Inside A.C.T.

By Taylor Steinbeck For playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, music isn’t just a medium she embraces in her art—it informs the very framework of her life. Growing up in a musical home, she and her siblings jitterbugged to their mother’s favorite jazz standards and belted out Puccini alongside their opera-loving father. These musical forms—along with the blues and show tunes, among others—have stayed with Parks and have influenced how she writes her plays. Embodying the playwright’s lyrical writing style, Father Comes Home from the Wars  has a musicality that recalls the past while retaining emotional immediacy, making it intricately layered and deeply personal. The Musician (Martin Luther McCoy) plays a song in A.C.T.'s 2018 production of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) . Photo by Joan Marcus. A blues musician herself, Parks composed the music and wrote the lyrics for the songs in  Father Comes Home . Music is a part of Parks’s makeup as an artist; whethe...

By Simon Hodgson When the first time director Liz Diamond picked up a script by Suzan-Lori Parks, she was smitten. “I fell in love with her work,” says Diamond, “with the stories she was telling, with her voice as a writer, and with Suzan-Lori herself—this blazingly smart, fierce, funny, vibrant, young artist.” In 1989, Diamond directed Parks’s Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom at Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association (BACA) Downtown, launching a partnership that has lasted 30 years. As she prepared to direct Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) at A.C.T., the chair of directing at Yale School of Drama spoke to us about the images that have inspired her design, her collaboration with the playwright, and why Parks’s play matters now. Director Liz Diamond. Photo by Joan Marcus. What was your initial reaction to Parks’s work? The playwright Mac Wellman sent me her play Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom . As I began to read, my un...

By Elspeth Sweatman and Simon Hodgson As soon as the first shots rang out on April 12, 1861, the American Civil War was classified, glorified, and romanticized as a white man’s war. The voices of the nearly four million Black Americans, more than 90 percent of whom were enslaved, were erased. It is their voices that playwright Suzan-Lori Parks re-earths in Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) , bringing us face to face with a painful, complicated, and shameful aspect of America’s history, one with which we are still coming to terms. Hero (James Udom) keeps watch on Smith (Tom Pecinka), the captured Union soldier, as ordered by the Colonel (Dan Hiatt) in A.C.T.'s 2018 production of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) . Photo by Joan Marcus. Like Parks’s protagonist, Hero, many enslaved Black men were forced to accompany their owners from the cotton field to the battlefield. Up before dawn, body servants had to polish boots, mend uniforms, cl...

By Elspeth Sweatman Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is a force that refuses to be contained. She is a lover of jazz and opera, William Faulkner and William Shakespeare, Roots and Downton Abbey . Her beaming smile, booming laugh, and rhythmic voice draw you in. She is fiercely intelligent, puckish, meticulous. Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Photo by Tammy Shell. Parks was born on May 10, 1963, in Fort Knox, Kentucky. From an early age, Parks was an energetic storyteller, but it wasn’t until she was in a college writing class taught by novelist James Baldwin that the idea of being a playwright crossed her mind. Baldwin saw how animated Parks was when she was reading her work for the class, and suggested she try writing plays. “And I was like, ‘What the fuck? Plays?’ I hated theater,” said Parks. “Just fake people doing bullshit. But James Baldwin said try it, so there I was.” In 1986, Parks moved to New York City, where she temped as a paralegal and searched for a home for her work....

By Simon Hodgson Suzan-Lori Parks reached down to the black case beside her chair and took out her guitar. “It’s about listening in,” she said, gesturing with her free hand. On the 8th floor of A.C.T.’s administrative offices at 30 Grant Avenue, three dozen young actors from the M.F.A. Program leaned in, watching the strings, waiting for the notes. Slowly, the playwright and songwriter of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) started a steady rhythm, light and even.  Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and A.C.T. Dramaturg Michael Paller with actors from A.C.T.'s M.F.A. Program. Photo by Taylor Steinbeck. “When I was in rehearsal for Father Comes Home ,” she said, fingers still strumming the strings, “I was playing the musician [the role currently played by Bay Area musician Martin Luther McCoy at The Geary]. I was watching Odyssey Dog and thinking, ‘What am I hearing?’” She mimed a dog’s back paw reaching up to scratch its ear, then changed the guitar rhythm to a...

By Taylor Steinbeck When the cast and creative team of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) flew in to San Francisco from Yale Repertory Theatre last week, their meet and greet at A.C.T. was more like a reunion than a first rehearsal. In a case of life imitating art, A.C.T. and Yale Rep’s co-production of Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home —beginning performances tomorrow at The Geary Theater—is a homecoming story not just for the characters in the play, but also for the artists involved. (From L to R) Julian Elijah Martinez, Michael J. Asberry, James Udom, Kadeem Ali Harris, Liz Diamond, Carey Perloff, Britney Frazier, Martin Luther McCoy, Eboni Flowers, and Gregory Wallace at the first San Francisco rehearsal of A.C.T. and Yale Repertory Theatre's 2018 production of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) . Photo by Taylor Steinbeck. Actors Steven Anthony Jones (The Oldest Old Man) and Gregory Wallace (Odyssey Dog), who were both a part...