Actor's Express to Stage FATHER COMES HOME FROM THE WARS (PARTS 1, 2 & 3)

Actor's Express stages Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) May 13-June 11, 2017.

According to Artistic Director Freddie Ashley, "Suzan-Lori Parks is one of our greatest living American Playwrights and this is perhaps her most accomplished play to date. The storytelling is at once sweepingly epic and devastatingly personal. Parks has a freewheeling and playful imagination that she backs up with a peerless intellectual rigor. It is an honor to produce this play, which was one of the most rapturously reviewed of the 2014-15 New York theatre season."

The production is directed by Martin Damien Wilkins. Wilkins is a proud member of the inaugural class of National Directors Fellows. His directing credits include Robert O'Hara's Bootycandy and Lydia R. Diamond's Stick Fly at Actor's Theatre of Charlotte, Terry Teachout's Satchmo at the Waldorf at B Street Theatre, and Jocelyn Bioh's African American at Howard University. He has developed new work at institutions such as the Kennedy Center, Actor's Express, the ALLIANCE THEATRE, Ars Nova's inaugural A.N.T. Fest, Classical Theatre of Harlem, the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, Hip-Hop Theater Festival, Lark Play Development Center, New York Musical Theatre Festival, and Primary Stages. They include Katori Hall's Olivier Award winning play, The Mountaintop, and Idris Goodwin's How We Got On. Martin served as the Assistant to director Charles Randolph-Wright for workshops of the Broadway musical, Motown: the Musical. He also served as the National New Play Network's Producer-In-Residence at Actor's Theatre of Charlotte for two seasons. He has been the recipient of Arena Stage's Allen Lee Hughes Directing Fellowship, a Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) Observership at the ALLIANCE THEATRE, and was a finalist for SDCF's Mike Ockrent Fellowship. He will return to Actor's Express next season to co-direct Tony Kushner's Angels in America Part 1: Millennium Approaches and Part 2: Perestroika with Artistic Director Freddie Ashley.

Performances of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) are Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 2 PM. Tickets start at $28 and may be purchased online at actors-express.com or by calling 404-607-7469.

IF YOU GO:

Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)
By Suzan-Lori Parks
Directed by Martin Damien Wilkins May 13-June 11, 2017
Finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Winner - 2015 Obie Award for Playwriting.

Offered his freedom in exchange for fighting for the Confederacy, a slave named Hero follows his master into the Civil War. His epic journey takes him through the battles of war, and he comes to discover the cost of freedom, the heartbreak of love and the enduring power of home. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' (Topdog/Underdog) acclaimed trilogy is one of the most celebrated American plays of the past decade.

PERFORMANCE DATES & TICKETS:

Preview Performances: Wednesday-Friday, May 10-12 at 8 PM
Opening Night: Saturday, May 13 at 8 PM
Regular Performances: May 13-June 11, 2017, Wednesday - Saturday at 8 PM & Sundays at 2 PM

Purchase tickets and subscriptions online at actors-express.com or by calling 404-607-7469. Group pricing is available. For info, e-mail tickets@actorsexpress.com.

*Ticket prices are subject to availability. Order early for best pricing. 8% sales tax will be added to all orders.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Named one of TIME Magazine's "100 Innovators for the Next New Wave," in 2002 Suzan-Lori Parks became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her Broadway hit Topdog/Underdog. A MacArthur "Genius" Award recipient, she has also been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was most recently awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for 2015. Her new play Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) made its world premiere at The Public Theater in New York, followed by a celebrated run at the A.R.T in Cambridge, MA. The play was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was awarded the 2015 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History as well as the 2014 Horton Foote Prize. Parks's work on The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess was honored with the 2012 Tony Award. Her numerous plays include The Book of Grace, In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Venus (1996 OBIE Award), 365 Days/365 Plays, and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, among others. She's written a novel, Getting Mother's Body, published by Random House. Her first feature-length screenplay was Girl 6, written for Spike Lee. She's also written screenplays for Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, and Oprah Winfrey, adapting Zora Neale Hurston's classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God which premiered on ABC's Oprah Winfrey Presents. Parks is currently writing an adaptation of the film The Harder They Come for a live stage musical. Suzan-Lori is the Master Writer Chair at The Public Theater, and she also serves as a professor in dramatic writing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Since our founding in 1988, we have sought to nurture the next generation of playwrights through workshops, readings, and full productions of new plays; to develop and nurture Atlanta's artistic community through theatre training; to catalyze the dialogue essential to the vitality of our neighborhood and our city; and to enhance Atlanta's reputation nationally as a thriving center for live performance.

Actor's Express is located on the west side of Atlanta in the King Plow Arts Center at 887 W. Marietta Street, Suite J-107, Atlanta, Georgia 30318.

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