while also being interested in human emotions and the human condition. I am most interested in Time and how people pass through it. The experience of Time is different for writer, actor, character and audience. A by-product of Time is History - what is remembered, recorded and transported into the next age. History - the destruction and creation of it through theatre pieces and how Black people fit into all of this - is my primary artistic concern. As an artist I have to go where the writing takes me."
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 Euripedes as by loopy, spiraling jazz. Dense and brazen, the plays are astringent, critical, wildly funny spectacles.
Born 1963, Fort Knox, KY
1996 Girl 6,
original screenplay produced and directed by Spike Lee
1996 Venus,
Yale Repertory Theatre and the Joseph Papp Public Theatre
1993 The America Play,
Arena Stage, Yale Repertory Theatre, the Joseph Papp Public Theatre
1992 Devotees in the Garden of Love,
Actors Theatre of Louisville
1990 The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,
BACA Downtown, Yale Repertory Winterfest
1989 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom,
BACA Downtown, Yale Repertory Theatre, New City Theatre, Seattle
1995 Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Award
1994 W. Alton Jones Grant Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays
1992 Whiting Writers' Award
1990, 91 National Endowment for the Arts, Playwriting Fellow
1990 OBIE, for Imperceptible Mutabilities, "Best New American Play"
1995 The America Play and Other Works, (plays and essays), Theatre Communications Group
1993 The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, in The Bedford Introduction to Drama, St. Martin's Press
