Perceptions Play Club is a space where we come together virtually and in person to discuss plays we  have read by BIPOC playwrights. Join us every other month for a new play that you will read for the month then come to discuss it with us at the end of the month.

March's Play Club isTopdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

About Topdog/Underdog:

Suzan-Lori Parks’ TOPDOG/UNDERDOG, a darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity, tells the story of two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, names given to them as a joke by their father. Haunted by the past and their obsession with the street con game, three-card monte, the brothers come to learn the true nature of their history.

It premiered in 2001 off-Broadway in New York City. The next year it opened on Broadway, at the Ambassador Theatre, where it played for several months. In 2002, Parks received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Outer Critics Circle Award for the play; it received other awards for the director and cast.

About Playwright: 

Suzan-Lori Parks (May 10, 1963 – Present) Parks has written three screenplays and numerous stage-plays. Her first screenplay was for Spike Lee's 1996 film Girl 6. She later worked with Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions on screenplays for Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) and The Great Debaters (2007).

Parks became the first female African-American to receive the Pulitzer Prize, which was awarded in 2002 for her play Topdog/Underdog. She has also received a number of grants including the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant  in 2001. She is a winner of the 2017 Poets, Essayists and Novelists (PEN) America Literary Awards in the category Master American Dramatist. She received the 2018 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. This biennial award is given to "established playwrights whose body of work has made significant contributions to the American theatre."