Suzan-Lori Parks Residency at Signature Theatre

A one-time student of literary luminary James Baldwin, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog) was the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama. Parks will be the focus of Signature Theatre’s 2016–17 season, which will feature her unique theatrical visions that toy with rhythm and language, narrative and structure, creating hyperreal and occasionally surreal meditations on race, belonging, otherness and history. Audiences will be treated to some of Parks’ classic works, including The Death of the Last Black Man in the Entire World, which sends a single, immortal black character through history—he perishes and returns, alive, to various points in time—as a way of interrogating the rubbing out of blackness in Western history. In 2017, the theater will present Parks’ Venus, a look at the life of Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus” whose black female body audiences gawked at, exploited, desecrated and fetishized in 19th-century Europe.