Topdog Underdog in New York
Suzan-Lori Parks is an American Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. She was born into a military family in 1963 in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Part of her childhood was spent in Germany, where she gained insight into the perspective of feeling like a foreigner. She returned to the United States and studied at Mount Holyoke College where she graduated with a degree in German and English Literature. Many of her plays have been produces in New York, and she is most known for her Tony nominated and Pulitzer Award winning play Topdog Underdog. Tourists staying in one of the five star New York hotels have the chance to see one of her works, or hundreds of others in this major theatre city.
Park’s career has been diverse and phenomenal. She has written plays and screenplays. She was strongly inspired to begin writing by one of her college professors James Baldwin. She also gives inspirational credit to another Mount Holyoke Pulitzer Prize winning graduate, Wendy Wasserstein. Wasserstein is most known for her play The Heidi Chronicles. The first screenplay Parks wrote was for the Spike Lee film Girl 6. She has also worked with Harpo Productions, the Oprah Winfrey company, on Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Great Debaters. Another of her well-known stage plays is In The Blood, which is a deconstruction and recreation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter.
One of Park’s most ambitious projects occurred in from November of 2002 to November of 2003, during which time she wrote one play a day. The result of this effort is a collection of works titled 365 Days/365 Plays. This has become a major collaborative production project and many companies and schools schedule performances of specific plays from the collection on specific days, each venue having a week and group of works devoted to them. Most of these plays are short, a few pages long, though some are even limited to a few lines, and some are a bit longer. Their themes and subjects range from soldiers returning from war to deities and archetypal manifestations.
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