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Notable Playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks Born: Fort Knox, Kentucky; May 10, 1963 Principal Drama The Sinner's Place, pr. 1984, pb. 1995; Betting on the Dust Commander, pr. 1987, pb. 1995; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, pr. 1989, pb. 1995; The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, pr. 1990, pb. 1995; Devotees in the Garden of Love, pr. 1991, pb. 1995; The America Play, pr. 1993, pb. 1995; The America Play and Other Works, pb. 1995; Venus, pr. 1996, pb. 1997; In the Blood, pr. 1999, pb. 2000; Fucking A, pr. 2000, pb. 2001; The Red Letter Plays, pb. 2001 (includes In the Blood and Fucking A); Topdog/Underdog, pr., pb. 2001 Other Literary Forms Though her literary reputation rests primarily on her dramatic writing, Suzan-Lori Parks has also written several screenplays: Anemone Me, an independent film released in New York in 1990, Girl 6, directed by Spike Lee and released in 1996, and two scripts for Jodie Foster and Danny Glover. Parks has also written several essays that have been published in theater journals. Achievements Suzan-Lori Parks produced her first play, The Sinner's Place, in 1984, as a student at Mount Holyoke College. Her second, Betting on the Dust Commander, debuted in a Brooklyn garage in 1987, with Parks purchasing five folding chairs to accommodate the audience. From these modest beginnings, Parks has become one of the most celebrated American playwrights of her generation. Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, produced in 1989, earned Parks her first Obie Award for best new American play, and The New York Times named her the year's most promising playwright. Parks received her second Obie, for Venus, in 1996. Her next play, In the Blood, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2000. Parks has received numerous fellowships and grants, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2001. In 2002, Parks became only the fourth African American and the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog. She has taught at the University of Michigan, Yale University, and New York University. She also served as writer-in-residence at the New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York from 1991 to 1992. In 2000, Parks became director of the Audrey Skirball Kernis Theatre Projects Writing for Performance program at the California Institute of the Arts. Biography Suzan-Lori Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1963, the daughter of a career army officer. She spent her early childhood in several cities across the United States and lived in Germany, where she attended high school. She began writing short stories as a third grader and continued to focus on prose writing until her undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. There, she met the distinguished author and essayist James Baldwin, who recognized her gift for dialogue and suggested that she explore drama. Parks wrote her first play, The Sinner's Place, in 1984 as a student at Mount Holyoke. Though she earned an honors citation for her work, the college's theater department refused to stage the play. Parks graduated with honors in 1985 and moved to London for a year to study acting. Betting on the Dust Commander, her first play to be produced in New York City, debuted in 1987. Two years later, Parks received an Obie Award for Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, and The New York Times named Parks the most promising playwright of 1989. Following the successful production of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at the Brooklyn Arts Council's BACA Downtown Theatre in 1990, Parks produced her next two plays, Devotees in the Garden of Love and The America Play on smaller stages in Lexington, Kentucky, and Dallas, Texas, respectively. The America Play later opened Off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York City in 1994. Parks earned a second Obie Award in 1996, for her play Venus, which also debuted at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre. Also in 1996, Parks wrote the screenplay for director Spike Lee's film Girl 6. The productions of In the Blood, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2000, and Fucking A, both of which draw on elements in Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), continued to earn Parks wide critical acclaim. She received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and the MacArthur Fellowship (called the genius grant) in 2001. Parks's growing reputation as a brilliant young playwright reached new heights in 2001 with the production of Topdog/Underdog. The play opened on July 22, 2001, at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York City to rave reviews and earned Parks the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2002, distinguishing her as the first African American woman and only the fourth African American to win the award. Topdog/Underdog opened on Broadway in April of 2002, the first Broadway opening for an African American woman since Ntozake Shange, whose for colored girls who have considered suicide/since the rainbow is enuf opened in 1976. "I think it's a great moment for all African-American women writers," Parks has explained about becoming the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama. "And anytime America recognizes a member of a certain group for excellence--one that has not traditionally been recognized--it's a great moment for American culture." Parks married Paul Oscher, a blues musician, in 2001, and joined the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, as the director of the Audrey Skirball Kernis Theatre Projects Writing for Performance program. Analysis "I am obsessed with resurrecting," Suzan-Lori Parks explained in a 1996 interview, "with bringing up the dead . . . and hearing their stories as they come into my head." Parks has often described the characters she creates as independent beings, as voices that relate their stories to her. Rather than writing them into existence, Parks allows the characters to speak themselves into being. Drawing on history, myth, and fantasy, she populates her plays with conventional and unconventional characters whose stories excavate the past in order to expose the truths and misconceptions about African American and American history. "Every play I write is about love and distance. And time," she explained in 1994. "And from that we can get things like history." She elaborates further in her essay "Possession," collected in The America Play and Other Works. "Through each line of text, I'm rewriting the Time Line--creating history where it is and always was but has not yet been divined." Language plays a vital role in this creation of history. Using what she calls "rep and rev" (repetition and revision), Parks often employs language as a musical refrain, with characters repeating phrases throughout her plays, the repetition of which adds different shades of meaning. In Topdog/Underdog, Booth rehearses his three-card monte street routine, addressing his imaginary audience: "Watch me close watch me close now: who-see-thuh-red-card-who-see-the-red-card?" As the words recur at various points in the play, they take on the quality of a chant, or a chorus that signifies the building tension between the brothers. The question of identity in Parks's drama, as self-awareness and the identification of an individual within a group, is of central importance. As characters attempt to identify themselves, they must destroy the false identities and histories that have been attributed to them. In Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, the characters Mona, Chona, and Verona, whose names have been changed to Molly, Charlene, and Veronica, meditate on the apparent mutability of their characters. "Once there was uh me named Mona who wondered what she'd be like if no one was watchin," Mona/Molly says. The Foundling Father of Parks's The America Play, whose setting is the Great Pit of History, is obsessed by Abraham Lincoln and decides to reenact his assassination in a traveling show. Like the character of Lincoln in Topdog/Underdog, who earns his living by reenacting Abraham Lincoln's assassination in a local arcade, the Foundling Father is a captive of history. Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom · Rather than separating her first major play into traditional acts, Parks creates four separate stories that provide a nonlinear and sometimes surreal look at aspects of the African American experience in her Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. "Snails," the first section of the play, looks at a contemporary group of women who possess two names, one they have chosen and another that has been imposed on them. The second section, "Third Kingdom," re-creates the tragic Middle Passage, through which enslaved Africans journeyed on their way to America, and the details of which are narrated by characters like Kin-Seer, Us-Seer, and Over-Seer. "Open House," the third section, depicts the life of Aretha Saxon, a black servant/slave in the household of the white Saxon family. Aretha's departure from the family is occasioned by the removal with pliers of all of her teeth. The play's final section, "Greeks," is a modern interpretation of Homer's Odyssey (c. 750 B.C.E.; English translation, 1614), with Mr. Seargant Smith in the role of Odysseus. Hoping to earn "his Distinction" in the army, Seargant Smith spends most of his life away from his family, who await his return and the honor he hopes to bring back with him. The four stories in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom depict characters whose identity and culture are marginalized by others. From the three women in "Snails," whose identities are studied and inevitably altered by the invasive Lutsky, to Miss Faith's extraction of Aretha Saxon's teeth in an act that functions metaphorically as a means of extracting Aretha from the Saxon family history, Parks dramatizes the struggle of African Americans against cultural, historical, and linguistic sabotoge. A critical and popular success, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom earned Parks her first Obie Award for best new American play. The New York Times also named her 1989's most promising young playwright. Venus Venus received mixed reviews for its portrayal of an African woman whose unconventional physiognomy becomes the basis for her exhibition in a traveling sideshow in Europe. Parks based her play on a historical character, Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman whose body was displayed publicly in London and Paris in the early nineteenth century. Dubbed the Hottentot Venus, Baartman became a popular spectacle for white audiences who were fascinated and revolted by her appearance. After her death, Baartman's sexual organs and buttocks were preserved and housed in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris until the late twentieth century. As the play opens, Venus is a popular attraction in Mother Showman's traveling show of Nine Human Wonders in London. Because slavery has been outlawed in England, Mother Showman's captivity of Venus sparks a debate about whether such exhibitions constitute slavery. Venus eventually escapes to Paris, where she falls under the influence of the Baron Docteur, who falls in love with Venus but also assures his colleagues that he intends to make her the object of scientific study. A twisted custody battle ensues as Mother Showman and Baron Docteur fight over who has the right to exhibit Venus. In the character of Venus, Parks explores the objectification of human beings, and particularly African Americans, whose humanity was denied in the nineteenth century (and beyond) on the basis of pseudoscientific theories that reinforced prejudices against physical and cultural difference. Venus, a woman who desires to be treated with love and respect, becomes an oddity in a circus sideshow, reduced to little more in the public consciousness than her "great heathen buttocks." In the Blood In the Blood is a hopeless tale of a woman undone by poverty and a social system that cannot meet her needs. Individuals in a position to help Hester can think only of how to use her. The word "slut," scrawled on the wall of Hester's makeshift home under the bridge in the play's opening scene, serves a purpose similar to Hawthorne's scarlet letter on Hester Prynne's chest. Both Hesters are defined almost exclusively by what their societies perceive as aberrant sexuality. When every means of salvation is exhausted, Hester is left, in the final scene of the play, with the word "slut," this time on the lips of her oldest child. Hester's murder of her son Jabber at the end of the play functions as an attempt to efface the word, and the identification, both of which have followed her throughout the play. A critical and popular success, In the Blood was named a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Philip Bader |
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