Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks To Make Onstage Debut In Public’s ‘Plays For The Plague Year’

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: Suzan-Lori Parks, the playwright who won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for her Topdog/Underdog, will make her on-stage debut this fall in the world premiere Public Theater Off Broadway staging of her Plays For the Plague Year.Parks’ performance in the production – the complete cast was announced today – will be yet another big moment in the playwright’s Fall season: A Broadway revival of Topdog/Underdog begins previews at the Golden Theatre on Sept.

27.In the new Plays For the Plague Year, Parks will play a character called “The Writer,” joining other just-announced cast members Leland Fowler, Greg Keller, Orville Mendoza, Kenita Miller, Lauren Molina, Martín Solá, and Pearl Sun.Directed by Niegel Smith, Plays For the Plague Year will begin a strictly limited three-week engagement on Friday, Nov.

4 at the Public’s Joe’s Pub venue, with an opening night on Wednesday, Nov. 16. The production will run through Sunday, November 27.The casting was announced today by Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director and Patrick Willingham, Executive Director.

Parks is the Public Theater Writer-in-Residence.The new work has its origins in the early days of the Covid pandemic. On March 13, 2020, as theaters went into lockdown, Parks “picked up her pen and her guitar and set out to write a play every day,” says the Public in today’s announcement. “What emerged is a breathtaking anthology of plays and songs that chronicle our collective experience and the hope and perseverance that occurred throughout that troubling year.”Performed in the intimate Joe’s Pub music venue, Joe’s Pub, Plays For the Plague Year will be a theatrical concert featuring Parks’ music and plays, and is described as being “both a personal story of one family’s daily lives,