News: Artists

Suzan-Lori Parks’ Journey from a New York Bar to Household Name

Since the late 1980s, Suzan-Lori Parks’ plays have graced stages in every major American city. She is a recipient of the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Award, the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the first Master Writer Chair at New York City’s Public Theater. Her newest play, Father Comes Home From The W...

Suzan-Lori Parks’ Journey from a New York Bar to Household Name

Jo Bonney Directs an Intimate Epic, a Contemporary History

Historical and contemporary. Dramatic and vaudevillian. A big show and a personal story. The words Jo Bonney uses to describe Father Comes Home From The Wars by Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks are full of contradictions. As is the production itself—and with good reason—said Bonney, who is directing the show’s run at the Mark Tape...

Jo Bonney Directs an Intimate Epic, a Contemporary History

Celebrating the Playwrights in Our Backyard

Walk into restaurants, boutiques, and bookstores across Los Angeles, and you’ll find chefs and salespeople touting all things “local”: steaks from locally raised cows, handbags by local artisans, and books by local authors. But you hear this buzzword far less often in the city’s theatres, despite the fact that “Los Angeles is a playwritin...

Celebrating the Playwrights in Our Backyard

A Road Map to Gentleness

Steeped in anti-war and civil rights movements as a young man, Robert Egan was first drawn to theatre because it could help combat the racial and political injustices of the social world in which he found himself. So he threw himself in. He was a Producing Director here at the Mark Taper Forum for 20 seasons. He launched the Taper’s New Work Fes...

A Road Map to Gentleness

Having 'Salad' - and Eating It, Too

The Center Theatre Group Writers’ Workshop, a program designed to foster the next generation of great American playwrights, has generated approximately 70 new plays in the past decade. Many of these shows have gone on to acclaimed world premieres, but only two have made their way back to Center Theatre Group’s stages. The second is Sheila Calla...

Having 'Salad' - and Eating It, Too

On Sex, Detective Fiction, Dinner Parties, and Edward Albee

Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love & Sex, which plays the Mark Taper Forum from January 27 through March 6, 2016, begins with a dinner party thrown by two college students, Charlotte and Jonny, for Charlotte’s parents—a party teetering on disaster as Charlotte invites her parents to dine on undressed salad and unbuttered bread while se...

On Sex, Detective Fiction, Dinner Parties, and Edward Albee