The Playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh, Live at The New Yorker Festival

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

This year’s New Yorker Festival featured two conversations with renowned playwrights: Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh. Parks, the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama, sat down with the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “The marketplace is telling us that Black joy is what sells,” she said. “I’m very suspicious about what the marketplace wants me to create because I know in my experience where real Black joy resides—and sometimes that’s in the place where there might be some traumatic thing that also happened.” A revival of Parks’s groundbreaking play, “Topdog/Underdog,” just opened on Broadway.

And McDonagh, who is out with a new film, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” spoke with Patrick Radden Keefe. “The Banshees of Inisherin” traces the story of a friendship breaking apart in the beautiful, remote hills of western Ireland. “I just wanted this [movie] to be sort of plotless in a way,” McDonagh said. “Just to have the unravelling of this breakup be what the whole story was about.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNWC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:14.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:17.4	And this is Vincent Cunningham, one of our theater critics, on stage, at The New Yorker
0:22.4	Festival, with the playwright Susan Laurie Parks.
0:26.0	It feels very stilted to read an introduction for you because I always tell people the first
0:30.9	Broadway show I saw was Cats as a middle schooler.
0:35.0	And the second one was Top Dog Underdog.
0:37.6	And you know, it's one of the reasons I studied literature, cared about the theater, you
0:42.4	like sort of, the reason I'm even here talking to you, so I'm so happy to be here with
0:46.7	you.
0:47.7	As Vincent said, Parks's influence has been enormous over the years.
0:52.2	He's still probably best known, though, for Top Dog Underdog, a two-man show about a pair
0:57.1	of brothers named Lincoln and Booth.
1:00.4	They're struggling with poverty, with the weight of American history, and their own bitter
1:04.6	rivalry.
1:06.1	Top Dog Underdog opened on Broadway in 2002 and 20 years later.
1:11.6	It's just been revived in a production with Corey Hawkins and Yaya Abdul-Martin the
1:16.5	second.
1:17.5	Here's Vincent Cunningham, talking with Susan Laurie Parks.
1:21.6	Susan Laurie Parks is the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama.
1:30.9	Other of her awards include the MacArthur Genius Grant, the Dorothy and Lilian Gish Prize.
1:36.5	Her theater credits include Top Dog Underdog, The Book of Grace, Unchained My Heart, The
	...

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