“In The Blood”- A Play by Suzan-Lori Parks

SUZAN-LORI PARKS (Playwright) was named one of TIME Magazine’s “100 Innovators for the Next New Wave,” in 2002. She became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her Broadway hit Topdog/Underdog (2002). 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 is recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts (Drama) and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant.

Her numerous plays include Father Comes Home From The Wars, The Book of Grace, In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Venus (1996 OBIE Award), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Fucking A, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 OBIE Award for Best New American Play), and The America Play. In 2007 her 365 Plays/ 365 Days was produced in over 700 theaters worldwide, creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history. Her work is the subject of the PBS Film The Topdog Diaries.

She has written screenplays for Spike Lee, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Jodi Foster and Oprah Winfrey, adapting Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. As a film actor Parks has appeared in the fictional-documentary …Plus One which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009.

Her current projects include a Ray Charles musical Unchain My Heart scheduled to premiere on Broadway, an adaptation of the classic opera Porgy and Bess which recently premiered at the American Repertory Theatre and her innovative performance piece Watch Me Work.

She is an alumna of Mount Holyoke College and holds an honorary doctorate from Brown University.  In 2008 Parksbecame the first recipient of the Master Writer Chair at the Public Theater, and also serves as a visiting arts professor in dramatic writing at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Her writing teacher and mentor James Baldwin declared Parks “an astonishing and beautiful creature who may become one of the most valuable artists of our time.”

JULIAN WHITE (Director) is the Chair and head of Directing at Cal Poly Pomona, Department of Theatre and New Dance, He received his BFA from Webster University Conservatory of Performing Arts in St. Louis, Missouri, his MFA from The University of Iowa – Iowa City, and his classical training from Oxford University in London. He has taught acting, movement, stage combat and directing at Cal Poly Pomona, CalState University Northridge, Cal State University Dominguez Hills, CerritosCollege, and Long Beach City College.  Julian is also a professional actor, director and stage combat choreographer. Directing projects include: Cabaret, Road to Mecca, The Grapes of Wrath, Noises Off, Working, Eleven Zulu (Long Beach City College), SubUrbia (Company of Angels Theater), for colored girls who have considered suicidewhen the rainbow is enuf (Morgan Wixon Theater) and The God Squad (Chance Theatre).

Selected acting credits include major roles in works by Shakespeare (that include Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Titus Andronicus and Macbeth) performed in the United States and in London, as well as lead roles in A Raisin in the Sun and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. He is a member of SAG, AFTRA, AEA, Black Theatre Network, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the Society of American Fight Directors.

MARC LONGLOIS (Scenic Designer) is Production Manager of the Department of Theatre, Head of StageManagement, Staff Scenic and Costume Designer, and Lecturer in Design, History, and Technical Theatre.  He received his MFA fromSouthern Methodist University where he studied with acclaimed Broadway designers William and Jean Eckart; Rosemary Ingham, author of The Costumer’s Handbook; and Richard Corson, author of the definitivetext Stage Makeup.  He has worked for professional regional theatres, including the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival; for opera companies, and in television and industrialproduction.  He is a member of United Scenic Artists, Local 829 and has designed costumes, scenery, and sound for over 100 productions during his 33-year career at UCR.

NOËLLE RAFFY (Costume Designer) is an accomplished freelance designer, and has created costumes for numerous stage productions including Guys and Dolls, The Eumenides, Love and Bones and La Danserie.  She has worked on a wide range of films thatinclude Robin Hood, Adventureland, Bridge to Nowhere, Shelter and the Oscar-nominated film The Road.   She was Head ofCostume for the English National Ballet School in London where she also worked with The Tricycle Theatre and Academy Costumes. She exhibited her designs for The Birds in the Prague Quadrennial (2007) and designed costumes for The Orestia Trilogy, which was voted “Best Play of 2007” by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. While at Otis College of Art and Design, she was awarded the Rudi GernreichScholarship by the Fashion Group International of Los Angeles.

GLEN DUNZWEILER (Sound Designer) has an MFA in Lighting and Sound Design from the University of Missouri at Kansas City  and is the resident Lighting and Sound Designer for the UCR Department of Theatre. He has designed for the Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City, Henlopen Theatre Project in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and International City Theatre in Long Beach, California. While in LasVegas, he was the Resident Designer for the UNLV Dance Department and worked for the moving light company VariLite Production Services. In 2005, his work was featured in the ‘How I Did That’ section of Lighting Dimensions Magazine. He has worked with sculpture artist Randy Cooper on lighting his Shadow Sculptures, has written a new theatrical work, The Bad Play, and has recently produced a feature-length documentary about the middle-class homeless called yHomeless?.

KEVIN PARKS (Sound Designer) is a graduate of Downtown Magnet High School in Los Angeles and a senior Theatre major.  He has served as Assistant Sound Designer on Detained in the Desert, Twelfth Night and the Clayton Rosenthal New Play Festival 2011.  He served on crew for Spring Awakening and played various roles in Playworks 2011.  Elsewhere he designed sound for Strong Mountain Productions’ Testimonies in the Valley.