Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks Is Singing Her Song

The singular and incendiary talent of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is on rich display this season in three world premieres—Plays for the Plague Year at Joe’s Pub, The Harder They Come at the Public this winter, and Sally & Tom at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis—and the Broadway revival of her 2001 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Topdog/Underdog.

In Kenny Leon’s transcendent production, Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II play brothers, Lincoln and Booth, struggling through the chaos of shared history, pain, and love with searing force and wrenching intensity. Parks spoke about how she does it all, the role of the artist as “sacred agent,” and the need to “wake up to the love.”

Vogue: Welcome! This is such an honor. You’re having an astonishing year.

Suzan-Lori Parks: I feel very blessed. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I realized the other day that doing the TV show that came out last year, Genius: Aretha, and the film, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, doing those two things, particularly showrunning for TV, has perfectly primed me to do three world premieres and a Broadway revival at the same time. And I’m having fun!

You left out that you’re also being inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

I feel so lucky and grateful to be working with some amazing collaborators. I feel like I’ve got my brotherhood with Kenny Leon directing Topdog/Underdog, with Niegel Smith directing Plays for the Plague Year, with Tony Taccone directing The Harder They Come, and with Steve Broadnax III directing Sally & Tom. Such amazing artists. I could go on and on.

Let’s talk about Topdog/Underdog. I saw the 2003 production of this play at the Royal Court in London. I had never been in a theater where a play was so alive with its audience. It changed some internal chemistry in me.

“Changed some internal chemistry.” Yes. You received the transmission.

Tell me more.

I’m realizing, when I’m doing my work, when I’m in the groove of my purpose, capital P, when I’m in the lane with my higher self, big S, that my work is an agent of the sacred. And the people who participate with me in the creation of that work become sacred agents. This is what we’re doing. All the way back from [Parks’s 1990 play] The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, a.k.a. The Negro Book of the Dead, all the way through, even when I do a work for hire, like Genius: Aretha or The United States vs. Billie Holliday or Native Son or Girl Six, I am dedicated to transmitting the beautiful song, capital S, of the soul, the song of the spirit. It is 2022, and it is time for me to speak to that.