Suzan-Lori Parks

Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play every day for one year.

Learning that a company plans to dig up the area where her mother is buried, supposedly with a cache of jewels, Billy Beede, poor and pregnant, heads for Arizona to rescue her mother's body and search for the jewels that could bring her a new life.

A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future. Suzan-Lori Parks is the author of numerous plays, including In the Blood and Venus. She is currently head of the A.S.K. Theater Projects Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

Two plays expanding on Hawthorne's classic novel "The scarlet letter." In the blood: Hester La Negrita, an unapologetic mother of five illegitimate children, practices writing the alphabet to help herself "one day get a leg up." Fucking A: Hester Smith works the only job available to her, as an abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son.

Suzie Fewings is a keen family history researcher. She's delighted when she discovers an ancestor with the same name as her teenage son. But what she finds out about the seventeenth-century Thomas casts a darker shadow than she expected. When her own Tom's girlfriend is found dead in mysterious circumstances, Suzie finds it hard to suppress her growing fears that Tom has inherited more than a name from his predecessor.--From publisher's description.

Maurice and Ian are successful, but aging actors. The two are close friends whose conversation generally revolves around theatrical shop talk and the infirmities of other aging actors. Ian is fearful that death is right around the corner, so he agrees to let his niece's daughter, Jessie, move in to his flat to care for him. Jessie is a modern woman in her early twenties. She turns out to be a nightmare for Ian, especially since she is a hard-drinking, rude, and dismissive brat. But Maurice sees something else in the young woman, a potential for humanity which blossoms under his kindness and gentle guidance. For Maurice, something else blossoms as well--romantic love for a girl fifty years younger.