Plays for the Plague Year

by Suzan-Lori Parks

Overview

A stunning collection of plays from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks that captures the societal rupture of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On March 13, 2020, as theaters shut their doors and the world went into lock­down, Suzan-Lori Parks picked up her pen and set out to write a play every day. What emerged is a breathtaking chronicle of our collective experience through­out the troubling days and nights that followed. Parks’s groundbreaking new work bears witness to what we’ve experienced and offers inspiration as we look ahead.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636701813
Publisher:	Theatre Communications Group
Publication date:	08/27/2024
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	1,004,984
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

SUZAN-LORI PARKS is one of the most acclaimed playwrights in the Ameri­can theater. She is the first African American woman to receive the Pulit­zer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog. James Baldwin, Parks’s mentor, declared her to be “an astonishing and beauti­ful creature who may become one of the most valuable artists of our time.”

Hometown:

Los Angeles, California

Date of Birth:

May 10, 1963

Place of Birth:

Fort Knox, Kentucky

Education:

B.A., Mt. Holyoke College, 1985

Website:

http://www.suzanloriparks.com/

Editorial Reviews

An original whose fierce intelligence and fearless approach to craft subvert theat­rical convention and produce a mature and inimitable art that is as exciting as it is fresh.” —August Wilson

“No work produced by an English-language dramatist of our time surpasses Suzan-Lori Parks for depth, complexity, poetry, originality, insight, and stunning dramatic power.” —Tony Kushner

“She occupies pretty hallowed air: She’s the one who walks among us . . . She’s the reigning empress of the Black and weird in theater, and she really is the most suc­cessful dramatist of the avant-garde working today.”—Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

“Parks’s stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous.” —TIME

“She is a genre in and of herself. It is formally really dazzling, in terms of how she structures the play; there is humor underpinned with horror and political satire; there’s this real thread of the blues and folkways and things that are just root Black American signifiers; it’s musical, it’s whimsical, it’s playful, and it’s dangerous—all of the stuff that’s so exciting to see onstage.” —James Ijames

“Her great subject is freedom. It’s both what she writes about, and how she writes.”—Oskar Eustis

“There’s something very grounding about that peace that she carries. When she walks in the room, she carries the ancestors, the people we’re trying to honor, with her. She’s a national treasure for us.” —Corey Hawkins

From the Publisher