Catching Up With Suzan-Lori Parks

Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ first show at the Public Theater, The America Play, went up in 1994. Three decades later, she’s there presenting her 12th: Sally & Tom, a backstage story of a troupe producing a play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Their relationship “has been on my mind for a long time,” explains Parks. Her play involves “two things that I love, America and theater, and I put them into a supercollider.” Hopefully that supercollider creates “a good time” at the theater. What’s a good time, to Parks? “An experience that isn’t afraid to mean something and say something,” she explains. “And, hell yeah, let’s have some laughs too.”