The America Play at Perisphere Theater

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.

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.”