Pulitzer Prize Winner Suzan-Lori Parks Will Be the Residency One Playwright of Signature Theatre's 2016-17 Season

Suzan-Lori Parks will be the Residency One Playwright of the Signature Theatre's 2016-17 season. She penned the Broadway hit Topdog/Underdog, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002, making Parks the first African American woman to receive the award. The Signature's one-year program produces a series of plays from the body of work of one accomplished writer.

Parks is currently writing an adaptation of the 1972 reggae film The Harder They Come for a live stage musical. The movie starred Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Jimmy Cliff and propelled the spread of the Jamaican musical genre. Director Perry Henzell oversaw the book for a 2005 production of The Harder They Come, which was staged at Theatre Royal Stratford East. The tuner moved on to the Playhouse Theatre in the West End in 2008.

A MacArthur “Genius” Award and Gish Prize recipient, Parks' new play Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) made its world premiere at the Public Theater in New York, followed by a celebrated run at the A.R.T in Cambridge, and is opening in spring of 2016 at the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. The play was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was awarded the 2015 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History as well as the 2014 Horton Foote Prize. Parks’ work on The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess was honored with the 2012 Tony Award. Her numerous plays include The Book of Grace, In The Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Venus (1996 OBIE Award), 365 Days/365 Plays, and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, among others.

Her first feature-length screenplay was Girl 6, written for Spike Lee. She’s also penned screenplays for Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster, as well as adapted Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God which premiered on ABC’s Oprah Winfrey Presents. Parks is the Master Writer Chair at the Public Theater, and she serves as a professor in dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.