We are pleased to announce the publication of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3). The play premiered in the fall of 2014 at The Public Theater in New York with a subsequent co-production in the winter of 2015 with A.R.T. in Cambridge, MA.
“The wonder of Ms. Parks’s achievement is how smoothly she blends the high and the low, the serious and the humorous, the melodramatic and the grittily realistic…The finest work yet from this gifted writer.”
– Charles Isherwood, New York Times
The play was named the winner of the 2015 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama and a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Offered his freedom if he joins his master in the ranks of the Confederacy, Hero, a slave, must choose whether to leave the woman and people he loves for what may be another empty promise. As his decision brings him face to face with a nation at war with itself, the ones Hero left behind debate whether to escape or wait for his return, only to discover that for Hero, freedom may have come at a great spiritual cost. A devastatingly beautiful dramatic work, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) is the opening trilogy of a projecting nine-play cycle that will ultimately take us into the present.
“Can one-third of something already be a masterpiece? Seems like it to me… People long for stories that engage the deepest possible issues in the most gripping possible ways. Father Comes Home from the Wars is one of those stories–or maybe more than one.”
- Jesse Green, New York
Suzan-Lori Parks became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog in 2002. Her other plays include The Book of Grace, In the Blood, Venus, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Fucking A, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The America Play. In 2007 her 365 Days/365 Plays was produced in more than seven hundred theatres worldwide. Parks is a MacArthur Fellow and the Master Writer Chair at The Public Theater.