DC Area Premiere! Perisphere will present The America Play, by Suzan-Lori Parks, with performances from January 31-February 15, 2025. The America Play centers around an African-American gravedigger and Abraham Lincoln impersonator and his estranged family. Parks found one of her early career successes in this play that explores the way Blackness is represented and erased in mainstream narratives of United States History. The production will be directed by 1/2 of Perisphere’s artistic leadership team, Gerrad Alex Taylor. Taylor states that “the play is an early experimentation of theatre making on the themes of racial politics that would become major motifs in the writings of Parks’ latter works. This production will not just interrogate the history of America and the voices left out its telling and retelling, but also celebrate the personal history of the artist, Suzan-Lori Parks, and how her commentary and dramatic form grew throughout the years. Our community in the DMV has witnessed several productions of Parks’ plays over the past few years and I think it will be an important and interesting development on our consciousness of Parks’ brilliance to look back at this early play for the first time in our region.”
The February 7th Performance has been dedicated as our BLACK OUT NIGHT. We encourage Black-identifying patrons to fill the theater for an evening of communion, celebration, and discussion of the sometimes fraught and oftentimes beautiful Black history of this country represented in the play. The performance will be followed by a talkback with the director and moderated by Perisphere Board Member, Nigel Semaj.
*Note: Tickets purchased in person at the box office will incur an additional $2 service fee added to the prices listed online.
Director Gerrad Alex Taylor Photo by RJPhotos
Gerrad Alex Taylor is an award-winning director and multidisciplinary theatre artist based out of the Greater Baltimore region and an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His current creative work and research centers around creating space that preserves history and celebrates culture of the Global Majority. In 2021, he was named one of Baltimore’s “40 Under 40” by the Washington Business Journal. In 2020, he founded Chesapeake Shakespeare’s Black Classical Acting Ensemble (BCAE), an affinity space for black actors interested in training and exposure of the “classics” and what an expansion of the classical canon may look like today. In 2024, Gerrad joined colleague Lizzi Albert to take on the roles of Co-Artistic Directors of Perisphere Theater in Montgomery County, MD. He has worked with theatres and educational institutions across the country and is a member of the Actors’ Equity Association and an Advanced Actor Combatant with the Society of American Fight Directors.
Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks Photo by Stephanie Diani
Suzan-Lori Parks (born May 10, 1963) is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Topdog/Underdog in 2002, and Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2023. She won a 1990 Obie Award for Best New American Play. Her works have been produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Repertory Theatre, Arena Stage, The Public Theater and Yale Repertory Theatre, among many others. A member of New Dramatists, she is a two-time playwriting fellow with the National Endowment for the Arts and has received grants from the Rockefeller, Ford and Whiting Foundations, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the W. Alton Jones Foundation and the Fund for New American Plays. She wrote her first feature-length screenplay for Spike Lee and his company 40 Acres and a Mule in 1996 and has since helped write the screenplays on films including Their Eyes Were Watching God and The United States vs. Billie Holliday. She currently teaches playwriting at NYU Tisch School of the Arts in the Rita & Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing.
Meet the cast
Meet the creative team
Join us for our Special Events!
Thursday, January 30, 8:00pm: PWYC Preview. Donations will be accepted at the door (cash preferred) for anyone interested in watching our final rehearsal of the show. We will be putting finishing touches on the show and invite the public to watch this exciting end to our process.
Friday, January 31, 8:00pm: Opening Night followed by an opening night reception at The Writer’s Center. Join us for drinks, food, and a chance to mingle with the cast and production team!
Friday, February 7, 8:00pm: BLACK OUT NIGHT. We encourage Black-identifying patrons to fill the theater for an evening of communion, celebration, and discussion of the sometimes fraught and oftentimes beautiful Black history of this country represented in this play. The performance will be followed by a talkback with the director and moderated by Perisphere Board Member, Nigel Semaj.
EACH SHOW: “Dismantling the Black monolith through art.” Before or after each show during the run, join us for a Curated Art Exhibit featuring the work of Yvonne Ferguson, whose artistic practice, Diasporic Pigments, seeks to dismantle the Black monolith through art. Learn more about Yvonne’s work on her website, diasporicpigments.com
