Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks is a critical study of a playwright and screenwriter who was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Suzan-Lori Parks is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, a Whiting Writers Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, two Obie Awards, and a Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts. In this book Jennifer Larson examines how Parks, through the innovative language and narratives of her extensive body of work, investigates and invigorates literary and cultural history. Larson discusses all of Parks’s genres—play, screenplay, essay, and novel—closely reading key texts from Parks’s more experimental earlier pieces as well as her more linear later narratives. Larson’s study begins with a survey of Parks’s earliest and most difficult texts including Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Larson then analyzes Venus, In the Blood, and the Lincoln Plays: The America Play and the Pulitzer Prize–winning TopDog/Underdog. Larson also discusses two of Parks’s most important screenplays, Girl 6 and Their Eyes Were Watching God. In interpreting these screenplays, Larson examines film’s role in the popularization and representation of African American culture and history. These essays suggest an approach to all genres of literature and blend creativity, form, culture, and history into a revisionary aesthetic that allows for no identity or history to remain fixed, with Parks arguing that in order to be relevant they must all be dynamic and democratic.
Saal argues that the attempt to reconstruct or recuperate the experience of African Americans under slavery is no longer at stake in the works of artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era.
A collection of plays and essays by one of America's premier playwrights. Includes the essays "Possession," "from Elements of Style," and "An Equation for Black People Onstage," and the plays...
y family moved around a lot which, so I'm told, if you've got the inclination, can make a writer out of you. ... written some radio plays and some screenplays including Girl 6 which premiered in 1996 and was directed by Spike Lee. I'm a ...
A dozen essays address Parks's plays, screenplays and novel. Additionally, this book includes two original interviews (one with Parks and another with her long-time director Liz Diamond) and a production chronology of her plays.
A new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Topdog/Underdog.
This is a major collection with immediate relevance to students of American/African-American theater, literature and culture. Parks’s engaging voice is brought to the fore, making the book essential for undergraduates as well as scholars.
Schiebinger points out colonial relationships “were often portrayed using female ‹gures as in William Blake's depiction of Europe supported by Africa and America” (15). As in Last Black Man, Parks underscores the links between the ...
Getting Mother’s Body is a true spiritual successor to the work of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker—but when it comes to bringing hard-luck characters to ingenious, uproarious life, Suzan-Lori Parks shares the stage ...
Surreal experimental work addresses issues of black history and identity.
(Rest) I got you the blue and I got me the brown. I walked in there and walked out and they didnt as much as bat an eye. Thats how smooth lil bro be, Link. Lincoln You did good. You did real good, 3Card. Booth All in a days work.