles, was inspired by her. Leah Blatt Glasser, another Mount Holyoke professor, was also lauded for her success by Parks.

Personal life

Parks married blues singer Paul Oscher in 2001, but the pair split in 2010. By 2017, she married Christian Konopka, with whom she has a child.

In an interview, Parks said that her name is written with a "Z" as the result of a misprint early in her career:

In the Rita & Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing, she teaches playwriting at Tisch School of the Arts.

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Career

Parks has written three screenplays and numerous stage plays. Spike Lee's 1996 film Girl 6 was her first screenplay. She continued to work with Harpo Productions on screenplays for Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) and The Great Debaters (2007).

Parks became the first female African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her play Topdog/Underdog. She has also been awarded the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001. She is a winner of the 2017 Poets, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN) America Literary Awards in the category Master American Dramatist. She was named recipient of the 2018 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. "Established playwrights whose body of work has made significant contributions to the American theatre" has been given this biennial award.

Although Betting on the Dust Commander was not the first play Parks wrote, it was the first of her scripts to be produced. The Sinner's Place, her first play at Mount Holyoke, was declined for production by her college's drama department because she wanted to have dirt on the stage during the performance. Betting on the Dust Commander, her second play, premiered, lasted for three nights in a bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side called Gas Station. In Kentucky, it is a short, one-act play based on a couple named Mare and Lucius, who have been married for 114 years. Parks' distinctive voice is portrayed throughout the text by her use of specific dialect and incorporation of the sounds of sniffling and sneezing as part of the discussion. Dust Commander, the horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1970, is the subject of the play. We discover that Dust Commander's Derby is responsible for bringing Mare and Lucius together, as well as the couple's discussion of him. The motif of dust is used throughout the book, as well as several of the play's lines. In addition to this Park, there are no details about how these two characters survived for so long. Any linear sense of memory and time is destabilized in this manner. Parks complicate the audience's knowledge of history, marriage, and the past; some claim that Parks' incorporation of these elements and the text's repetitive style is reminiscent of African rituals and the way in which their retelling of stories often replicates the past in a literal manner.

Topdog/Underdog is one of her best-known creations. This play marked a change from the heightened words she usually wrote. Parks is a fan of Abraham Lincoln and believed he left a legacy for slave descendants. Topdog/Underdog explains what the tradition is about. Lincoln and Booth are two African-American brothers. Lincoln was hired to work at a boardwalk arcade, dressing up as Abraham Lincoln and inviting the visitors to shoot him with plastic guns. He took this career because he was paid less than the white man who had no such qualifications before. In this film, Parks does not evaluate Lincoln but rather enjoys his presence in the lives of the other characters and seeing how they are affected. "Lincoln is the nearest thing we have to a mythical figure," she said. They had Apollo and Medea and Oedipus, these larger than life figures who walked the earth and spoke, and they converted them into plays in days of Greek drama. Shakespeare had kings and queens that he fashioned into his stories. Lincoln, to me, is one of those." Lincoln was also believed to have opened with the hole in his head." As the eye of a needle, she makes the argument that everything we do needs to pass through everything else. We have all passed through the hole in Lincoln's head on our way to whatever is ahead, according to her. Topdog/Underdog follows her characters on a quest to discover who they are and what their lives have inspired, as well as other plays. More than anything, she believes that we have a strong connection with the past.

Parks decided that she wanted to write 365 plays in 365 days, hence her play 365 Plays/365 Days. This decision was made shortly after one of her books, Getting Mother's Body, was published. She stayed on target and triumphed. She wrote about anything she had to: on the road, hotel rooms, and transport modes. More than 700 theaters around the world have produced the final product.

By 725 performing arts companies, taking turns until the entire cycle was completed. The performances began in 2006 and included venues such as the Denver Center Theatre Company, colleges in England and Australia, and the Steel City Theatre Company in Pueblo, Colorado. Also performing at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, as well as the Center Theatre Company in Los Angeles, were the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and the Goodman Theatre Company. In November 2006, the plays were presented at the Public Theater in New York City, directed by Michael Greif.

Father Comes Home Parts 1, 2, 2 & 3 appeared off-Broadway at the Public Theater in March 2014 as a pilot and a complete production that fall. Sterling K. Brown, Louis Cancelmi, Peter Jay Fernandez, Russell G. Jones, and Jacob Ming-Trent were among the cast members directed by Jo Bonney. The American Theater Wing's Jacob Ming-Trent received the 2015 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play and Parks play. Part 1, A Measure of a Man; Part 2, The Battle in the Wilderness; and Part 3, The Union of My Confederate Parts. In a revival of the Public Theatre production directed by Jo Bonney, the play appeared at the Royal Court from September 15 to October 22, 2016. Steve Toussaint, Nadine Marshall, Leo Wringer, Sibusiso Mamba, Tom Bateman, and Jimmy Akingbola appeared on the program.

The play was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. "A distinctive and lyrical epic about a slave during the Civil War that deftly addresses issues of identity, influence, and liberation with a mixture of humor and dignity," the Pulitzer committee wrote.

Two plays were produced at the same time. The Scarlet Letter's topics included sex, love, society, and power. Plays from Fucking A & In the Blood. Both parents have a Hester mother who is struggling in a world where they place her in the position of outcast. Both mothers face serious challenges caused by power struggles, culture, misogyny, and love. Following the tale of a penniless mother of five, In the Blood premiered in 1999. The men who once adored her have condemned Hester. Hester is trying to help her children's lives be better when living in poverty. She has a reputation in the community as a "slut," which is affecting her children's chances of living a happier life. Hester takes advantage of her children's fathers' assistance, with the hopes that one will be able to assist them. In the Blood was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Parks had intended to say 'In the Blood' Fucking A. Later Parks wrote Fucking A in 2000, which tells the tale of Hester the abortionist's fight to free her son from prison.

These two shows were produced in the same season by Signature Theatre Company in 2017. "They were born from the same idea but they have now lived in very different ways," Suzan-Lori Parks says. I can't wait to participate in the dialogue that will result from seeing these two works in concert. Both plays can be seen separately, and the audience member will get a complete picture of the park, but a joint exhibition that was on display together captures Parks' work from more than two decades ago sparks a new audience.

"Sally & Tom," a new Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings play, opened in Vancouver in October 2022.

Plays in the Plague Year were scheduled for a November 2022 premiere at Joe's Pub, with Parks onstage and starring. "Parks' diaristic musings on the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and a tragic series of deaths, including those of Black Americans killed by police officers," according to the New York Times.

In early 2023, the Harder They Come, Parks musical adaptation of the 1972 Jamaican reggae film was supposed to be staged at the Public Theater.

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