PERCEPTIONS PLAY CLUB
A space where we come together virtually and in person to discuss plays we have read by BIPOC playwrights. Join us every 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 and some months we even have a watch party of the play before we discuss it!
*When you RSVP for your FREE ticket you will be sent a link to the play club meeting we will also send you a pdf of the play to read, so you are prepared for the discussion, if available. We may even have the playwright sit in to discuss the play with us for some meetings! We will also be recording each play club meeting for promotional purposes, however feel free to leave your cameras off for the discussion or to decline being filmed in person, if you choose.
March's Play Club
Topdog/Underdog
By
Suzan-Lori Parks
Photo Credit: (Below) Wiki
(Right) Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, left, as Booth, and Corey Hawkins as Lincoln in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Topdog/Underdog” at the Golden Theater in Manhattan.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
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Meet Suzan-Lori Parks
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."
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.
Our Covid Protocol:
We are following all Covid protocols and respect everyone's individual decisions when it comes to this. We strongly encourage our audiences to wear a mask to all of our events.