Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks on making art about Covid

Life and Art from FT Weekend

Forhecz Topher

Tv & Film, Arts, Society & Culture

4.6 • 601 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2023

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, Lilah speaks to Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, whose new show Plays for the Plague Year asks us to remember, process and grieve the pandemic. Suzan-Lori is best known for her 2001 play Topdog/Underdog, which was reprised on Broadway in the autumn. But her new show is different: she wrote one short play a day through the pandemic, and collected them into a lively, music-filled theatrical event. Suzan-Lori and Lilah talk through big questions: when is the right time to look back? What does ‘back to normal’ mean? What can and should we do with our memories? And how do you create complex art about difficult things?

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Want to say hi? We love hearing from you. Email us at [email protected]. We’re on Twitter @ftweekendpod, and Lilah is on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap.

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Links:

– Plays for the Plague Year by Suzan-Lori Parks is running at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater until April 30 https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2223/plays-for-the-plague-year2/

– Suzan-Lori’s Pulitzer-Prize winning play is Topdog/Underdog: https://bookshop.org/p/books/topdog-underdog-suzan-lori-parks/10486222?ean=9781559362016

– The FT interviewed Suzan-Lori and Cynthia Erivo on the alchemy of Aretha Franklin (2021): https://on.ft.com/3V120Jt

–Suzan-Lori is the playwright in residence at the Public, and does a regular virtual ‘watch me work’ session over zoom for people to get writing done together, and ask her questions: https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2122/watch-me-work/

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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco.

Clips in this episode courtesy of The Public Theater

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We aren't seeing a lot of plays about the pandemic yet, but I was at one recently.
0:12.6	It was by the playwright Susan Laurie Parks, and it's called Plays for the Play Gear.
0:18.3	There's this scene in it that reminds me of how we were so stressed out back
0:22.7	then that we were kind of forgetting to breathe. One of the main characters breaks the
0:29.3	fourth wall and he walks right up to the audience and he asks us to do this breathing exercise
0:34.6	with him. And so he tells us as an an audience, together, to breathe in for four, hold for four,
0:42.4	and breathe out for four.
0:44.9	And I breathed in for four, and I just, like, immediately started to cry.
0:50.7	Wow.
0:51.8	And I was, like, total involuntary.
0:54.6	Oh, bless your heart.
0:55.2	Yeah.
0:56.5	That's me telling Susan Lurie about this just days after seeing her play.
1:01.0	Oh, that's so great.
1:02.8	No, no, no.
1:03.3	If you can feel it, you can heal it.
1:05.5	We have our nation that does not want to grieve.
1:09.3	Yeah.
1:09.8	And we need to grieve. Yeah. And we need to grieve.
1:11.4	Yeah.
1:11.7	We need to look back and go, oh, gee, something unfortunate happened.
1:16.1	We need to grieve it.
	...

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