These days her mode is fable-tinted realism: her Father Comes Home from the Wars (2014) is hugely accessible by the standards of her early work. She started in the late 1980s writing avant-garde head-trips like Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989), reached the pinnacle of critical acclaim with jazz-inflected allegories like Topdog/Underdog (2001), then-after winning the Pulitzer for that play-swept closer to an almost conventional theatrical style. Parks has slowly, in her astonishing thirty-year career, percolated into the mainstream. They both revolve around a “fallen” woman named Hester they’re both terrifying. It’s such a natural gesture to program Suzan-Lori Parks’s partner-plays In the Blood and Fucking A together, it makes you wonder-why has no other theater done this yet? The pieces were born from the same mother-thought: each is what Parks calls a “riff” on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (she wrote one while trying to break through writer’s block on the other). The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A and In the Blood, by Suzan-Lori Parks, the Signature Theatre, 480 West Forty-Second Street, through Octo(Fucking A ) and Octo(In the Blood )
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |