ABSTRACT
More than a decade before she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her 2002 play Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks stood at (or near) the centre of the American theatre. The playwright had attracted the attention of the most prominent theatre critics who, by turns, identified the young, up-and-coming writer as the next, great, American playwright. If the 1970s was the decade of Mamet, the 1980s that of Wilson, the 1990s of Hwang and Kushner, then the fin de siecle/new millennium belonged to Parks. Mel Gussow, the celebrated New York Times theatre critic, led the charge among the mainstream press in 1989, when he applauded the playwright for her unique and ‘playful’ use of language in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (C24). Similarly, engaged, scholarly readings of Parks’s dramaturgy began a year later with Alisa Solomon’s study of Parks’s early plays in Theatre and slowly developed throughout the 1990s in the critical essays of Kimberly Dixon, W.B. Worthen, Jean Young, Harry Elam and Alice Rayner. In the 15 years since her critical debut, Parks has written seven plays, a novel (Getting Mother’s Body), won multiple Obie Awards, received a MacArthur ‘genius’ award, written a screenplay (Girl 6), collaborated on two other screenplays or teleplays (Their Eyes were Watching God and The Great Debators), been nominated for a Tony Award (Topdog/Underdog), been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist (In the Blood and Topdog/Underdog) and won the Pulitzer.
