April 13, 2004
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Suzan-Lori Parks, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Topdog/Underdog, to deliver the Edwin & Jean Corle Memorial Lecture at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Suzan-Lori Parks
- The 41st Edwin & Jean Corle Memorial Lecture
- Parks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the play Topdog/Underdog
- She is also the author of the acclaimed novel Getting Mother’s Body
- This Evening with the Writer will feature reading, singing and story-telling
- Tuesday, May 25 / 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
- Free event
- Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535
MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Suzan-Lori Parks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the play Topdog/Underdog, will give the 41st Edwin & Jean Corle Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, May 25 at 8 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. The evening will feature Parks reading from her work, singing and telling stories. This is a free event co-presented by the UCSB Davidson Library and UCSB Arts & Lectures.
A playwright, screenwriter, novelist, songwriter and essayist, Suzan-Lori Parks was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Topdog/Underdog is a wickedly funny and insightful look at race, power and the art of the con, centered on black brothers Lincoln and Booth. In a rave review upon the opening of the play on Broadway (it first appeared off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater), New York Times critic Ben Brantley exclaimed, “The two lonely, rowdy brothers who make up the entire cast of characters of Suzan-Lori Parks’s thrilling comic drama give off more energy than the ensembles of 42nd Street, The Lion King and The Graduate combined....The play vibrates with the clamor of big ideas, audaciously and exuberantly expressed. Like Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s landmark novel of 1952, Topdog/Underdog considers nothing less than the existential traps of being African-American and male in the United States, the masks that wear the men as well as vice versa. But don’t think for a second that Ms. Parks is delivering a lecture or reciting a ponderous poem. Under the bravura direction of George C. Wolfe, a man who understands that showmanship and intellectual substance are not mutually exclusive, Topdog/Underdog is a deeply theatrical experience.”
Parks frequently turns to classic texts as inspirations for her work. While the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel haunts Topdog/Underdog, she has written two plays—Fucking A and In the Blood—which not only echo the moral struggles of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, but also feature heroines named Hester. Similarly, her first novel Getting Mother’s Body (Random House, 2003) uses Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying as a model. A Southern Gothic tale of a family making an arduous road trip to exhume a woman they assume has jewels buried in her coffin, the book features chapters told from different characters’ points-of-view. Salon.com calls the novel “much more than a cleverly told coming-of-age tale. At turns funny and poignant, tragic and transcendent, Parks’ novel careers along like the best sort of road movie.... Throughout, Parks’ theatrical skills and experience as a songwriter are ever in evidence: in the richness of the characters, the originality and individual lilt of each voice. She inhabits each character, channels his or her dreams and disappointments, hurts and hopes, and reveals them with a deftness and assuredness.”
Parks’ other plays include Venus (1996 OBIE Award), The America Play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 OBIE Award), and The Death Of The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. The plays are published by Theatre Communications Group and her work is the subject of the PBS documentary The Topdog/Underdog Diaries. When she received a 1996 Alpert Award from Cal Arts, where she currently heads the Dramatic Writing Program, the citation read: “Non-naturalistic meditations on history, identity and culture, Parks’ plays deconstruct both the mythic experience of black America and the history of America. Employing theatrical poetic language that relies upon the musical strategy of repetition and revision, she creates works that are incandescent, controlled and anarchic. Parks’ kinetic language is musical and subversive, as much influenced by Euripides as by loopy, spiraling jazz. Dense and brazen, the plays are astringent, critical, wildly funny spectacles.”
In addition to her playwriting and fiction, Parks wrote the screenplay for Girl 6, which Spike Lee directed in 1996. Since then she has written screenplays for Jodie Foster, Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey and is currently adapting Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise and Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Courtesy of Borders, books by Suzan-Lori Parks will be available for purchase and signing after the event.
Suzan-Lori Parks is presented by the UCSB Davidson Library and UCSB Arts & Lectures.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.