Commencement speaker Suzan-Lori Parks '85

Screenwriter and Obie Award-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks '85, who has tackled subjects ranging from racism and homelessness to sexual hypocrisy in her avant-garde plays, will be the commencement speaker at Mount Holyoke's 164th commencement ceremonies Sunday, May 27. Parks will receive the degree of doctor of arts and will be joined at commencement by five other honorary degree recipients. They are director of the National Science Foundation and biologist Rita Rossi Colwell, who will receive the degree of doctor of science; graphic designer Susan D. Kare '75, who will receive a doctor of science degree; humanitarian taxi driver Om Dutta Sharma, who founded and supports a school for girls in rural India and who will receive a doctor of humane letters degree; Smith College president (and future Brown University president) Ruth Simmons, who will receive a doctor of humane letters degree; and mathematician Jean E. Taylor '66, who will receive a doctor of science degree.

Says President Joanne Creighton, “I am thrilled that Suzan-Lori Parks will be our commencement speaker. She read from her work at my inauguration five years ago to the delight of all who heard her. Since then, her career has soared. A writer of great talent, she is also witty, wry, and wise. I'm sure the students will enjoy hearing from her and will find her an inspiring role model.”

Since graduating, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from MHC in 1985 with a double major in English and German and as a protégé of the late James Baldwin, all the world has been a stage for Suzan-Lori Parks. In 1989, at the age of twenty-six, she was named the “year's most promising playwright” by the New York Times. A year later, her surrealist play Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom won an Obie Award for best new American play. Director Spike Lee sought the playwright to pen his film Girl 6, the story of a struggling actress-turned-phone sex operator, although she had never written a film before. She has won more prestigious grants, awards, and fellowships, from agencies ranging from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations to the National Endowment for the Arts, than there is space to list here.

Of Parks Time magazine has written, “Her dislocating stage devices, stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and wondrous.” Vogue noted that she has “burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way.” Her plays revolve around such unusual characters as a person who makes a living as an arcade attraction playing Abraham Lincoln (patrons pay to impersonate John Wilkes Booth, get a gun, and shoot him) and Hottentot Venus, a nineteenth-century African woman displayed as a freak because of her huge buttocks. In addition to Imperceptible Mutabilities, Parks's plays include Betting on the Dust Commander (1987), Pickling (1989), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), Devotees in the Garden of Love (1992), The America Play (1993), Venus (1996), and In the Blood (1999).

Parks's plays have been published in numerous anthologies, most notably The Bedford Introduction to Drama (St. Martin's Press), The Best of Off-Broadway (Mentor Books), and Moonmarked and Touched by Sun (TCG). Parks produced a film, Anemone Me, wrote the screen adaptation of the novel Gal for Universal, and rewrote God's Country for Jodie Foster and Egg Pictures. She is currently on the team working on Hoopz, a Disney musical that chronicles the life and times of the Harlem Globetrotters. Parks received the College's Mary Lyon Award in 1993.