The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks on “Topdog/Underdog”

 

'Suzan-Lori Parks, the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama, sits down with the staff writer Vinson Cunningham for a live conversation at this year’s New Yorker Festival. “The marketplace is telling us that Black joy is what sells,” she says. “I’m very suspicious about what the marketplace wants me to create because I know in my experience where real Black joy resides—and sometimes that’s in the place where there might be some traumatic thing that also happened.” A revival of Parks’s groundbreaking two-person play, Topdog/Underdog, just opened on Broadway, starring Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. The play features two brothers struggling with poverty, the weight of American history, and their own bitter rivalry.'