The Playwright Who Fearlessly Reimagines America

When we met in January at a downtown cafe, Parks greeted me enthusiastically, standing before a wall of blooming flowers in the dead of New York winter. Dressed in purple-and-lavender-striped fingerless gloves, fur-lined boots and a black Comme des Garçons jacket, she looked every bit the iconoclastic downtown New Yorker. At 60, Parks carries herself with the energy of someone half her age, her presence a combination of gravitas and lightness, wisdom and childlike exuberance. One of America’s most celebrated playwrights — a recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant,” a Guggenheim fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize — she is in the midst of a renaissance. There is renewed recognition that her plays, inventive provocations whose sometimes scathing visions of race and gender can unsettle audiences, have something to tell us about the troublesome relationship between individual identity and national community.