Critical Context (Masterplots II: African American Literature)

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Suzan-Lori Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1964, the daughter of an Army colonel. As an “Army brat,” she lived in six states and spent her adolescence in Germany. She studied at Mount Holyoke (where she met James Baldwin, who was to become her mentor), the Drama Studio in London, and the Yale School of Drama.

Topdog/Underdog is in some ways a reworking of characters Parks first created for The America Play (pr. 1993, pb. 1995). At first, the later play garnered as much attention for the performances of the actors (Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle Off-Broadway, Wright and Mos Def on Broadway) as for the script itself. Still, in 2002 it became the first multirole play by an African American woman to appear on Broadway in over thirty years; that same year, it won the Pulitzer Prize in drama, making Parks the first African American woman to win that award. Even so, at least one member of the Pulitzer committee indicated that the award was based more on Parks’s earlier works than solely on her script for Topdog/Underdog. In the Blood (pr. 1999, pb. 2000), for example, had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize two years earlier.

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Critical Context (Comprehensive Guide to Drama)

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