Director Gerrad Alex Taylor Photo by RJPhotos

Perisphere’s production of The America Play will be directed by 1/2 of our 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 of 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.” He 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.