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MIT Presents:
A Conversation with Suzan-Lori Parks -- Feb 21

Dramashop presents Parks' "Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom" Feb. 8-10 and Feb. 15-17

Cambridge, MA...Award-winning American playwright and screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks will speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday, February 21 at 7 p.m. in  a public conversation with Assistant Professor Jay Scheib of MIT's Music and Theater Arts Section.

Recipient of the 2006-07 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts, awarded yearly by the Council for the Arts at MIT to an artist for outstanding achievement in his/her own field, Parks will be a visiting artist at MIT from February 20-22, working with MIT faculty, staff, and students.

The Feb. 21 talk will take place in the Broad Institute's Auditorium, MIT Room NE30-1154, 7 Cambridge Center, Cambridge). The event is free, and seating is first-come, first-served; no tickets or reservations are required. For more information, call (617) 253-ARTS (2787).

Parks has received recent acclaim for her new play cycle, "365 Plays/365 Days" which opened Nov. 13, 2006 and is currently being performed through Nov. 12, 2007 in major cities and communities around the country.

Consisting of 365 plays of varying lengths (one to 10 minutes apiece) that Parks wrote, one each day for a year, "365" has been acclaimed for its "laugh-out-loud-funny expressions of id" and its range of subject matter: "miniature dramas about war and family, Johnny Cash and Barry White -- whatever popped into her psyche on a given morning." (Atlanta Journal Constitution). Plays in the cycle are currently being performed in simultaneous and separate performances by over 600 theaters across the country, creating the largest theater collaboration in US history

This will be Parks' second visit to MIT in the 2006-07 season. During her first visit, in October 2006, she accepted the $70,000 MIT McDermott Award in the Arts and gave a public talk sponsored by the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, during which she read from and discussed her work, including "365."

MIT Dramashop presents Parks play

Parks' Obie-award winning play, "Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom" will be performed by MIT's Dramashop February 8-10 and February 15-17 at 8 p.m. in Kresge Little Theater (48 Massachusetts Ave.). The production is directed by Associate Professor Thomas DeFrantz. Tickets are $8 general admission, $6 for students. For information or reservations, call (617) 253-2908, e-mail ds_officers@mit.edu.

"Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom," presents a quartet of thematically related scenes examining black experience from slavery to the present.

Suzan Lori-Parks

Suzan-Lori Parks was born in 1964 in Fort Knox, Kentucky and went to high school in West Germany. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Mount Holyoke College in 1985 with a B.A. in English and German literature. As a student at Mount Holyoke, Parks took a writing class with Five Colleges faculty member James Baldwin, who called her "an utterly astounding and beautiful creature who may become one of the most valuable artists of our time." At his behest, she began to write plays.

In 2002, Parks became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for "Topdog/Underdog," a play about family identity, fraternal interdependence, and the struggles of everyday African American life. Her other awards include the Whiting Writers' Award in 1992, the Guggenheim Fellowship Playwriting in 2000, and the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001.

Jay Scheib

Jay Scheib, who holds an MFA from Columbia University, has directed productions at MIT, in New York City, Berlin, Salzburg and Budapest. He has won the Richard Sherwood Award, The Wade Award and numerous fellowships, and is a regular guest professor at the Mozarteum Institute für Schauspiel und Regie, in Salzburg, Austria. Scheib's play, "This Place is a Desert," inspired by the work of filmmaker Michaelangelo Antonioni, will be staged at Boston's newly-opened Institute of Contemporary Art in March 2007. The action of the play is projected live onto a wide screen looming above the stage as a lone cinematographer moves through the set. Depicting a portrait of human love gone wrong the action is seen in fragments--through windows, reflected in mirrors, behind half-drawn curtains and partially opened doors.

The MIT Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts

MIT's Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts is among the country's most esteemed arts awards, recognizing one artist each year for the highest standard of creative achievement in his/her field. Established to honor Eugene McDermott, founder of Texas Instruments and long-time friend and benefactor to MIT, the award was created by the Council for the Arts at MIT in 1974, and further endowed by Eugene's wife, Margaret. Since its inception, the Council has given the award to 31 individuals producing creative work in the performing, visual and media arts, as well as authors, art historians and patrons of the arts. The award is bestowed with a $70,000 prize, which is considered an investment in the individual's future creative work.

Past recipients of the award have included engineer/architect Santiago Calatrava, filmmaker Isaac Julien, interdisciplinary artists-architects Diller + Scofidio, photographer Jeff Wall, composer Tan Dun and sculptor Henry Moore. Each recipient travels to MIT to accept the award and to work with students, staff, and faculty as a visiting artist.

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