Host: This is Vinson Cunningham, one of our theater critics on stage at the New Yorker Festival with the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks.

Vinson Cunningham: It feels very stilted to read an introduction for you because I always tell people the first Broadway show I saw was Cats as a Middle Schooler, and the second one was Topdog/Underdog. It's one of the reasons I studied literature, cared about the theater you are the reason I'm even here talking to you. I just am so happy to be here with you.

Host: As Vincent said, Parks's influence has been enormous over the years. She's still probably best known though, for Topdog/Underdog, a two-man show about a pair of brothers named Lincoln and Booth. They're struggling with poverty with the weight of American history and their own bitter rivalry. Topdog/Underdog opened on Broadway in 2002 and 20 years later, it's just been revived in production with Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Here's Vincent Cunningham talking with Suzan-Lori Parks.

Vinson Cunningham: Suzan-Lori Parks is the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama. [applause] Other of her awards include the MacArthur Genius Grant, The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. Her theater credits include Topdog/Underdog, The Book of Grace Unchain my Heart, The Ray Charles Musical, and the upcoming plays for the Play Gear, which we'll talk about. She wrote the screenplays for The United States vs. Billie Holiday and Girl 6.

Wrote the novel Getting Mother's Body, which I'm sorry, I will pay back one day. I read the whole thing in a Barnes and Noble when I was in college. I'll Venmo you for that experience. She was the creator, head writer, and executive producer for the series Genius. Additionally, Suzan-Lori Parks fronts the band Sula & the Noise. Thank you so much for being with us. It's such an honor.

Suzan-Lori Parks: Happy to be here. Thank you.

Vinson Cunningham: We should start with Topdog/Underdog because it's being revived on Broadway. You shocked the theater world and the rest of the world when it came out. It felt like an avalanche. Now you, of course, are working with a different pair of wonderful performances. How do you even think about it living in other bodies?

Suzan-Lori Parks: Well, that's a great question. As a playwright or as a writer of dramatic literature that's something that we grow accustomed to. I write specifically plays. Films are just for the one actor and they do the performance, but with plays you have to write it so that it endures, you know what I'm saying? It has to be passed around from hand to hand, from community to community, from continent to continent through the ages long, hopefully after you pass away and the script will endure and be something that artists can come to and embody. It's built like that. It's built with that in mind. If it's written well.

I believe the Topdog is written very well, and it has been done by many, many, many people. Not only men of African descent, all kinds of different folks have felt like, "Hey, I have a place in here, might I do it also?" I'm like, "Sure, it's your production. Go for it." Do you know what I mean? Kenny Leon is such a brilliant director, and I just sit back and go, "Yes, that looks good. I like that." Now, I did change the one thing they were talking about. You give someone your number and you tell them that you have a home because in 1999 when I wrote it, landlines were the thing. Now I've changed it. It's the same rhythm.

You give someone your number, telling them one thing that you have a home, you give someone your number, telling them one thing that you have a phone. Hello. It's the same rhythm, different words, because now giving someone your phone number tells them that you have a phone, not necessarily a home. Little changes like that, but it wasn't specific to the guys. It was just the world that we live in now.

Vinson Cunningham: Wow. Do you think metrically like that when you write?

Suzan-Lori Parks: Totally. Scripture says, and I am a fan of scripture, in the beginning was the word, but that might just be the word's point of view. All respect intended, but that might just be the word's point of view. Because I had a notion last night, in the beginning, was the groove. That I was like, yes, because the groove I think comes before the word. See this is me up late at night thinking, or feeling things and surmising, perhaps because I do write to the groove. I write to the groove just to the groove, and I can tap it out. It's all lyrics to me.

Vinson Cunningham: I've heard you say that your dad when you were young, he moved around a lot.

Suzan-Lori Parks: He was in the army. He was in service.

Vinson Cunningham: I've heard you say that he bought when you were a kid, a baby grand piano that you took around with you. Would you say, in the same way, that cosmically first comes to the groove, the groove came first for you autobiographically, was that before you were interested in writing or you were interested in music?

Suzan-Lori Parks: Oh, yes, definitely. I definitely started out as a musician. Someone who loved music. Someone who played music not so great on the piano. My mom loved jazz. They both loved soul music. My dad loved opera. He's six foot four darker shade of soul brother. He would walk around the house lip-syncing to Puccini and Wagner, and we would just sit there, you're like, "What is this dad?" Then by day he would put on a uniform and he'd go and be in the Army. Then in the evening he'd come home and turn on the Puccini and walk around the house. That was that. You'd be like, yes, okay. The drama was right there in the living room.

Vinson Cunningham: During the first year of the pandemic, you wrote a play every day. Now, of course, your play is for the play Gear is going to be produced at the public. I heard from you that you had your first rehearsal today.

Suzan-Lori Parks: We did.

Vinson Cunningham: I should say that you are performing, acting, singing in this performance.

Suzan-Lori Parks: Yes, I am.

Vinson Cunningham: Can you please just, what was the-

Suzan-Lori Parks: I know, what's going on?

Vinson Cunningham: Huh? No, what was the impulse behind doing this everyday thing?

Suzan-Lori Parks: March 13th, what was it? March 13th, 2020, whatever it was.

Vinson Cunningham: 2020. Yes.

Suzan-Lori Parks: We all were minding our own business or at work or whatever, and they were like, "We're shutting everything down." I'm like, "Eh." I said I need to do something to prepare for the moment when we all get back together. I said, I don't know what that is, but I'm going to write a play. I could just sit at home at our dining room table where I write, and while remote schooling, a third grader in the one-bedroom apartment, which was at the dining room table also my husband there too. We were living there, like all of us closed off from each other. I just started writing a play [unintelligible 00:07:53] I showed it to the folks of the public theater where I am one of the writers and residents.

Oscar just said, "This is great. Let's produce it." I said, "Okay." Then he said, "You have to be in it." I said, "Oh, really?" He said, "Yes, yes, yes." Because one of the recurring characters in these little plays is called The Writer. I'd written myself into the plays without thinking that I was going to actually do it. I thought I was going to pass it on to a wonderful actor.

Vinson Cunningham: Maybe this is a very broad question, but what's it like to memorize on the level of performance your own lines?

Suzan-Lori Parks: It's a little strange because I thought for a while-- I told the actors, I'm not acting. I said to them, you're acting, I'm just being myself. Then I realized, well, I'm actually not even doing that. I'm pretending to be myself. I'm not quite sure what it all means.

Vinson Cunningham: I love the fact that every time I read your bio somewhere, you always say, her teacher was James Baldwin. That sense of literary ancestry is so alive in you. I love that that's always a part of the package that we get with you. As an 18-year-old, 19-year-old?

Suzan-Lori Parks: Yes. 19, 20 yes. I'm old. It was when I was 19, 20. He taught at Hampshire College. I went to Mount Holyoke College and you could take a class in the five college area five College consortium. I was one of the lucky ones, the 15 in the class around a library table. He said it was the first creative writing class that he had taught, which is amazing. There we were sitting there and I was very dorky and shy. I was writing short stories then, very animated when I would read them aloud like this, and then and the characters, I do all that. He was just watching me like this. He suggested that I write for the theater because I was so animated. I had no desire to write for the theater at all because theater people were all [unintelligible 00:10:23] They would all talk like that. Here I am.

Vinson Cunningham: Do you notice any differences in how people start out in their aspirations to be writers now that you're with students so often? One thing that I think about, you didn't go to grad school to write, for example. Now, so many of the playwrights that we know, like institutions play a bigger part in creating artists these days, or nurturing or launching or whatever verb you want to use. Has that changed the structure of things or some of what we think of art?

Suzan-Lori Parks: I think so and again, the footnote to this is, I teach at NYU. I have a yes, NYU, yes, yes, go [unintelligible 00:11:11] and it's expensive. It's high. That bill is high and I think that creates in my students, not in y'all, but in my students, I think it creates a lot of unnecessary anxiety. When I graduate I have to pay this bill but also the competitive nature of the institution creates a kind of anxiety that I think creates an artist, specifically a writer who is, as they say on the wall of the new school as you pass by desperate to make their mark on the world.

I was never desperate to make my--I just wanted to do the best work I could. I think there's an anxiety that's happening because of the way these institutions are training artists, and which is why I stayed in NYU because I'm like, well if the majority of the training is to go like this, then at least I can offer my outlook and my say or throw my words into the pot with the others.

Vinson Cunningham: In the times the other day, you mentioned feeling a certain compulsion in our culture to perform a certain kind of whether it's black joy or some other feeling as a Black writer that you were expected to broadcast. I was wondering if you could talk more about that. What does that compulsion feel like and how have you dealt with it, circumvented it, ignored it, whatever?

Suzan-Lori Parks: We do expect certain things of certain people. I feel as a Black woman person writer, or human, certain things are expected of me and certain things are looked at," why are you doing that? I follow the spirit. The thing about Black joy, which I think is important, I think I love to see Black people joyful on stage, on screen everywhere. We need to be clear about in my opinion, where the joy really is. The marketplace is telling us that Black joy is what sells. I'm very suspicious about what the marketplace wants me to create because I know in my experience where real Black joy resides.

Sometimes that's in the place where there might be some traumatic thing that also happened. Two things and why I feel this. There are two things that make me really believe that we ought to take another look at this rejection of trauma-based stories, that's very fashionable now. No more trauma-based stories. I heard professors at certain universities have to agree that their acting students won't be in any demeaning roles, which includes any roles when they're slaves.

I'm like, Oh gee, that's a lot of my plays. Interesting. I'm just going to drop one more thing. WWJD, what would Jesus do? Whether you believe in Jesus or not, it doesn't matter. That was a person who went into the stinky places. Now, if you want to follow someone great who did cool things, that kind of person did some cool shit because they weren't afraid to go into places where there was pain and suffering. Again, I love a good Black joyous story and I think Topdog is one. I'm not afraid of the painful places too.

Vinson Cunningham: On one hand, Topdog is about the love as you say, but there is tragedy involved. What's the use of tragedy as a--

Suzan-Lori Parks: What's such a great--I'm smiling because I'm writing about that right now in one of an essay that I'm writing. Yes, because we don't think tragedy has a use anymore. No, it's only good stuff. It's only happy stories, happy endings. If you write anything that approaches something that might make somebody uncomfortable, and I don't mean the titillating, I'm about like, I'm not talking about that. That's a bullshit basically. That must be real.

I'm talking about the stuff that makes you reevaluate the way you are, the way you treat your neighbor. Oh my goodness, I have to rethink some things on a deep level, not maybe a little square me. I'm not talking about that.

I do think that there's a great use of tragedy that we've forgotten about. Again, I didn't go to grad school, so I'm just reading plays and coming up with some ideas out of the side of my neck. In the old-school Greek tragedy, like Oedipus, you guys know Oedipus, right? That play, if you don't know, just imagine.

It's an old play. Everybody in the theater going to see Oedipus would have known the ending already. Amazing. Wasn't like spoiler alerts were in a thing back then. Everybody knew, Oedipus hey, he's really related to that Laney that he married. That's really his mother. They're sitting back going, this is going to be really interesting. They come to the theater knowing the story, and yet the story is so all-enveloping, that it's so moving and it creates things like catharsis. It shocks them, it wakes them up, it moves them to reconsider basic aspects of their life. That's cool shit.

Now, just eating like sugar entertainment, while it's really nice, ain't going to do that. Entertainment is going to anesthetize you and make you buy shit that you don't need. I'm encouraging us to as human beings, have the equipment to do incredible things. What are we waiting for?

[applause]

Host: Susan-Lori Parks, her Pulitzer Prize-winning play Topdog/Underdog has just been revived on Broadway, and she spoke with Vinson Cunningham as part of the New Yorker festival this month.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.