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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

Why would an African-American—and a slave—enter a Civil War battlefield on the side of the Confederacy? Hero, the character at the center of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), which plays the Mark Taper Forum through May 15, 2016, wrestles with this very question as the play opens. His master has prom...

How Slaves Fought—and Found Freedom—in the Civil War

Some great stories not only stand the test of time but go on to inspire great art for generations to come. Homer’s Odyssey, the story of Trojan War hero Odysseus’ journey from the battlefield to his home and family is one such masterpiece. Over 2,500 years after it was written (or spoken), The Odyssey continues to shape a sizable portion o...

Art That Drinks from the Well of ‘The Odyssey’

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

It was December 1974—one of those monochromatic winter days in Paris when the sky, the streets, and the river all seem to turn the same shade of gray.

Samuel Beckett in Prison

On January 3, 2011, “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” became a thing. Edith Zimmerman, editor of The Hairpin, a general-interest website aimed at women, published a post featuring 18 stock photos of women in various states of hysterics over bowls filled with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli, melon and berries, and the occasional cucumber sli...

What's So Funny About Salad?